We can talk productively here about topics like decision theory because we have an attack, a small foothold of sanity (established mostly by Eliezer and Wei) that gives us a firm footing to expand our understanding. As far as I can see, we have no such footholds in politics, or gender relations, or most of those other important topics you listed.
To me, this sounds way too ambitious for a place that advertises itself as a public forum, where random visitors are invited with kind words to join and participate, and get upvoted as long as they don’t write anything outright stupid or bad-mannered.
You’re correct about the reasons why physicists don’t work on on anti-gravity, but you’ll also notice that they don’t work by opening web forums to invite ideas and contributions from the general public. A community focusing strictly on hard scientific and mathematical progress must set the bar for being a contributor way higher, so high that well over 90% of the present rate of activity on this website would have to be culled, in terms of both the number of contributors and the amount of content being generated. At that point, you might as well just open an invitation-only mailing list.
As for the softer (or as you call them, “pre-paradigmatic”) fields, many of them are subject to Trotsky’s famous (though likely apocryphal) maxim that you might not be interested in war, but war is interested in you. Even if it’s something like politics, where it’s far from certain (though far from impossible either) that insight into it can yield useful practical guidelines, by relinquishing thinking about it you basically resign to the role of a pawn pushed around by forces you don’t understand at all. Therefore, since you’ll have an opinion one way or another, it can’t hurt if it’s been subjected to a high-standard rational discussion, even if only for eliminating clear errors of fact and logic. Also, I don’t see anything wrong with discussing such things just for fun.
Moreover, the real problem with such discussions are the “who-whom?” issues and the corresponding feelings of group solidarity, not the inability to resolve questions of fact. In fact, when it comes to clearly defined factual questions, I think the situation is much better than in the hard fields. Progress in hard fields is tremendously difficult because all the low-hanging fruit was picked generations ago. In contrast, the present state of knowledge in softer fields is so abysmally bad, and contaminated with so much bias and outright intellectual incompetence, that a group of smart and unbiased amateurs can easily reach insight beyond what’s readily available from reputable mainstream sources about a great variety of issues. Of course, the tricky part is actually avoiding passions and biases, but that’s basically the point, isn’t it?
In contrast, the present state of knowledge in softer fields is so abysmally bad, and contaminated with so much bias and outright intellectual incompetence, that a group of smart and unbiased amateurs can easily reach insight beyond what’s readily available from reputable mainstream sources about a great variety of issues.
I’m afraid that if we accept this suggestion, most posts about softer fields will consist of seemingly plausible but wrong contrarian ideas, and since most of us won’t be experts in the relevant fields, it will take a lot of time and effort for us to come up with the necessary evidence to show that the ideas are wrong.
And if we do manage to identify some correct contrarian insight, it will have minimal impact on society at large, because nobody outside of LW will believe that a group of smart and unbiased amateurs can easily reach such insight.
That is undoubtedly true. However, it seems to me that my main objection to cousin_it’s position applies to yours too, namely that the ambitious goals you have in mind are incompatible with the nature of this website as a public forum that solicits participation from the wide general public and warmly welcomes anyone who is not acting outright stupid, trollish, or obnoxious. On the whole, the outcome you describe in the above comment as undesirable and falling short of your vision is in reality the very best that can be realistically achieved by a public forum with such a low bar for entry and participation.
I absolutely admire your ambitions to achieve progress in hard areas, but building a community capable of such accomplishments requires a radically different and far more elitist approach, as I explained in my other comments. There are good reasons why scientists don’t approach problems by opening web forums that solicit ideas from the public, and don’t try to find productive collaborators among random people who would gather at such forums. Or do you believe that LW might turn out to be the first example of such an approach actually working?
Or do you believe that LW might turn out to be the first example of such an approach actually working?
LW does seem to be working to some extent, in the core areas related to rationality. Presumably it’s because even though we’re technically amateurs, we all share enough interest and have enough background knowledge in those areas to spot wrongness relatively quickly.
Also, I believe Math Overflow has previously been cited as another such site, although I’m not personally familiar with it.
LW does seem to be working to some extent, in the core areas related to rationality.
What would be the concrete examples you have in mind, if by “working” we mean making progress in some hard area, or at least doing something that might plausibly lead to such progress (i.e. your above expressed benchmark of success)?
The only things I can think of are occasional threads on mathy topics like decision theory and AI cooperation, but in such cases, what we see is a clearly distinguished informal group of several people who are up to date with the relevant knowledge, and whose internal discussions are mostly impenetrable to the overwhelming majority of other participants here. In effect, we see a closely-knit expert group with a very high bar for joining, which merely uses a forum with a much wider membership base as its communication medium.
