There’s the music appreciation algorithm: listen to the people the people you listen to listen to. More generally, bootstrap from your current algorithms to better ones. I likely wouldn’t have been alerted to various academic subfields if SingInst folk hadn’t pointed them out, and I wouldn’t have been alerted to SingInst if I hadn’t been alerted to LessWrong via RationalWiki, and I wouldn’t have been alerted to RationalWiki if I hadn’t been alerted to Carl Sagan by my high school friends, and I wouldn’t have made those friends if I hadn’t been a friend of their friends, et cetera. Nowadays I have a rather low opinion of Carl Sagan and RationalWiki, I’m very meh about LessWrong, and my opinion of SingInst isn’t as sky-high as it once was, but I think the process tends to be self-correcting.
While I’m sympathetic to this view, I don’t think it is without problems. See modern art for an example of how this kind of approach can fail. I think the problem is that as you go up the chain you get people who have less interaction with reality outside their specialty. This is the same problem that can occur when climbing to many meta-levels, i.e., one looses sight of the object level or even forgets that it exists.
Edit: Also, I can think of a number of people I (at least somewhat) respect, but most definitely don’t respect the people they respect.
Right, definitely not fail-safe and you probably need some measure of luck to start out with the right dispositions (though my starting out a RationalWiki-esque leftist and ending up a pseudo-reactionary is evidence that at least sometimes it’s not super important), but the most obvious alternative is just getting stuck being boring doing boring things.
That said, I generally have had ridiculous amounts of sheer luck—no, general positive outlook and so on really does not explain it, trust me—and so I generally don’t know what’s safe to recommend. Vladimir_M’s told a story about how listening to the advice of someone high status ended up hurting him a lot, and what he did sounds sorta similar to what I’m recommending, so major disclaimers apply.
This sounds frighteningly similar to my usual procedure. I noticed a few months ago that I am in a habit of “using up” my information sources and LessWrong has hit that point that I am not learning that much more. Since I assume you consider yourself a cool person and do not like Sagan and LessWrong, what are some ressources you could point us to?
Sounds almost too good to be true. How do you recommend to train this skill?
There’s the music appreciation algorithm: listen to the people the people you listen to listen to. More generally, bootstrap from your current algorithms to better ones. I likely wouldn’t have been alerted to various academic subfields if SingInst folk hadn’t pointed them out, and I wouldn’t have been alerted to SingInst if I hadn’t been alerted to LessWrong via RationalWiki, and I wouldn’t have been alerted to RationalWiki if I hadn’t been alerted to Carl Sagan by my high school friends, and I wouldn’t have made those friends if I hadn’t been a friend of their friends, et cetera. Nowadays I have a rather low opinion of Carl Sagan and RationalWiki, I’m very meh about LessWrong, and my opinion of SingInst isn’t as sky-high as it once was, but I think the process tends to be self-correcting.
While I’m sympathetic to this view, I don’t think it is without problems. See modern art for an example of how this kind of approach can fail. I think the problem is that as you go up the chain you get people who have less interaction with reality outside their specialty. This is the same problem that can occur when climbing to many meta-levels, i.e., one looses sight of the object level or even forgets that it exists.
Edit: Also, I can think of a number of people I (at least somewhat) respect, but most definitely don’t respect the people they respect.
Right, definitely not fail-safe and you probably need some measure of luck to start out with the right dispositions (though my starting out a RationalWiki-esque leftist and ending up a pseudo-reactionary is evidence that at least sometimes it’s not super important), but the most obvious alternative is just getting stuck being boring doing boring things.
That said, I generally have had ridiculous amounts of sheer luck—no, general positive outlook and so on really does not explain it, trust me—and so I generally don’t know what’s safe to recommend. Vladimir_M’s told a story about how listening to the advice of someone high status ended up hurting him a lot, and what he did sounds sorta similar to what I’m recommending, so major disclaimers apply.
This sounds frighteningly similar to my usual procedure. I noticed a few months ago that I am in a habit of “using up” my information sources and LessWrong has hit that point that I am not learning that much more. Since I assume you consider yourself a cool person and do not like Sagan and LessWrong, what are some ressources you could point us to?