Hi, I am a Physicist, an Effective Altruist and AI Safety student/researcher.
Linda Linsefors
Karma: 2,647
I was pretty sure this exist, maybe even built into LW. It seems like an obvious thing, and there are lots of parts of LW that for some reason is hard to find from the fron page. Googleing “lesswrong dictionary” yealded
https://www.lesswrong.com/w/lesswrong-jargon
https://www.lesswrong.com/w/r-a-z-glossary
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/fbv9FWss6ScDMJiAx/appendix-jargon-dictionary
Now days you can descripe the concept you want and have a LLM tell you the common term, but this tech is super new. Most of our jargon in from a time when you could only Google things you already know the name for.
Yes, thanks. I’ve fixdd it now.
I think it’s great that you point this out when you see it!
I think the acadeimc meaning of the word “review” (as in “review paper”) is a great fit. Except this word also have several other near by meanings which are not the meaning we want.
“Explainer” is pretty good. E.g. calling a post “Explainer of …”, or somene can have the role of Explainer.
I don’t think “pedagogy” is the right word? It’s too broad. It encompases things like how long lectures should be before taking a break, spaced repetition, etc. The jargon Distillation [2] is not a shorthand for the entire science of teahing and learning. It’s a shorthand for the art of writing good explainers, right?
and then being told that it’s a skill issue and I should just learn the rules.
This part is not aimed at leogao’s post!
What I was (not very skillfully) trying to point at is people who think that autistic people are just worse at social skills. I’m so fead up with this claim, and is a contributing reason to me avoiding the neurotypicals. But it’s not a claim that I read leogao’s as having made.
leogau’s language comparison is actually pretty great for this. You would not call someone who have a difrent native langue “bad at languages”, but nerutypicals are often mistakenly beleveing that autists are “bad at social skills”.
I also want to add that lots of atuists learn how to interact with the neurotypicals. It’s called masking, and involves learning more than just their wierd customs. It also involves hiding ones natural reactions. I hear it’s common for autistic women to get so good at this that they don’t get diagnosed untill later in life, when the burden of constant masking causes depression or something. This did not happen to me, because I am terrible at masking.
I’m pretty smart, clearly above average in general inteligence. But I’m also clearly below average in ability to learn langugaes. I can learn, I did learn English after all. But for a long time I was much worse than the typical Sweed my age.
I use my the prhase “I’ve updated” even when not having a number in my head. When I do say it, it’s motly a signal to myself to notice my feeling of how strongly I belive something and deliberatly push that feeling a bit to one side or another, especially when the evindence is week and should not change my mind very much.
I belive the human brain is acctually pretty good at aproximating basian updating, if one pays attention to facts in the right way. Part of this practice, for me, is to sometimes state out lound that I’ve encountered evidence that should influence my belifs, especially in cases where I’m in risk of confirmation bias.
I’m getting typo reacts (not suprsing) but I can’t see where typo is when hovering over the reaction. What am I doing wrong?
(reacted to my own post to test something about reactions, and now I don’t knwo how to remove it)
I agree that is a problem of jargon, but how would you fix it? If you tell peopel to not come up with new words for their new cocepts… does not work, they will do that anyway. But if some how stop people from crating shorthands for things they talk about a lot, that seems much worse, than the problem you tried to solve.
Although I don’t disagree with you, this is not a crux for me at all.
Hm, this does not rule out independent discovery, but is evidence against it.
I notice that I’m confused why they would re-name it if it isn’t independent discovery.
My guess is that the people inveting the term “murphyjitsu” did not know of the term “premortem”. If anyone want to check this, look in the CFAR handbook and see if there are any citations in that section. CFAR was decent at citing when they took ideas from other places.
Independent invesion is another way to get synonyms. I concidered including this in the original comment, but didn’t seem central enough for my main point.
But diffrent academic fields having diffrent jargon for the same thing because of independent invention of ideas, is a common thing.
