Hi folks, I’m Peter. I read a lot of blogs and saw enough articles on Overcoming Bias a few years ago that I was aware of Yudkowsky and some of his writing. I think I wandered from there to his personal site because I liked the writing and from there to Less Wrong, but it’s long enough ago I don’t really remember. I’ve read Yudkowsky’s Sequences and found lots of good ideas or interesting new ways to explain things (though I bounced off QM as it assumed a level of knowledge in physics I don’t have). They’re annoyingly disorganized—I realize they were originally written as an interwoven hypertext, but for long material I prefer reading linear silos, then I can feel confident I’ve read everything without getting annoyed at seeing some things over and over. Being confused by their organization when nobody else seems to be also contributes to the feeling in my last paragraph below.
I signed up because I had a silly solution to a puzzle, but I’ve otherwise hesitated to get involved. I feel I’ve skipped across the surface of LessWrong; I subscribe to a feed that only has a couple posts per week and haven’t seen anything better. I’m aware there are pages with voting, but I’m wary of the time sink of getting pulled into a community or being a filter rather than keeping up with curated content.
I’m also wary of a community so tightly focused around one guy. I have only good things to say about Yudkowsky or his writing, but a site where anyone is far and away the most active and influential writer sets off alarm bells. Despite the warning in the death spiral sequence, this community heavily revolves around him. Maybe every other time hundreds of people rally around one revelatory guy it’s bad news and it’s fine here because there are lots of arguments against things like revelation here, but things like the sequence reruns are really off-putting. It fits a well-trod antipattern; even if I can’t see anything wrong in the middle of the story I know it ends badly. (Yes, I know, I’m not.)
I’m also wary of a community so tightly focused around one guy. I have only good things to say about Yudkowsky or his writing, but a site where anyone is far and away the most active and influential writer sets off alarm bells. Despite the warning in the death spiral sequence, this community heavily revolves around him.
Yeah, it’s a problem. I’d even go so far as to say that it’s a cognitive hazard, not just a PR or recruitment difficulty: if you’ve got only one person at the clear top of a status hierarchy covering some domain, then halo effects can potentially lead to much worse consequences for that domain than if you have a number of people of relatively equal status who occasionally disagree. Of course there’s also less potential for infighting, but that doesn’t seem to outweigh the potential risks.
There was a long gap in substantive posts from EY before the epistemology sequence, and I’d hoped that a competitor might emerge from that vacuum. Instead the community seems to have branched; various people’s personal blogs have grown in relative significance, but LW has stayed Eliezer’s turf in practice. I haven’t fully worked out the implications, but they don’t seem entirely good, especially since most of the community’s modes of social organization are outgrowths of LW.
if you’ve got only one person at the clear top of a status hierarchy covering some domain
For what it’s worth, if Yudkowsky and gwern gave me conflicting advice on some arbitrary topic, then all else equal I’d go with gwern’s opinion. The two of them focus on different things, though, so I don’t know if this matters in practice.
I think a part of the problem with other people filling the “vacuum” left by Eliezer is that when he was writing the sequences it was a large amount of informal material. Since then we’ve established a lot of very formal norms for main-level posts; the “blog” is now about discussions with a lot of shared background rather than about trying to use a bunch of words to get some ideas out.
That is, most of the point of the sequences is laying out ground rules. There’s no vacuum left over for anyone to fill, and LW isn’t really a “blog” any more, so much as a community or discussion board.
And for me, personally, at least, a lot of the attraction of LW and the sequences is not that Eliezer did a bunch of original creative work, but that he verbalized and worked out a bit more detail on a variety of ideas that were already familiar, and then created a community where people have to accept that and are therefore trustworthy. What this “feels like on the inside” is that the community is here because they share MY ideas about epistemology or whatever, rather than because they share HIS ideas, even if he was the one to write them down.
Of course YMMV and none of this is a controlled experiment; I could be making up bad post hoc explanations.
Just to be clear, what you say does not contradict the argument you are responding to. You gave a good explanation for why EY has a big influence on the community. It still isn’t clear that this is a good thing.
Yes, I’m not arguing that it is a good thing. I’m simply putting forward an explanation for why no one else has stepped in to “fill the vacuum” as some have hoped in other comments; I don’t believe there is a vacuum to fill.
Also I meant to endorse the idea that Eliezer is like Pythagoras: someone who wrote down and canonized a set of knowledge already mostly present, which is at least LESS DANGEROUS than a group following a set of personal dogma.
Actually, I think that the sequences have a fair number of original ideas. They were enumerated about a year or so ago by Eliezer and Luke in separate posts.
I do remember that and I agree I oversimplified. I mostly mean that much of the basis of his ideas that aren’t controversial here aren’t controversial elsewhere either, they just aren’t seen as his ideas elsewhere. This all makes it seem like Eliezer is more of a figurehead than I feel he actually is.
I’ve read Yudkowsky’s Sequences and found lots of good ideas or interesting new ways to explain things (though I bounced off QM as it assumed a level of knowledge in physics I don’t have)
This seems to be a common problem. It certainly happened to me.