I don’t think this situation is necessarily bad, though it does generate frustration whenever non-expert members try joining such discussions and end up just muddling them. However, if the goal of LW is defined as progress in hard areas—let alone progress of wider-society-influencing magnitude—then it is an unavoidable conclusion that most of what actually happens here is sheer dead weight, imposed by the open nature of the forum that is inherently in conflict with such goals.
Also, I believe Math Overflow has previously been cited as another such site, although I’m not personally familiar with it.
I wouldn’t say that Math Overflow is a good counterexample to my claims. First, from what I understand, it’s a place where people exchange information about the existing mathematical knowledge, rather than a community of researchers collaborating on novel problems. Second, it requires extremely high qualifications from participants, and the discourse is rigorously limited to making technical points strictly pertinent to the topic at hand. That’s an extremely different sort of community than LW, which would have to undergo a very radical transformation to be turned into something like that.
In effect, we see a closely-knit expert group with a very high bar for joining, which merely uses a forum with a much wider membership base as its communication medium… most of what actually happens here is sheer dead weight, imposed by the open nature of the forum that is inherently in conflict with such goals.
I’d say the bar for joining isn’t very high (you only have to know the right kind of undergraduate math, a lot of which was even covered on LW), and the open forum is also useful for recruiting new members into the “group”, not just communication. Everytime I post some rigorous argument, I hope to interest more people than just the “regulars” into advancing it further.
Besides decision theory and AI cooperation, I mean things like better understanding of biases and ways to counteract them (see most posts in Top Posts). Ethics and other rationality-related philosophy (Are wireheads happy?). Ways to encourage/improve rational discussions. Ways to make probability/decision theory more intuitive/useful/relevant in practice.
It might be that we got into a misunderstanding because we mean different things when we speak about “soft” areas. To me, the topics you listed except for the first two ones, and the posts that exemplify them, look like they could be reasonably described as addressing (either directly or indirectly) various soft fields where the conventional wisdom is dubious, disorganized, and contradictory. Therefore, what you list can be seen as a subset of the soft topics I had in mind, rather than something altogether different.
To support this, I would note that most of the top posts bring up issues (including some ideologically sensitive ones) about which much has been written by prominent academics and other mainstream intellectual figures but in a pre-paradigmatic way, that ethics and philosophy are clear examples of soft fields, and that improvements in the understanding of biases achieved in LW discussions are extremely unlikely to be useful for people in hard fields who already use sophisticated and effective area-specific bias-eliminating methodologies, but they could lead to non-trivial insight in various soft topics (and the highest-scoring top posts have indeed applied them to soft topics, not hard ones).
So, on the whole, the only disagreement we seem to have (if any) is about what specific range of soft topics should be encouraged as the subject of discussions here.
To me, this sounds way too ambitious for a place that advertises itself as a public forum
contradicts the other part:
a group of smart and unbiased amateurs can easily reach insight beyond what’s readily available from reputable mainstream sources about a great variety of issues
so I’m not sure that your well-worded and well-upvoted comment even has a point I could respond to. Anyway. The politically charged discussions here have been useless to me (with one exception that sadly didn’t get the follow-through it deserved), so I’ll go on waiting for insight, and avoid talking when I have no insight, and encourage others to do the same.
The comment definitely wasn’t well-worded if it seems like there’s a contradiction there; in fact, my failure to convey the point suggests that the wording was quite awful. (Thus providing more evidence that people are way too generous with upvoting.) So please let me try once more.
I was trying to draw a contrast between the following:
Topics in math and hard science, in which any insight that can’t be found by looking up the existing literature is extremely hard to come by. It seems to me that a public web forum that invites random visitors to participate freely is, as a community, inherently unusable for achieving any such goal. What is required is a closely-knit group of dedicated researchers that imposes extremely high qualifications for joining and whose internal discussions will be largely incomprehensible to outsiders, the only exception being the work of lone geniuses.
Topics in softer fields, in which the present state of knowledge is not in the form of well-organized literature that is almost fully sound and extremely hard to improve on, but instead even the very basics are heavily muddled and biased. Here, in contrast, there is plenty of opportunity to achieve some new insight or at least to make some sense out of the existing muddled and contradictory information, even by casual amateurs, if the topics are just approached with a good epistemology and a clear and unbiased mind.
Of course, a web forum can serve for all other kinds of fun chit-chat and exchange of useful information, but when it comes to generating novel insight, that’s basically it.
Or do you really find it within the realm of the possible that a public forum that gets its membership by warmly inviting random readers might be up to standard for advancing the state of knowledge in some hard area?
Thanks, I understand your point now. It seems my original comment was unclear: I didn’t mean to demand that everyone shut up about soft topics. RobinZ expressed the intended meaning.
It seems my original comment was unclear: I didn’t mean to demand that everyone shut up about soft topics.
