This dialogue is very long and rambling (and is an example of why I am skeptical about the dialogues feature in general), so this comment only addresses a couple of bits of it. That said:
[alkjash] Of course the final goal is to produce thoughts that are original AND correct, but I find the originality condition more stringent and worth optimizing for. This might be a feature of working in mathematics where verifying correctness is cheap and reliable.
(Emphasis mine.)
Yes, I think that’s basically it. There doesn’t seem to be much more to say on the subject, actually; yes, if you work in math, where verifying correctness is cheap and reliably, then pursuing originality is obviously the way to go. Almost no other domain works like that, so pursuing originality over correctness is not the way to go in most other domains. End of discussion…?
One thing I’ll add from my own experience as a designer is that in design (UX design / web design in my case, though I strongly suspect—and what I’ve heard and read from others supports this—that it applies generally), if you try to do things correctly, and if you’re serious about this, you will find yourself doing original things, merely as an almost inevitable by-product of doing things correctly. This is partly because your assessment of what is correct may differ from others’, but mostly it’s because very few people are actually trying to do things correctly.
[habryka] … I think as people go I’ve been much more “heads-down” on building things than most other people in the LW community, and have had trouble finding other people to join me.
[habryka] But also, at the same time, one of the most common pieces of advice I give to young people in AI Alignment is to just try to write some blogposts that explain what you think the AI Alignment problem is, and where the hard parts are, and what you think might be ways to tackle it, in your own language and from your own perspective. And almost every time I’ve seen someone actually do that, I think they went on to do pretty great work. But almost no one does it, which is confusing.
This is consistent with my experience. As I wrote recently on a different forum, the number of people who are willing to actually do a technically simple thing, that they wish to see done, is very small. People mostly don’t do things, in general. If you assume that people just won’t take the initiative to do any given thing, you’ll usually predict outcomes correctly.
(This seems to be especially true among “rationalists”, unfortunately.)
This reminds me of the Replication Crisis. Psychologists placed a high value on novelty and surprising results, the sort of narratives you can build a TED Talk on, and thought that verifying correctness in psychology was cheap and reliable. You didn’t have to eat your veggies, you could just skip straight to the dessert. Turns out, that is not the case: the effects are small, analyst flexibility far higher than known, required sample sizes at least 1 order of magnitude (and often 2) larger than used, and verification is expensive and extremely difficult. The areas of psychology that most prize novelty and cool stories, like social psychology, have turned out to be appallingly riddled with entire fake fields of study and now have a bad tummyache from trying to digest decades of dessert; meanwhile, the most boring, tedious, mathematical areas, like psychophysics, don’t even know what ‘the Replication Crisis’ is.
This dialogue is very long and rambling (and is an example of why I am skeptical about the dialogues feature in general), so this comment only addresses a couple of bits of it. That said:
(Emphasis mine.)
Yes, I think that’s basically it. There doesn’t seem to be much more to say on the subject, actually; yes, if you work in math, where verifying correctness is cheap and reliably, then pursuing originality is obviously the way to go. Almost no other domain works like that, so pursuing originality over correctness is not the way to go in most other domains. End of discussion…?
One thing I’ll add from my own experience as a designer is that in design (UX design / web design in my case, though I strongly suspect—and what I’ve heard and read from others supports this—that it applies generally), if you try to do things correctly, and if you’re serious about this, you will find yourself doing original things, merely as an almost inevitable by-product of doing things correctly. This is partly because your assessment of what is correct may differ from others’, but mostly it’s because very few people are actually trying to do things correctly.
This is consistent with my experience. As I wrote recently on a different forum, the number of people who are willing to actually do a technically simple thing, that they wish to see done, is very small. People mostly don’t do things, in general. If you assume that people just won’t take the initiative to do any given thing, you’ll usually predict outcomes correctly.
(This seems to be especially true among “rationalists”, unfortunately.)
This reminds me of the Replication Crisis. Psychologists placed a high value on novelty and surprising results, the sort of narratives you can build a TED Talk on, and thought that verifying correctness in psychology was cheap and reliable. You didn’t have to eat your veggies, you could just skip straight to the dessert. Turns out, that is not the case: the effects are small, analyst flexibility far higher than known, required sample sizes at least 1 order of magnitude (and often 2) larger than used, and verification is expensive and extremely difficult. The areas of psychology that most prize novelty and cool stories, like social psychology, have turned out to be appallingly riddled with entire fake fields of study and now have a bad tummyache from trying to digest decades of dessert; meanwhile, the most boring, tedious, mathematical areas, like psychophysics, don’t even know what ‘the Replication Crisis’ is.