Cultivating epistemic at the expense of instrumental rationality. They’re both very important, but I think LessWrong has focused too much on the former. The explore-exploit tradeoff also applies to humans, not just to machine learning. Rationalists should be more agentic, applying what they’ve learned to the real world more than most seem to. Instead, cultivating too much doubt has broken our resolve to act.
I’m not sure your last sentence is true, mainly because selection bias: a fair proportion of the more instrumental folks are too busy actually doing work IRL to post frequently here anymore (e.g. Luke Muehlhauser, who I still sometimes think of as the author of posts like How to Beat Procrastination instead of his current role).
Cultivating epistemic at the expense of instrumental rationality. They’re both very important, but I think LessWrong has focused too much on the former. The explore-exploit tradeoff also applies to humans, not just to machine learning. Rationalists should be more agentic, applying what they’ve learned to the real world more than most seem to. Instead, cultivating too much doubt has broken our resolve to act.
I’m not sure your last sentence is true, mainly because selection bias: a fair proportion of the more instrumental folks are too busy actually doing work IRL to post frequently here anymore (e.g. Luke Muehlhauser, who I still sometimes think of as the author of posts like How to Beat Procrastination instead of his current role).