Related rant: Another indpendent invetion (invented many times) is the multi agent mind method for therapy (and similar). It seems like various people have converged on calling all of it Interla Famaly System, which I dislike, because IFS is much more specific than that.
I agree that those a better examples, and probably just synonyms.
With the nitpick that it’s not obvious to me how to say “distilling” in one word, in some other way. Although I agree with you that dthe word “distillation” is a bad fit for how we use it.
I’ve updated to think that a diffrent common way jargon happens is that someone temporarley fogett the standard term and grab some other word that is natrual for them and their audience, e.g. sequence instead of series. And sometimes this never gets “corrected”, and instead end up being the new normal in that sub-culture.
I don’t know about other autists, but my primary problem with the neurotypical world isn’t that I don’t understand it, it that they don’t understand me. It doesn’t matter how well I can decode the social norms, if I can’t also control my unvoluntary emotional expressions, and also do other things ranging from impossible to unpleasant.
I do understand social white lies. It’s not that complicated. But I still find it unpleasant to speak them. When I was younger I got into trouble for literally being unable to utter words like “thanks” and “apology” when I did not mean them. (My native language does not have the ambiguous “sorry”.) I am now able to tell white lies, but it makes me feel bad, in a way that has nothing to do with morals. The dissonance is just intrinsically hurtful to my sole, in a way that non-autistic people don’t understand and typically don’t respect.
Another common thing is that people assume that if I don’t succeed in hiding my negative emotion this is an invitation/request for them to to try to help me, and then proceed to try to do that, even though they have zero skills, in this. And then they refuse to listen to anything I say, including not leaving me alone when I ask to be left alone.
I don’t want to hang out in a space where the norms are set up to be comfortable to people un-like me, at the cost of making it unpleasant for people like me, and then being told that it’s a skill issue and I should just learn the rules.
I accept that the wider norms will be set up to be good for the average people (i.e. not me). I just prefer to not go there.
I think it’s interesting that the phrase “I updated” was also used as a an example of a supposedly non-useful jargon, last time I mentioned my jargon opinions.
I do think that [purely signal that you belong to a certain group] type jargon does exist but that’s it is much rarer than you think. Because I think you mistake information carrying jargon for non-information carrying jargon.
I think that “it hints that you’re a Bayesian and think of your own cognitive process in Bayesian terms” is worth the cost in this case.
You say “but who isn’t around these parts?”. We’ll outsiders/newcomers might not, so in this case the implication (when used correctly) have important information. So exactly in the cases where there is a cost, there is also important value.
When talking to LW natives, it’s usually safety to assume a Bayesian mindset, so the information value is approximately zero. But the cost is also approximately zero, since we’re all super familiar with this phrase.
Additionally I do think, that “you changed my mind” indicate a stronger update than the typical “I updated”, and “you convinced me” is even stronger. Caveat that this can be context dependent as is always the case with natural language.
E.g. if someone shows me a math proof that contradict my initial intuition about a math fact, I’d say “you convinced me”, rather than “I updated”. Here this means that I now think of the proven statement as true. Sure there are some non-zero probability that the proof is wrong. But I also have limited cognition, so sometimes it’s reasonable to just treat a statement as 100% true on the object level (while still being open to be convinced this was a mistake), even though this is not how an ideal Bayesian would operate.
Thoughts on how to onboard volunteers/collaborators
Volunteers are super flaky, i.e. often abandon projects with no warning. I think the main reason for this is planning fallacy. People promise more than they actually have time for. Best case they will just be honest about this when they notice. But more typically the person will feel some mix of stress, shame and overwhelm that prevents them from communicating clearly. From the outside this looks like person promised to do a lot of things and then just ghosts the project. (This is a common pattern and not a specific accusation of any specific person.)
I don’t think I’m particularly good at volunteer management. But I have a few methods that I find very useful to avoid having the volunteers be net negative from my perspective. Which one depends on what fits the project. When ever I don’t do at least one of these precaution, I always end up regretting it, except if the person is someone I know well from before, and already have specific reasons to trust.
