Yes! Letting go is key to conversational skill.
What you describe is letting go of certain topics that you would like to be discussed further, and I think that’s extremely valuable.
The other kind of letting go is letting go of the urge to nitpick and apply excessive nuance to every little point no matter how relevant to a context.
Hey, thanks for sharing your perspective. This is not particular to rationalist communities. I’ve experienced this with non-rationalist social circles.
I’ve added the following paragraph to the post to address your point:
Another context in which exploring many topics is desirable is when getting to know someone new. In this context, traversing a breadth of topics quickly and having flexibility in which topics to discuss will maximise the chances of finding a common interest.
However, the kind of topic change I describe is different, and it often results in conversations growing in depth towards rabbit holes rather than in breadth and flexibility.
Without getting too into the weeds and looking at the specific examples you gave in the post, I agree with the overall point you make. There exists more falsehood than truth in the world, and navigating the information landscape requires strategic effort. The reasoning for this belief is simple: suppose that you want to make a vehicle from raw material. There are vastly more permutations of that raw material resulting in something other than a functioning vehicle. Similarly, there are vastly more permutations of information representing the reality they are trying to model inaccurately than accurately.
A suggestion: rather than giving specific examples of good/bad fiction, it could be more timeless and more generally applicable to come up with general heuristics about what is good content to consume if you want to systematically improve your modelling of the world vs what is content that consistently worsens the accuracy of your modelling. An implicit assumption here is that our goal is to improve the accuracy of our modelling, which is not always instrumental. For example, you might want to deceive yourself into adopting certain beliefs by consuming ‘bad’ fiction to fit in or attract mates. (“The Elephant in the Brain” is a good book on the importance of self-deception.)
The value of fiction is in helping me understand the experience of other minds, but this is not particular to fiction as I can also acquire the same knowledge from reading biographies or psychology or just socialising. This quote from the preface to the Lok Sang Ho translation of the “Tao Te Ching” captures this idea well:
Joseph Conrad [...] wrote that the role of the artist is no different from that of the thinker or that of the scientist. Like the latter, he is after the Truth, but whereas the scientist seeks the truth about the physical world, the artist seeks the Truth about the human mind. “The artist appeals to that part of our being which is not dependent on wisdom: to that in us which is a gift and not an acquisition...”
A general heuristic I use to judge the quality of content is whether prestigious people I respect endorse that content. This is not a catchall heuristic, but it is better than nothing. If someone like Scott Aaronson, a highly rigorous rationalist, endorsed a book or a blog, it’s likely of good epistemic quality.
I don’t like this voting feature on mobile. It makes it impossible to press the normal vote arrow without zooming in because I keep fat-fingering something other than the regular vote arrow.
That’s fascinating. Thanks for sharing. Number theory is mindblowing. The integers look very simple at first glance, but they contain immense complexity and structure.
I sometimes wondered why mathematicians are so pedantic about proofs. Why can’t we just check the first cases with a supercomputer and do without rigorous proofs? Here’s an excellent example of why proofs matter.
Consider this proposition: .
If you check with a computer, then this proposition will appear true.
The smallest counterexample has more than 1000 digits, and your computer program might not have checked that far. If you relied on the assumption that this equation has no solution in a cryptographic application without a proof, the consequences could be catastrophic.
Exactly. We can replace the use of imaginary numbers with matrix operations.
Schrödinger himself was annoyed by the imaginary part in his equation. In a letter to Lorentz on 6 June, 1926, Schrödinger wrote:
What is unpleasant here, and indeed directly to be objected to, is the use of imaginary numbers. is surely fundamentally a real function”.
Surely he knew that he could have done without imaginary numbers.
According to Wikipedia, the most significant known prime number at this moment in time is . This is a nice illustration of two phenomena:
The profound unpredictability of the growth of knowledge. If we can predict the next prime, then we should know what it is, but we don’t.
It tells us something profound about the reality of (Platonic) abstractions. We know that a more significant prime number must exist (there are infinitely many primes), but we just haven’t found it yet. But we know it’s out there in reality.
Thanks, Viliam. I appreciate your insights. I read a few Paul Graham essays, and I loved them, and I’m going to read all of them.
