I’m in the process of turning the ideas in a stack of my notebooks into what I hope will be a short paper, which is just one illustration of what I think was the real trade-off, which is between conciseness and time spent writing. Or for another, see the polished 20-page papers on logical decision theory. Though it’s not the same, they cover much of the same ground as the older expositions of timeless decision theory and updateless decision theory. There was a long period where these kinds of decision theories were only available through posts, and then through Eliezer Yudkowsky’s long TDT paper. That period could not have been skipped, and could only have been shortened in the sense that the same work could have been done faster at the expense of other work. See also this exchange on Twitter, though they’re not talking about being concise specifically:
Miles Brundage: I can’t speak to the details of those experiments but I at least read a much higher fraction of your paper outputs than your blog post outputs. Possibly I’m a minority here but I am certainly not the only one.
Eliezer Yudkowsky: Yeah, I tried it and it was way too fucking time-expensive. My guess is that 100x the output you like less ends up having the larger impact on the world.
I’m in the process of turning the ideas in a stack of my notebooks into what I hope will be a short paper, which is just one illustration of what I think was the real trade-off, which is between conciseness and time spent writing. Or for another, see the polished 20-page papers on logical decision theory. Though it’s not the same, they cover much of the same ground as the older expositions of timeless decision theory and updateless decision theory. There was a long period where these kinds of decision theories were only available through posts, and then through Eliezer Yudkowsky’s long TDT paper. That period could not have been skipped, and could only have been shortened in the sense that the same work could have been done faster at the expense of other work. See also this exchange on Twitter, though they’re not talking about being concise specifically:
Miles Brundage: I can’t speak to the details of those experiments but I at least read a much higher fraction of your paper outputs than your blog post outputs. Possibly I’m a minority here but I am certainly not the only one.
Eliezer Yudkowsky: Yeah, I tried it and it was way too fucking time-expensive. My guess is that 100x the output you like less ends up having the larger impact on the world.