Give the volunteer a task which isn’t essential, so that if they drop out, that is ok. E.g. if I run an event and someone want’s to help then I would still make plans as if I did not have their help. After I’ve filled my to do-list with all the most important things, I would consider what non essential extras would be nice-to-have for the event, and give those tasks away.
Have enough volunteers that if half of them drop out, this is still ok.
Don’t invest any more time in them than the amount of work they’ve already put in. This could look like asking them to pre-reading before I invest time in onboarding. There are some obvious failure modes here, if both sides have this approach to a mutual collaboration. I think the solution is to ask people to do work that they want to do for it’s own sake, if and only if they are the person that has both sufficient time and interest in the project. (This point is specifically if your goal for doing onboarding is that you expect to get a collaborator out if it. E.g. when I did AISC career coaching calls, I deliberately did not have any barrier to book a 1h call with me. Because my aim then was to gift support, not trade for mutual benefits.)
Give them opportunities to take initiative. In my opinion, the best collaborator is someone who takes their own initiative, rather than wait for directions. This also happens to corelate somewhat (but not perfectly) with actually finishing the task they promise to do. I expect this is largely because initiativ and task completion both flows from sense of ownership. Ways to do this could be as simple as just telling them that you want them to take initiative, or you can give them a list of half specified task, to chose from but let them figure out the details. If you give people an opportunity to take initiative, most people will not do this, but this is not a failure mode. Remember that most people offering to volunteer actually don’t have time for this. You want to filter for who will actually do the work, and if filtering for initiative did not filter out most people, that would mean it wasn’t a good enough filter.
Advertise that you’re project exists but don’t advertise that you’re looking for help (even if you are). This way the people who reach out to join is at least somewhat filtered for initiativ.
Generally, any filter that does not filter out most people, is not enough of a filter. But also, just because a filter does filter out most people does not mean it’s any good. The filter also need to filter for the right few people.
Also, my own experience is that the best collaborations happens organically. The first AISC organiser team formed because I wondered around EAG and talked about an idea I had, and over the weekend and a few days after, several people decided to join the team. I didn’t even ask anyone to join, people just joined. AISS was first set up by me, not intended to be more than me, but people asked to help, so I put them all in a slack, and when I had a task I wanted to outsource I asked in the slack. Most people who joined never engaged again, but one person JJ, was very active and started to take more and more initiative, and around 2 months later we decided to be co-founders of AISS. My current research project came from me asking one of my AI safety researcher flatmates for a math quest.
The problem with this is sometimes you don’t find help organically and need to cast a wider net, e.g. write a public post asking for volunteers/collaborators for your project. But when doing this you’ll get a lot of people reaching out, who have not though through if this is something they would prioritise enough given their current time constraints, and then you get the problem I described at the top of this quick take.
I wrote down some ways I try to deal with this. I can’t say I’ve had a lot of success with volunteer managing, but at least if I follow the advice above, things don’t go terribly wrong. E.g. I’ve goten some use of volunteers at events, and as far as I know the volunteers where happy too.Volunteer management is very different from outsourcing to someone you pay to do the work. Often when people have opinion on how to manage a team, they draw from their professional experience, which does not straightforwardly translate, or just doesn’t address the biggest problems, since they are volunteer specific.
I don’t know of any good volunteer management guide, but they probably exist? If anyone with at least some volunteer management experience know of a good guide that you yourself have read and endorse, than I’d be interested in a link.I’m not expecting to do any volunteer management my self anytime soon, but I’m advising on more than one project who would benefit from a good guide like that.
Although non of them seem to have “distillation”, or “reserach debt” so there seems to be room for imporvement.
“distilation” do have an explanation in this tag though
https://www.lesswrong.com/w/distillation-and-pedagogy
I think the Wiki Tags are ment to be used as both tags and dictionary, however these two purpuses don’t cleanly line up.