I agree with you that acquiring generally useful skills such as mathematics is a good bet. I’ve been in the software industry for ~3 years, and sadly the most mathematics I’ve used in my software job is multiplication.
I tend to perform best if I have a north star to motivate my learning and practising. This north star is something for me to figure out, and it’s a never-ending process.
I came across this interview with Demis Hassabis recently. (Demis inspired me to study CS in the first place.) He said there is no defined career path in academia if you want to be a career engineer, meaning that academia loses the best engineers because they choose to work in the industry. I’m very excited about the many new opportunities that allow engineers to contribute to research projects in the industry, so for me, this seems like a nicely defined goal to go after.
Can we compare utility functions across agents? I.e. do utility functions use the same “units” across different agents?
I keep coming across the opinion that physics containing imaginary numbers is somehow a crazy and weird phenomenon, such as this article.
Complex numbers are an excellent tool for modelling rotations. When we multiply a vector by , we effectively rotate it anticlockwise by 90 degrees around the origin. Rotations are everywhere in reality, and it’s thus unsurprising that a tool that’s good at modelling rotations shows up in things like the Schrödinger Equation.
The most productive I have been in my life was probably during my final year at university (2019), completing my CS degree. I scored my best grades during this year. I attribute this increase in productivity to the following reasons:
I had signed a graduate job offer, which lowered my stress and made me feel more secure about the future.
I was generally feeling secure about my social relations. One of my friends was topping all the classes, and I learnt a lot from her while studying together.
I went on daily walks at a beautiful park nearby (averaged 10k+ daily steps for the year) and listened to audiobooks. Audiobooks trained my focus. Whenever I got distracted from the audiobook, I’d rewind and bring my attention back. I also paused and typed notes whenever I came across a fascinating idea.
I dramatically reduced social media usage and deleted several accounts.
I had a daily routine going on, which was destroyed by the pandemic. It took me a while to re-establish a new routine.
I read the book “The Mind Illuminated” and was meditating daily. I’m uncertain how precisely this helped, but the practice felt good. I stopped practising meditation, but maybe I should pick it up again.
Thanks, Viliam. You’re very right in that I hadn’t made the distinction between a direction and a goal clear. In my question, “long-term goal” refers to “direction”. Therefore, what I am struggling with is choosing a direction. I find myself going in too many directions at once, and that those different direction’s don’t necessarily build on each other. For example, working towards career success requires building product-specific knowledge, which is of limited use outside my daily job.
Is my choice of direction simply based on what feels good to me?
I find it helpful to think about probabilities as I think about inequalities. If we say that , then we are making an uncertain claim about the possible values of , but we have no idea what value actually has. However, from this uncertain claim about the value of , we can make the true claim that .
Similarly, when we prove that a probability is nonzero, it means that whatever it is we are talking about must be true somewhere within possibility space.
Do you know where I can view the LW public API?
The Egan Superpermutation: https://youtu.be/n4WpyNMfQ2Q
In some sense, yeah, “life is inherently meaningless” and “living beings are just machines.” However, I am still struggling to wrap my head around the objectivity of aesthetics, meaning and morality. Information is now widely considered physical (refer to papers by R Landauer and D Deutsch). Maybe someday, we will once and for all incorporate aesthetics, meaning and morality under physicalism. If minds are physical, and aesthetics, purposes, and morality are real aspects of minds, then wouldn’t that imply that they are therefore objective notions? And thus not “meaningless”?
This is a gnarly rabbit hole, and I am not qualified to talk about this topic. I recently read Parfit’s “Reasons and Persons” to gain a deeper grasp of these topics and it’s a stunning and precious book, but I need to do more work to understand all this. I may have to read his magnum opus “On What Matters” to wrap my head around this. We don’t have a proper understanding of minds at this point in time. Developing robust theories about rationality, morality, aesthetics, desires, etc., necessitates actually understanding minds.
As you’ve pointed out, marketing matters. In my view, this is part of the reason why epistemic and instrumental rationalities are distinct aspects of rationality as defined in the sequences. If your goal is to explain an idea to your interlocutor and you can convey the same truth using different wording, with one wording leading to mutual understanding and the other leading to obstinacy, then the instrumentally rational thing to do would be to use the former wording. Here we have a situation where two things are epistemically equivalent but not instrumentally so.
Thank you, done :D