Although it’s not marked as the inspiration, this post comes straight after an article by many-decades cryonicist Charles Platt, which he wrote for Cryonics magazine but which was rejected by the Alcor board:
Platt discusses what he sees as the dangerously excessive optimism of cryonics, particularly with regard to financial arrangements: that because money shouldn’t be a problem, people behave as though it therefore isn’t a problem. When it appears clear that it is. To quote:
In fact their determination to achieve and defend their goal results in optimism that I think is so intense, I’m going to call it cryoptimism, which I might define as rampant optimism flavored with a dose of hubris and a dash of megalomania, sustained by fear of oblivion.
The above post may make more sense considered as a response to Platt’s article.
Glanced over them. I started with the Intuitive Explanation and my brain slid off it repeatedly. I fear that if that’s the “intuitive” explanation, then all the merely quite bright people are b*ggered. Needs rewriting for the merely quite bright, as opposed to the brilliant. This is what I meant about how, if you have a pitch, it better target the merely quite bright if you have any serious interest in spreading your favoured ideas.
This ties into my current interest, books that eat people’s brains. I’m increasingly suspecting this has little to do with the book itself. I realise that sentence is condensed to all but incomprehensibility, but the eventual heartbreaking work of staggering genius will show a lot more of the working.
I fear that if that’s the “intuitive” explanation, then all the merely quite bright people are b*ggered. Needs rewriting for the merely quite bright, as opposed to the brilliant.
Writing accessible math stuff is pretty hard, since sometime after you’ve figured out the basic math, you start getting blind to what was difficult in the first place. I suppose you’d need a continuous supply of math-naive test readers who you could A-B test continuing iterations of the text with, trying to come up with one that presents the easiest path to actually making the content comprehensible.
I’m having trouble coming up with any articles that try to present some abstract mathematical concept in anything resembling the form actual mathematicians work with, and wouldn’t be pretty tough to work through with no preknowledge of learning and working with abstract math concepts. Maybe it’s just hard to do.
On a quick glance, the intuitive explanation article seems several times longer than people who would want to get a quick idea about what all the Bayes stuff is about would be prepared to read.
This ties into my current interest, books that eat people’s brains. I’m increasingly suspecting this has little to do with the book itself.
I’m guessing this refers to books that start cults, not just books that will consume limitless amount of brainpower if you let them? In any case, quite interested in hearing more about this.
On a quick glance, the intuitive explanation article seems several times longer than people who would want to get a quick idea about what all the Bayes stuff is about would be prepared to read.
That’s another factor. But I just couldn’t get a feel for the numbers in the breast cancer example. This is noting that I found Bruce Schneier’s analogous numbers on why security theatre is actively damaging [couldn’t find the link, sorry] quite comprehensible.
(I certainly used to know maths. Did the Olympiad at high school. Always hated learning maths despite being able to, though, finally beaching about halfway through second-year engineering maths twenty years ago. I recently realised I’ve almost completely forgotten calculus. Obviously spent too long on word-oriented artistic pursuits. I suppose it’s back to the music industry for me.)
As someone who is definitely smart but has adopted a so far highly productive life strategy of associating with people who make me feel stupid by comparison, I am happy to be a test stupid person for these purposes.
I’m guessing this refers to books that start cults, not just books that will consume limitless amount of brainpower if you let them? In any case, quite interested in hearing more about this.
More a reference to how to cure a raging memetic cold. Cults count (I am/was an expert on Scientology ), Ayn Rand sure counts (this being the example that suggests a memetic cold is not curable from the outside and you have to let the disease run its course). What struck me was that quite innocuous works that I don’t get a cold from have clearly caused one in others.
“Memetic cold”: an inadequate piece of jargon I made up to describe the phenomenon of someone who gets a big idea that eats their life. As opposed to the situation where someone has a clear idea but is struggling to put it into words, I’m not even entirely sure I’m talking about an actual phenomenon. Hence the vagueness.
Possible alternate term: “sucker shoot” (Florence Littauer, who has much useful material but many of whose works should carry a “memetic hazard” warning sign). It’s full of apparent life and vitality, but sucks the energy out of the entire rest of your life. When you get an exciting new idea and you wake up a year later and you’ve been evicted and your boyfriend/girlfriend moved out and your friends look at you like you’re crazy because that’s the external appearance. Or you don’t wake up and you stay a crank. The catch then is when the idea is valid and it was all worth it. But that’s a compelling trope because it’s not the usual case.
I just looked over my notes and didn’t entirely understand them, which means I need to get to work if this is ever to make coherent sense and not just remain a couple of tantalising comments and an unreleased Google doc.
Another thing re. the Bayesian explanation. It’s probably quite a bad place to start reading LW content. It seems to really aim to get the reader to be able to do the math instead of just presenting the general idea. I find the newer sequence stuff a lot more approachable. Haven’t ever bothered to go through the Bayes article myself.
