I wanted to register that I don’t like “babble and prune” as a model of intellectual development. I think intellectual development actually looks more like:
1. Babble
2. Prune
3. Extensive scholarship
4. More pruning
5. Distilling scholarship to form common knowledge
And that my main criticism is the lack of 3 and 5, not the lack of 2 or 4.
I also note that: a) these steps get monotonically harder, so that focusing on the first two misses *almost all* the work; b) maybe I’m being too harsh on the babble and prune framework because it’s so thematically appropriate for me to dunk on it here; I’m not sure if your use of the terminology actually reveals a substantive disagreement.
I basically agree with your 5-step model (I at least agree it’s a more accurate description than Babel and Prune, which I just meant as rough shorthand). I’d add things like “original research/empiricism” or “more rigorous theorizing” to the “Extensive Scholarship” step.
I see the LW Review as basically the first of (what I agree should essentially be at least) a 5 step process. It’s adding a stronger Step 2, and a bit of Step 5 (at least some people chose to rewrite their posts to be clearer and respond to criticism)
...
Currently, we do get non-zero Extensive Scholarship and Original Empiricism. (Kaj’s Multi-Agent Models of Mind seems like it includes real scholarship. Scott Alexander / Eli Tyre and Bucky’s exploration into Birth Order Effects seemed like real empiricism). Not nearly as much as I’d like.
If the cost of evaluating a hypothesis is high, and hypotheses are cheap to generate, I would like to generate a great deal before selecting one to evaluate.
But, honestly… I’m not sure it’s actually a question that was worth asking. I’d like to know if Eliezer’s hypothesis about mathematicians is true, but I’m not sure it ranks near the top of questions I’d want people to put serious effort into answering.
I do want LessWrong to be able to followup Good Hypotheses with Actual Research, but it’s not obvious which questions are worth answering. OpenPhil et al are paying for some types of answers, I think usually by hiring researchers full time. It’s not quite clear what the right role for LW to play in the ecosystem.
All else equal, the harder something is, the less we should do it.
My quick take is that writing lit reviews/textbooks is a comparative disadvantage of LW relative to the mainstream academic establishment.
In terms of producing reliable knowledge… if people actually care about whether something is true, they can always offer a cash prize for the best counterargument (which could of course constitute citation of academic research). The fact that people aren’t doing this suggests to me that for most claims on LW, there isn’t any (reasonably rich) person who cares deeply re: whether the claim is true. I’m a little wary of putting a lot of effort into supply if there is an absence of demand.
(I guess the counterargument is that accurate knowledge is a public good so an individual’s willingness to pay doesn’t get you complete picture of the value accurate knowledge brings. Maybe what we need is a way to crowdfund bounties for the best argument related to something.)
(I agree that LW authors would ideally engage more with each other and academic literature on the margin.)
I’ve been thinking about the idea of “social rationality” lately, and this is related. We do so much here in the way of training individual rationality—the inputs, functions, and outputs of a single human mind. But if truth is a product, then getting human minds well-coordinated to produce it might be much more important than training them to be individually stronger. Just as assembly line production is much more effective in producing almost anything than teaching each worker to be faster in assembling a complete product by themselves.
My guess is that this could be effective not only in producing useful products, but also in overcoming biases. Imagine you took 5 separate LWers and asked them to create a unified consensus response to a given article. My guess is that they’d learn more through that collective effort, and produce a more useful response, than if they spent the same amount of time individually evaluating the article and posting their separate replies.
Of course, one of the reasons we don’t to that so much is that coordination is an up-front investment and is unfamiliar. Figuring out social technology to make it easier to participate in might be a great project for LW.
There’s been a fair amount of discussion of that sort of thing here: https://www.lesswrong.com/tag/group-rationality There are also groups outside LW thinking about social technology such as RadicalxChange.
Imagine you took 5 separate LWers and asked them to create a unified consensus response to a given article. My guess is that they’d learn more through that collective effort, and produce a more useful response, than if they spent the same amount of time individually evaluating the article and posting their separate replies.
I’m not sure. If you put those 5 LWers together, I think there’s a good chance that the highest status person speaks first and then the others anchor on what they say and then it effectively ends up being like a group project for school with the highest status person in charge. Somerelatedlinks.
That’s definitely a concern too! I imagine such groups forming among people who either already share a basic common view, and collaborate to investigate more deeply. That way, any status-anchoring effects are mitigated.
Alternatively, it could be an adversarial collaboration. For me personally, some of the SSC essays in this format have led me to change my mind in a lasting way.