Apply skepticism evenly? I mean, you don’t have to do/participate in something just because a bunch of other people are doing it.
TBH, I’d like to see a type of “sequence review” of stuff from other major writers on this site. It’s useful in that I’ll occasionally read one if I don’t remember having read it before, so I can’t knock it.
Hi folks, I’m Peter. I read a lot of blogs and saw enough articles on Overcoming Bias a few years ago that I was aware of Yudkowsky and some of his writing. I think I wandered from there to his personal site because I liked the writing and from there to Less Wrong, but it’s long enough ago I don’t really remember. I’ve read Yudkowsky’s Sequences and found lots of good ideas or interesting new ways to explain things (though I bounced off QM as it assumed a level of knowledge in physics I don’t have). They’re annoyingly disorganized—I realize they were originally written as an interwoven hypertext, but for long material I prefer reading linear silos, then I can feel confident I’ve read everything without getting annoyed at seeing some things over and over. Being confused by their organization when nobody else seems to be also contributes to the feeling in my last paragraph below.
I signed up because I had a silly solution to a puzzle, but I’ve otherwise hesitated to get involved. I feel I’ve skipped across the surface of LessWrong; I subscribe to a feed that only has a couple posts per week and haven’t seen anything better. I’m aware there are pages with voting, but I’m wary of the time sink of getting pulled into a community or being a filter rather than keeping up with curated content.
I’m also wary of a community so tightly focused around one guy. I have only good things to say about Yudkowsky or his writing, but a site where anyone is far and away the most active and influential writer sets off alarm bells. Despite the warning in the death spiral sequence, this community heavily revolves around him. Maybe every other time hundreds of people rally around one revelatory guy it’s bad news and it’s fine here because there are lots of arguments against things like revelation here, but things like the sequence reruns are really off-putting. It fits a well-trod antipattern; even if I can’t see anything wrong in the middle of the story I know it ends badly. (Yes, I know, I’m not.)
Yeah, it’s a problem. I’d even go so far as to say that it’s a cognitive hazard, not just a PR or recruitment difficulty: if you’ve got only one person at the clear top of a status hierarchy covering some domain, then halo effects can potentially lead to much worse consequences for that domain than if you have a number of people of relatively equal status who occasionally disagree. Of course there’s also less potential for infighting, but that doesn’t seem to outweigh the potential risks.
There was a long gap in substantive posts from EY before the epistemology sequence, and I’d hoped that a competitor might emerge from that vacuum. Instead the community seems to have branched; various people’s personal blogs have grown in relative significance, but LW has stayed Eliezer’s turf in practice. I haven’t fully worked out the implications, but they don’t seem entirely good, especially since most of the community’s modes of social organization are outgrowths of LW.
For what it’s worth, if Yudkowsky and gwern gave me conflicting advice on some arbitrary topic, then all else equal I’d go with gwern’s opinion. The two of them focus on different things, though, so I don’t know if this matters in practice.
I think a part of the problem with other people filling the “vacuum” left by Eliezer is that when he was writing the sequences it was a large amount of informal material. Since then we’ve established a lot of very formal norms for main-level posts; the “blog” is now about discussions with a lot of shared background rather than about trying to use a bunch of words to get some ideas out.
That is, most of the point of the sequences is laying out ground rules. There’s no vacuum left over for anyone to fill, and LW isn’t really a “blog” any more, so much as a community or discussion board.
And for me, personally, at least, a lot of the attraction of LW and the sequences is not that Eliezer did a bunch of original creative work, but that he verbalized and worked out a bit more detail on a variety of ideas that were already familiar, and then created a community where people have to accept that and are therefore trustworthy. What this “feels like on the inside” is that the community is here because they share MY ideas about epistemology or whatever, rather than because they share HIS ideas, even if he was the one to write them down.
Of course YMMV and none of this is a controlled experiment; I could be making up bad post hoc explanations.
Just to be clear, what you say does not contradict the argument you are responding to. You gave a good explanation for why EY has a big influence on the community. It still isn’t clear that this is a good thing.
Yes, I’m not arguing that it is a good thing. I’m simply putting forward an explanation for why no one else has stepped in to “fill the vacuum” as some have hoped in other comments; I don’t believe there is a vacuum to fill.
Also I meant to endorse the idea that Eliezer is like Pythagoras: someone who wrote down and canonized a set of knowledge already mostly present, which is at least LESS DANGEROUS than a group following a set of personal dogma.
Actually, I think that the sequences have a fair number of original ideas. They were enumerated about a year or so ago by Eliezer and Luke in separate posts.
I do remember that and I agree I oversimplified. I mostly mean that much of the basis of his ideas that aren’t controversial here aren’t controversial elsewhere either, they just aren’t seen as his ideas elsewhere. This all makes it seem like Eliezer is more of a figurehead than I feel he actually is.
This seems to be a common problem. It certainly happened to me.
Apply skepticism evenly? I mean, you don’t have to do/participate in something just because a bunch of other people are doing it. TBH, I’d like to see a type of “sequence review” of stuff from other major writers on this site. It’s useful in that I’ll occasionally read one if I don’t remember having read it before, so I can’t knock it.