The memetic cold thing is interesting, in particular, like you said, because there isn’t a foolproof way of telling if the all-consuming weird preoccupation is fundamentally flawed, on the right track but most likely going to fail, or going to produce something genuinely useful. Recognizing mathematics in general as something other than a memetic cold before mathematics established itself as something useful might not have been entirely easy, and there’s still the tension between math obsession that gets you the Fields medal, math obsession that makes you write angry handwritten letters about your disproof of Cantor’s diagonalization argument for decades, and math obsession that makes you correlate numerological sums of the names of Fortune 500 CEOs with charts made from the pages of the Hebrew Bible to discover the identity of the Antichrist.
This also reminds me a bit of Robert Pirsig, both in the Motorcycle book and in Lila. Pirsig talks about the difficulty of discerning good stuff from bad stuff when the stuff goes outside a preset framework to evaluate it in, describes his personal sucker shoot episodes, and the books have probably started more than a few memetic colds themselves.
That’s an extreme failure mode of decompartmentalisation, of course. (Some lesser ones are on RationalWiki: Engineers and woo.) But when you see a new idea and you feel your eyes light up with the realisation that it’s compelling and brilliant, that’s precisely the time to put it in a sandbox.
Maybe. I’m not sure yet. It feels a bit like deliberate stupidity. On the other hand, we live in a world where the most virulent possible memes are used to sell toothpaste. Western civilisation has largely solved food and shelter for its residents, so using infectious waste as a token of social bonding appears to be what we do with the rest of our lives.
The above post may make more sense considered as a response to Platt’s article.
If interpreted in that way, it fails completely. It doesn’t respond in any way to Pratt’s argument that the cryonics industry does not have the financial resources to deliver on its promises, and that the shortfall gets larger as more people sign up.
Isparrish simply advises people to ignore this and to optimistically sign up anyways.
Since Isparrish does not seem to be irrational, I have to assume he is not attempting to respond to Platt.
I should clarify that it was not his main point about shortfalls due to signups, but the peripheral point about cryonics being optimistic that I was replying to. I disagree with his main point to a limited degree, i.e. I consider it probable that Alcor is not going to go bankrupt, though I recognize the need to be alert to the possibility.
As he said, money has shown up in the past from wealthy donors who don’t want it to fail. I’m not upset at the inequity there because the donors are purchasing social status, and I don’t have a problem with paying slightly more (or, if I can afford it, a lot more) to help cover someone else’s expenses. (I am more open to socialistic logic than most current cryonicists.)
Although it’s not marked as the inspiration, this post comes straight after an article by many-decades cryonicist Charles Platt, which he wrote for Cryonics magazine but which was rejected by the Alcor board:
Cryoptimism Part 1 Part 2
Platt discusses what he sees as the dangerously excessive optimism of cryonics, particularly with regard to financial arrangements: that because money shouldn’t be a problem, people behave as though it therefore isn’t a problem. When it appears clear that it is. To quote:
The above post may make more sense considered as a response to Platt’s article.
Correct. I will add the links in the article.
Hey David, welcome to Less Wrong, and thanks for the link to these articles!
Count yourself as having other-optimised ;-p
Marvellous :-) Does that mean you’ve started looking at the Sequences?
Glanced over them. I started with the Intuitive Explanation and my brain slid off it repeatedly. I fear that if that’s the “intuitive” explanation, then all the merely quite bright people are b*ggered. Needs rewriting for the merely quite bright, as opposed to the brilliant. This is what I meant about how, if you have a pitch, it better target the merely quite bright if you have any serious interest in spreading your favoured ideas.
This ties into my current interest, books that eat people’s brains. I’m increasingly suspecting this has little to do with the book itself. I realise that sentence is condensed to all but incomprehensibility, but the eventual heartbreaking work of staggering genius will show a lot more of the working.
Writing accessible math stuff is pretty hard, since sometime after you’ve figured out the basic math, you start getting blind to what was difficult in the first place. I suppose you’d need a continuous supply of math-naive test readers who you could A-B test continuing iterations of the text with, trying to come up with one that presents the easiest path to actually making the content comprehensible.
I’m having trouble coming up with any articles that try to present some abstract mathematical concept in anything resembling the form actual mathematicians work with, and wouldn’t be pretty tough to work through with no preknowledge of learning and working with abstract math concepts. Maybe it’s just hard to do.
On a quick glance, the intuitive explanation article seems several times longer than people who would want to get a quick idea about what all the Bayes stuff is about would be prepared to read.
I’m guessing this refers to books that start cults, not just books that will consume limitless amount of brainpower if you let them? In any case, quite interested in hearing more about this.
That’s another factor. But I just couldn’t get a feel for the numbers in the breast cancer example. This is noting that I found Bruce Schneier’s analogous numbers on why security theatre is actively damaging [couldn’t find the link, sorry] quite comprehensible.