For what that’s worth, I didn’t understand your comment that way. I merely wanted to point out the inherent tension between the public and inviting nature of the forum and your vision of the goals it should ideally achieve.
What kind of follow-through do you think my post deserved? I’m pretty happy with the effect that it’s had on the LW community myself. People do seem to be more careful about giving and taking offense after that post. So I’m curious what you have in mind.
I hoped for more of the kind of analysis you demonstrated. Of course I don’t know what specific advances would happen! But I feel you were doing something methodologically right when writing that post, and the same approach could be applied to other problems.
cousin_it:
To me, this sounds way too ambitious for a place that advertises itself as a public forum, where random visitors are invited with kind words to join and participate, and get upvoted as long as they don’t write anything outright stupid or bad-mannered.
You’re correct about the reasons why physicists don’t work on on anti-gravity, but you’ll also notice that they don’t work by opening web forums to invite ideas and contributions from the general public. A community focusing strictly on hard scientific and mathematical progress must set the bar for being a contributor way higher, so high that well over 90% of the present rate of activity on this website would have to be culled, in terms of both the number of contributors and the amount of content being generated. At that point, you might as well just open an invitation-only mailing list.
As for the softer (or as you call them, “pre-paradigmatic”) fields, many of them are subject to Trotsky’s famous (though likely apocryphal) maxim that you might not be interested in war, but war is interested in you. Even if it’s something like politics, where it’s far from certain (though far from impossible either) that insight into it can yield useful practical guidelines, by relinquishing thinking about it you basically resign to the role of a pawn pushed around by forces you don’t understand at all. Therefore, since you’ll have an opinion one way or another, it can’t hurt if it’s been subjected to a high-standard rational discussion, even if only for eliminating clear errors of fact and logic. Also, I don’t see anything wrong with discussing such things just for fun.
Moreover, the real problem with such discussions are the “who-whom?” issues and the corresponding feelings of group solidarity, not the inability to resolve questions of fact. In fact, when it comes to clearly defined factual questions, I think the situation is much better than in the hard fields. Progress in hard fields is tremendously difficult because all the low-hanging fruit was picked generations ago. In contrast, the present state of knowledge in softer fields is so abysmally bad, and contaminated with so much bias and outright intellectual incompetence, that a group of smart and unbiased amateurs can easily reach insight beyond what’s readily available from reputable mainstream sources about a great variety of issues. Of course, the tricky part is actually avoiding passions and biases, but that’s basically the point, isn’t it?
I’m afraid that if we accept this suggestion, most posts about softer fields will consist of seemingly plausible but wrong contrarian ideas, and since most of us won’t be experts in the relevant fields, it will take a lot of time and effort for us to come up with the necessary evidence to show that the ideas are wrong.
And if we do manage to identify some correct contrarian insight, it will have minimal impact on society at large, because nobody outside of LW will believe that a group of smart and unbiased amateurs can easily reach such insight.
That is undoubtedly true. However, it seems to me that my main objection to cousin_it’s position applies to yours too, namely that the ambitious goals you have in mind are incompatible with the nature of this website as a public forum that solicits participation from the wide general public and warmly welcomes anyone who is not acting outright stupid, trollish, or obnoxious. On the whole, the outcome you describe in the above comment as undesirable and falling short of your vision is in reality the very best that can be realistically achieved by a public forum with such a low bar for entry and participation.
I absolutely admire your ambitions to achieve progress in hard areas, but building a community capable of such accomplishments requires a radically different and far more elitist approach, as I explained in my other comments. There are good reasons why scientists don’t approach problems by opening web forums that solicit ideas from the public, and don’t try to find productive collaborators among random people who would gather at such forums. Or do you believe that LW might turn out to be the first example of such an approach actually working?
LW does seem to be working to some extent, in the core areas related to rationality. Presumably it’s because even though we’re technically amateurs, we all share enough interest and have enough background knowledge in those areas to spot wrongness relatively quickly.
Also, I believe Math Overflow has previously been cited as another such site, although I’m not personally familiar with it.
Wei_Dai:
What would be the concrete examples you have in mind, if by “working” we mean making progress in some hard area, or at least doing something that might plausibly lead to such progress (i.e. your above expressed benchmark of success)?
The only things I can think of are occasional threads on mathy topics like decision theory and AI cooperation, but in such cases, what we see is a clearly distinguished informal group of several people who are up to date with the relevant knowledge, and whose internal discussions are mostly impenetrable to the overwhelming majority of other participants here. In effect, we see a closely-knit expert group with a very high bar for joining, which merely uses a forum with a much wider membership base as its communication medium.
