Wow. This was great. I really liked sitting and thinking through the update that Pat would/should make on observing the in-fact outcome of HPMOR. I have in my head the feelings assocciated with generating Pat’s arguments, and I have in my head the notion of ‘keeping your eye on the ball’ - looking at all the evidence and models of the thing you have—and realising that HPMOR worked, helps me flag the feels of the first notion as ‘unhelpful’, and direct my thoughts towards the object level evidence (I also expect it’s a really useful example for many people in this community—especially those who were around before HPMOR succeeded). I greatly appreciate having a bunch of these fully-general counterarguments flagged in my head as ‘wasted cognition’.
This line was super helpful, in being able to pass the ITT of Pat and Maude:
The modest view, roughly, is that the world is inexploitable as far as you can predict, because you can never knowably know better than the experts.
And also:
A voice like Pat Modesto is not a productive voice to have inside your head, in my opinion, so I don’t spontaneously wonder what he would say.
In the past I’ve noticed voices in my head that are of reasonable (or at least, high-status-to-me) people whose arguments were reliably unhelpful, and I was attempting to argue from their position to mine, and it was a lot of wasted cognition. I will endeavour to have only productive voices in my head in future.
Naturally for a piece of writing this freaking awesome, I’ve promoted it to Featured.
If “A voice like Pat Modesto isnot a productive voice to have inside your head” could be put on a poster and hang on walls that might be the right level of respect and attention.
Wow. This was great. I really liked sitting and thinking through the update that Pat would/should make on observing the in-fact outcome of HPMOR. I have in my head the feelings assocciated with generating Pat’s arguments, and I have in my head the notion of ‘keeping your eye on the ball’ - looking at all the evidence and models of the thing you have—and realising that HPMOR worked, helps me flag the feels of the first notion as ‘unhelpful’, and direct my thoughts towards the object level evidence (I also expect it’s a really useful example for many people in this community—especially those who were around before HPMOR succeeded). I greatly appreciate having a bunch of these fully-general counterarguments flagged in my head as ‘wasted cognition’.
This line was super helpful, in being able to pass the ITT of Pat and Maude:
And also:
In the past I’ve noticed voices in my head that are of reasonable (or at least, high-status-to-me) people whose arguments were reliably unhelpful, and I was attempting to argue from their position to mine, and it was a lot of wasted cognition. I will endeavour to have only productive voices in my head in future.
Naturally for a piece of writing this freaking awesome, I’ve promoted it to Featured.
Yes. Those lines in particular.
If “A voice like Pat Modesto is not a productive voice to have inside your head” could be put on a poster and hang on walls that might be the right level of respect and attention.
I now have this written on a whiteboard on the wall in my bedroom.