(I certainly used to know maths. Did the Olympiad at high school. Always hated learning maths despite being able to, though, finally beaching about halfway through second-year engineering maths twenty years ago. I recently realised I’ve almost completely forgotten calculus. Obviously spent too long on word-oriented artistic pursuits. I suppose it’s back to the music industry for me.)
As someone who is definitely smart but has adopted a so far highly productive life strategy of associating with people who make me feel stupid by comparison, I am happy to be a test stupid person for these purposes.
More a reference to how to cure a raging memetic cold. Cults count (I am/was an expert on Scientology ), Ayn Rand sure counts (this being the example that suggests a memetic cold is not curable from the outside and you have to let the disease run its course). What struck me was that quite innocuous works that I don’t get a cold from have clearly caused one in others.
“Memetic cold”: an inadequate piece of jargon I made up to describe the phenomenon of someone who gets a big idea that eats their life. As opposed to the situation where someone has a clear idea but is struggling to put it into words, I’m not even entirely sure I’m talking about an actual phenomenon. Hence the vagueness.
Possible alternate term: “sucker shoot” (Florence Littauer, who has much useful material but many of whose works should carry a “memetic hazard” warning sign). It’s full of apparent life and vitality, but sucks the energy out of the entire rest of your life. When you get an exciting new idea and you wake up a year later and you’ve been evicted and your boyfriend/girlfriend moved out and your friends look at you like you’re crazy because that’s the external appearance. Or you don’t wake up and you stay a crank. The catch then is when the idea is valid and it was all worth it. But that’s a compelling trope because it’s not the usual case.
I just looked over my notes and didn’t entirely understand them, which means I need to get to work if this is ever to make coherent sense and not just remain a couple of tantalising comments and an unreleased Google doc.
Another thing re. the Bayesian explanation. It’s probably quite a bad place to start reading LW content. It seems to really aim to get the reader to be able to do the math instead of just presenting the general idea. I find the newer sequence stuff a lot more approachable. Haven’t ever bothered to go through the Bayes article myself.
The memetic cold thing is interesting, in particular, like you said, because there isn’t a foolproof way of telling if the all-consuming weird preoccupation is fundamentally flawed, on the right track but most likely going to fail, or going to produce something genuinely useful. Recognizing mathematics in general as something other than a memetic cold before mathematics established itself as something useful might not have been entirely easy, and there’s still the tension between math obsession that gets you the Fields medal, math obsession that makes you write angry handwritten letters about your disproof of Cantor’s diagonalization argument for decades, and math obsession that makes you correlate numerological sums of the names of Fortune 500 CEOs with charts made from the pages of the Hebrew Bible to discover the identity of the Antichrist.
This also reminds me a bit of Robert Pirsig, both in the Motorcycle book and in Lila. Pirsig talks about the difficulty of discerning good stuff from bad stuff when the stuff goes outside a preset framework to evaluate it in, describes his personal sucker shoot episodes, and the books have probably started more than a few memetic colds themselves.
You can get a bad memetic cold by deliberately compromising your memetic immune system: decompartmentalising too aggressively, getting a not quite so magical click and it all becomes terribly clear: the infidel must die!
That’s an extreme failure mode of decompartmentalisation, of course. (Some lesser ones are on RationalWiki: Engineers and woo.) But when you see a new idea and you feel your eyes light up with the realisation that it’s compelling and brilliant, that’s precisely the time to put it in a sandbox.
Maybe. I’m not sure yet. It feels a bit like deliberate stupidity. On the other hand, we live in a world where the most virulent possible memes are used to sell toothpaste. Western civilisation has largely solved food and shelter for its residents, so using infectious waste as a token of social bonding appears to be what we do with the rest of our lives.
My video lecture you’ve found also includes a brief introduction to Bayes’ Theorem.
If interpreted in that way, it fails completely. It doesn’t respond in any way to Pratt’s argument that the cryonics industry does not have the financial resources to deliver on its promises, and that the shortfall gets larger as more people sign up.
Isparrish simply advises people to ignore this and to optimistically sign up anyways. Since Isparrish does not seem to be irrational, I have to assume he is not attempting to respond to Platt.
Edit: Whoops. Bad assumption.
I should clarify that it was not his main point about shortfalls due to signups, but the peripheral point about cryonics being optimistic that I was replying to. I disagree with his main point to a limited degree, i.e. I consider it probable that Alcor is not going to go bankrupt, though I recognize the need to be alert to the possibility.
As he said, money has shown up in the past from wealthy donors who don’t want it to fail. I’m not upset at the inequity there because the donors are purchasing social status, and I don’t have a problem with paying slightly more (or, if I can afford it, a lot more) to help cover someone else’s expenses. (I am more open to socialistic logic than most current cryonicists.)