I wanted to register that I don’t like “babble and prune” as a model of intellectual development. I think intellectual development actually looks more like:
1. Babble
2. Prune
3. Extensive scholarship
4. More pruning
5. Distilling scholarship to form common knowledge
And that my main criticism is the lack of 3 and 5, not the lack of 2 or 4.
I also note that: a) these steps get monotonically harder, so that focusing on the first two misses *almost all* the work; b) maybe I’m being too harsh on the babble and prune framework because it’s so thematically appropriate for me to dunk on it here; I’m not sure if your use of the terminology actually reveals a substantive disagreement.
I basically agree with your 5-step model (I at least agree it’s a more accurate description than Babel and Prune, which I just meant as rough shorthand). I’d add things like “original research/empiricism” or “more rigorous theorizing” to the “Extensive Scholarship” step.
I see the LW Review as basically the first of (what I agree should essentially be at least) a 5 step process. It’s adding a stronger Step 2, and a bit of Step 5 (at least some people chose to rewrite their posts to be clearer and respond to criticism)
...
Currently, we do get non-zero Extensive Scholarship and Original Empiricism. (Kaj’s Multi-Agent Models of Mind seems like it includes real scholarship. Scott Alexander / Eli Tyre and Bucky’s exploration into Birth Order Effects seemed like real empiricism). Not nearly as much as I’d like.
But John’s comment elsethread seems significant:
This reminded of a couple posts in the 2018 Review, Local Validity as Key to Sanity and Civilization, and Is Clickbait Destroying Our General Intelligence?. Both of those seemed like “sure, interesting hypothesis. Is it real tho?”
During the Review I created a followup “How would we check if Mathematicians are Generally More Law Abiding?” question, trying to move the question from Stage 2 to 3. I didn’t get much serious response, probably because, well, it was a much harder question.
But, honestly… I’m not sure it’s actually a question that was worth asking. I’d like to know if Eliezer’s hypothesis about mathematicians is true, but I’m not sure it ranks near the top of questions I’d want people to put serious effort into answering.
I do want LessWrong to be able to followup Good Hypotheses with Actual Research, but it’s not obvious which questions are worth answering. OpenPhil et al are paying for some types of answers, I think usually by hiring researchers full time. It’s not quite clear what the right role for LW to play in the ecosystem.
All else equal, the harder something is, the less we should do it.
My quick take is that writing lit reviews/textbooks is a comparative disadvantage of LW relative to the mainstream academic establishment.
In terms of producing reliable knowledge… if people actually care about whether something is true, they can always offer a cash prize for the best counterargument (which could of course constitute citation of academic research). The fact that people aren’t doing this suggests to me that for most claims on LW, there isn’t any (reasonably rich) person who cares deeply re: whether the claim is true. I’m a little wary of putting a lot of effort into supply if there is an absence of demand.
(I guess the counterargument is that accurate knowledge is a public good so an individual’s willingness to pay doesn’t get you complete picture of the value accurate knowledge brings. Maybe what we need is a way to crowdfund bounties for the best argument related to something.)
(I agree that LW authors would ideally engage more with each other and academic literature on the margin.)
I’ve been thinking about the idea of “social rationality” lately, and this is related. We do so much here in the way of training individual rationality—the inputs, functions, and outputs of a single human mind. But if truth is a product, then getting human minds well-coordinated to produce it might be much more important than training them to be individually stronger. Just as assembly line production is much more effective in producing almost anything than teaching each worker to be faster in assembling a complete product by themselves.
My guess is that this could be effective not only in producing useful products, but also in overcoming biases. Imagine you took 5 separate LWers and asked them to create a unified consensus response to a given article. My guess is that they’d learn more through that collective effort, and produce a more useful response, than if they spent the same amount of time individually evaluating the article and posting their separate replies.
Of course, one of the reasons we don’t to that so much is that coordination is an up-front investment and is unfamiliar. Figuring out social technology to make it easier to participate in might be a great project for LW.
There’s been a fair amount of discussion of that sort of thing here: https://www.lesswrong.com/tag/group-rationality There are also groups outside LW thinking about social technology such as RadicalxChange.
I’m not sure. If you put those 5 LWers together, I think there’s a good chance that the highest status person speaks first and then the others anchor on what they say and then it effectively ends up being like a group project for school with the highest status person in charge. Some related links.
That’s definitely a concern too! I imagine such groups forming among people who either already share a basic common view, and collaborate to investigate more deeply. That way, any status-anchoring effects are mitigated.
Alternatively, it could be an adversarial collaboration. For me personally, some of the SSC essays in this format have led me to change my mind in a lasting way.