I’m a relatively new lurker, still working through the Sequences. It strikes me that patrissimo’s disaffection and resultant call to action are targeted at “the more advanced students”, or where I hope to be at some point. To use a shop-class analogy, once you’ve finished Shop 101, sitting around reading back issues of Woodcrafts magazine wil be lower ROI than designing and building a Mission chest of drawers. But until you’ve been through the basics, “go build” is less productive and potentially dangerous. I ’ve discovered that reading LW has helped me notice a common thread in my haphazard intellectual explorations, and align my current ones. So a follow-up question I’ll pose in 2 parts is: a) is it a fallacy to presume one must walk before learning to run?, and b) if not, how can one judge when it’s time to “go build”?
If you are working through the sequences, how did you get to my post? :).
It seems that instead of paying attention to your lathe and table saw in Shop 101, you are leafing through the latest copies of “Advanced Carpentry”. This can be motivation, it can add context to the class, or it can be a form of procrastination, focusing on the dream of producing great things in the future instead of the hard work of learning to produce small things in the present. Only you can decide, through conscious examination, which is.
Do you read my post (and presumably many other new LW posts, which slows your reading of the Sequences) because you truly, consciously believe that they enhance your learning of the Sequences? Or because of the dopamine hit you get by seeing something new, something timely, a post where your comments will get seen by others, rather than the sterile years-old Sequences with no feedback?
a) The issue of learning to walk before running, though seemingly simple, is not. Reading originals, for instance is highly likely to displace the good meme grasping/producing potential you’d have if you never went through them. Recently this link about that was posted here, can’t find the post now: http://www.infiniteinjury.org/blog/2010/02/25/reading-originals/
I agree with the author, and after 4 years in a continental philosophy department, can assure you, there is no way the rational strategy for being rational is to go through the history of rationality. The added value of learning through historic order is greatly inferior to the value of time-saved, hindsight view analytical capacity towards ancient stuff that you get from reading only what is recent.
Not that I’m claiming the Sequences are moldy old stuff. Go through them, but speed up your pace whenever you can.
A final point on “a)”. Do not read what is too recent (give 4 months here, 1 year in science as a tentative suggestion), thus allowing others to filter for you. Unless the post claims that the whole Less-Wrong endeavour is anti-instrumentalist!
When dealing with catastrophic risks, even tiny probabilities (that the Sequences suck) ought to take priority.
b) There is no doubt that the first 100 posts you read here will be more important than the second.… if you are past 400 (I’m not), probably you are beyond the tipping point. Learning rationality is logarithmic. Maybe, for professional reasons, Eliezer needs 99% of the abstract rationality he can achieve (he is the coach, after all). But if you are just part of the team (as I am) I would never get to the point where you are actually regularly reading yesterday’s stuff.
This is a red signal, if you (reader of this sentence) want only to be part of the team, and you’ve been reading daily or weekly before you got a chapter, a plan, a framework, or just plain work done, then not only you are wrong because Less Wrong in general is not doing what Patrissimo wants it to do, but also because if it were, you are using it wrong...
You make a good point here and I’ll go on to add...
I’m a relatively new lurker, still working through the Sequences.
This (usually, but depending on the engagement level) does constitute deliberate practice. It’s directed and requires intense construction of new mental concepts and ways of thinking. In fact, I would say that even for people who have read the sequences previously could still be executing deliberate practice by engaging with them again. It must be ‘engage’ rather than skim and obviously doesn’t apply indefinitely. Practice must move to a new area once a skill is mastered to an acceptable level. When it comes to learning stuff that means not just ‘kinda get it’ but also not having understood it enough that going over it more isn’t even effortful.
I’m a relatively new lurker, still working through the Sequences. It strikes me that patrissimo’s disaffection and resultant call to action are targeted at “the more advanced students”, or where I hope to be at some point. To use a shop-class analogy, once you’ve finished Shop 101, sitting around reading back issues of Woodcrafts magazine wil be lower ROI than designing and building a Mission chest of drawers. But until you’ve been through the basics, “go build” is less productive and potentially dangerous. I ’ve discovered that reading LW has helped me notice a common thread in my haphazard intellectual explorations, and align my current ones. So a follow-up question I’ll pose in 2 parts is: a) is it a fallacy to presume one must walk before learning to run?, and b) if not, how can one judge when it’s time to “go build”?
If you are working through the sequences, how did you get to my post? :).
It seems that instead of paying attention to your lathe and table saw in Shop 101, you are leafing through the latest copies of “Advanced Carpentry”. This can be motivation, it can add context to the class, or it can be a form of procrastination, focusing on the dream of producing great things in the future instead of the hard work of learning to produce small things in the present. Only you can decide, through conscious examination, which is.
Do you read my post (and presumably many other new LW posts, which slows your reading of the Sequences) because you truly, consciously believe that they enhance your learning of the Sequences? Or because of the dopamine hit you get by seeing something new, something timely, a post where your comments will get seen by others, rather than the sterile years-old Sequences with no feedback?
Here comes a new challenger.....
a) The issue of learning to walk before running, though seemingly simple, is not. Reading originals, for instance is highly likely to displace the good meme grasping/producing potential you’d have if you never went through them. Recently this link about that was posted here, can’t find the post now: http://www.infiniteinjury.org/blog/2010/02/25/reading-originals/
I agree with the author, and after 4 years in a continental philosophy department, can assure you, there is no way the rational strategy for being rational is to go through the history of rationality. The added value of learning through historic order is greatly inferior to the value of time-saved, hindsight view analytical capacity towards ancient stuff that you get from reading only what is recent.
Not that I’m claiming the Sequences are moldy old stuff. Go through them, but speed up your pace whenever you can.
A final point on “a)”. Do not read what is too recent (give 4 months here, 1 year in science as a tentative suggestion), thus allowing others to filter for you. Unless the post claims that the whole Less-Wrong endeavour is anti-instrumentalist! When dealing with catastrophic risks, even tiny probabilities (that the Sequences suck) ought to take priority.
b) There is no doubt that the first 100 posts you read here will be more important than the second.… if you are past 400 (I’m not), probably you are beyond the tipping point. Learning rationality is logarithmic. Maybe, for professional reasons, Eliezer needs 99% of the abstract rationality he can achieve (he is the coach, after all). But if you are just part of the team (as I am) I would never get to the point where you are actually regularly reading yesterday’s stuff.
This is a red signal, if you (reader of this sentence) want only to be part of the team, and you’ve been reading daily or weekly before you got a chapter, a plan, a framework, or just plain work done, then not only you are wrong because Less Wrong in general is not doing what Patrissimo wants it to do, but also because if it were, you are using it wrong...
If you are a wanna be coach on the other hand…
For posterity’s sake, the original reading originals page is down, but it’s here on archive.org:
http://web.archive.org/web/20120422134314/http://www.infiniteinjury.org/blog/2010/02/25/reading-originals/
You make a good point here and I’ll go on to add...
This (usually, but depending on the engagement level) does constitute deliberate practice. It’s directed and requires intense construction of new mental concepts and ways of thinking. In fact, I would say that even for people who have read the sequences previously could still be executing deliberate practice by engaging with them again. It must be ‘engage’ rather than skim and obviously doesn’t apply indefinitely. Practice must move to a new area once a skill is mastered to an acceptable level. When it comes to learning stuff that means not just ‘kinda get it’ but also not having understood it enough that going over it more isn’t even effortful.