I agree with the benefits of narrowness, but let’s not forget there is a (big) drawback here: science and math are, in their core, built around generalizations. If you only ever study the single apple, or any number of apples individually, and not take the step of generalizing to all apples, or maybe all apples in a given farm, at least, you have zero predictive power. The same goes for Rationality, by the way. What good is talking about biases and Bayesianism, If I can only apply it to Frank from down the street?
I’m arrogantly confident you agree with me on this to some level, Eliezer, and just were not careful with your phrasing. But I think this is more than semantic nitpicking—there is a real, hard trade-off at play here between sticking to concrete, specific examples on which we can have all the knowledge we want, and applying ideas to as many problems as possible, to gain more predictive power and understanding of the Laws of Reality. I think a more careful formulation is to say “do not generalize irresponsibly”. Don’t abandon the specific examples, as they anchor you down to reality and details, but do try to find patterns and commonalities where they appear—and pinpoint them in precise, well defined, some-result-subspaces-excluding manners.
I agree with the benefits of narrowness, but let’s not forget there is a (big) drawback here: science and math are, in their core, built around generalizations. If you only ever study the single apple, or any number of apples individually, and not take the step of generalizing to all apples, or maybe all apples in a given farm, at least, you have zero predictive power. The same goes for Rationality, by the way. What good is talking about biases and Bayesianism, If I can only apply it to Frank from down the street?
I’m arrogantly confident you agree with me on this to some level, Eliezer, and just were not careful with your phrasing. But I think this is more than semantic nitpicking—there is a real, hard trade-off at play here between sticking to concrete, specific examples on which we can have all the knowledge we want, and applying ideas to as many problems as possible, to gain more predictive power and understanding of the Laws of Reality. I think a more careful formulation is to say “do not generalize irresponsibly”. Don’t abandon the specific examples, as they anchor you down to reality and details, but do try to find patterns and commonalities where they appear—and pinpoint them in precise, well defined, some-result-subspaces-excluding manners.