I don’t think this situation is necessarily bad, though it does generate frustration whenever non-expert members try joining such discussions and end up just muddling them. However, if the goal of LW is defined as progress in hard areas—let alone progress of wider-society-influencing magnitude—then it is an unavoidable conclusion that most of what actually happens here is sheer dead weight, imposed by the open nature of the forum that is inherently in conflict with such goals.
I wouldn’t say that Math Overflow is a good counterexample to my claims. First, from what I understand, it’s a place where people exchange information about the existing mathematical knowledge, rather than a community of researchers collaborating on novel problems. Second, it requires extremely high qualifications from participants, and the discourse is rigorously limited to making technical points strictly pertinent to the topic at hand. That’s an extremely different sort of community than LW, which would have to undergo a very radical transformation to be turned into something like that.
I’d say the bar for joining isn’t very high (you only have to know the right kind of undergraduate math, a lot of which was even covered on LW), and the open forum is also useful for recruiting new members into the “group”, not just communication. Everytime I post some rigorous argument, I hope to interest more people than just the “regulars” into advancing it further.
Besides decision theory and AI cooperation, I mean things like better understanding of biases and ways to counteract them (see most posts in Top Posts). Ethics and other rationality-related philosophy (Are wireheads happy?). Ways to encourage/improve rational discussions. Ways to make probability/decision theory more intuitive/useful/relevant in practice.
It might be that we got into a misunderstanding because we mean different things when we speak about “soft” areas. To me, the topics you listed except for the first two ones, and the posts that exemplify them, look like they could be reasonably described as addressing (either directly or indirectly) various soft fields where the conventional wisdom is dubious, disorganized, and contradictory. Therefore, what you list can be seen as a subset of the soft topics I had in mind, rather than something altogether different.
To support this, I would note that most of the top posts bring up issues (including some ideologically sensitive ones) about which much has been written by prominent academics and other mainstream intellectual figures but in a pre-paradigmatic way, that ethics and philosophy are clear examples of soft fields, and that improvements in the understanding of biases achieved in LW discussions are extremely unlikely to be useful for people in hard fields who already use sophisticated and effective area-specific bias-eliminating methodologies, but they could lead to non-trivial insight in various soft topics (and the highest-scoring top posts have indeed applied them to soft topics, not hard ones).
So, on the whole, the only disagreement we seem to have (if any) is about what specific range of soft topics should be encouraged as the subject of discussions here.
This part:
contradicts the other part:
so I’m not sure that your well-worded and well-upvoted comment even has a point I could respond to. Anyway. The politically charged discussions here have been useless to me (with one exception that sadly didn’t get the follow-through it deserved), so I’ll go on waiting for insight, and avoid talking when I have no insight, and encourage others to do the same.
The comment definitely wasn’t well-worded if it seems like there’s a contradiction there; in fact, my failure to convey the point suggests that the wording was quite awful. (Thus providing more evidence that people are way too generous with upvoting.) So please let me try once more.
I was trying to draw a contrast between the following:
Topics in math and hard science, in which any insight that can’t be found by looking up the existing literature is extremely hard to come by. It seems to me that a public web forum that invites random visitors to participate freely is, as a community, inherently unusable for achieving any such goal. What is required is a closely-knit group of dedicated researchers that imposes extremely high qualifications for joining and whose internal discussions will be largely incomprehensible to outsiders, the only exception being the work of lone geniuses.
Topics in softer fields, in which the present state of knowledge is not in the form of well-organized literature that is almost fully sound and extremely hard to improve on, but instead even the very basics are heavily muddled and biased. Here, in contrast, there is plenty of opportunity to achieve some new insight or at least to make some sense out of the existing muddled and contradictory information, even by casual amateurs, if the topics are just approached with a good epistemology and a clear and unbiased mind.
Of course, a web forum can serve for all other kinds of fun chit-chat and exchange of useful information, but when it comes to generating novel insight, that’s basically it.
Or do you really find it within the realm of the possible that a public forum that gets its membership by warmly inviting random readers might be up to standard for advancing the state of knowledge in some hard area?
Thanks, I understand your point now. It seems my original comment was unclear: I didn’t mean to demand that everyone shut up about soft topics. RobinZ expressed the intended meaning.
cousin_it:
For what that’s worth, I didn’t understand your comment that way. I merely wanted to point out the inherent tension between the public and inviting nature of the forum and your vision of the goals it should ideally achieve.
What kind of follow-through do you think my post deserved? I’m pretty happy with the effect that it’s had on the LW community myself. People do seem to be more careful about giving and taking offense after that post. So I’m curious what you have in mind.
I hoped for more of the kind of analysis you demonstrated. Of course I don’t know what specific advances would happen! But I feel you were doing something methodologically right when writing that post, and the same approach could be applied to other problems.
Honestly I assumed something like that was being used for decision theory.
It is.