I think there will not be a proper Art until many people have progressed to the point of remaking the Art in their own image, and then radioed back to describe their paths.
Also, I took his use of the term to specifically mean his art. I hear this type of use a lot. “His art is amazing.” Or, “He possesses the Art.”
I just meant—how does the Art get expanded to include many peoples’ paths, and to have room for distinctively female rationalists and other cognitive types?
One possibility is for several individuals to painstakingly search out approaches that work for themselves in particular, and radio their paths to us, as Eliezer did. I expect this image is what was behind, say, Eliezer’s discussion of mandatory secret identities.
A second possibility is for individuals (or the LW community) to painstakingly search out approaches (or distributions of approaches) that work for many different people, including people who are not yet master rationalists and who don’t yet have the skills to pick out their own paths all that efficiently. So, in addition to figuring out what works for me in my own attempts to protect what I protect, I could make extensive, active attempts to understand how a variety of other people think, and what techniques do and do not help those individuals. This would involve painstakingly gathering data, interacting with many different people as they experiment with different technique-components, offering suggestions and carefully watching what my interlocutors do with a given suggestion, etc. On this model, seeing what works for other people (even people who are not master rationalists, and who are not more skilled than me) would be a substantial part of what pushed my own art of rationality: both the art I use myself, and the art I share with others.
To bring in a concrete example, pjeby sounds like he is taking this second approach—so his art may more naturally grow the faces or approaches that work well for distinctively female practitioners of the art he is trying to develop, and for others who differ from himself in various ways. Not because he has the model “woman” inside himself well enough to write distinctively female characters, but because he is actively experimenting on a large number of actual women, and on students who differ from himself in other ways, and is using their responses to update his models of what works for people in general.
Along similar lines, a skilled facilitator who knows how to detect progress or promise, and who knows how to help many individuals work usefully on a common query, may be able to draw from a group knowledge that neither the facilitator nor the group would have been able to produce alone.
I’m not sure how different this is from Eliezer’s picture—certainly Eliezer has spent time modeling how others learn, and learning how to break his pathways into pieces others can take in. Incredibly successfully—many of us became much better thinkers as a result of his writing. But I’m trying to draw out a feeling of different-paradigm that I get from e.g. the metaphor above about radioing back our solitary paths through the labyrinth, and the fact that Eliezer’s OB posts on rationality techniques neither came with meta-info on what kinds or fractions of people the technique had proved useful for, in what contexts, nor asked for such info from commenters (though he did ask in his book-planning threads here).
From his post:
Also, I took his use of the term to specifically mean his art. I hear this type of use a lot. “His art is amazing.” Or, “He possesses the Art.”
I just meant—how does the Art get expanded to include many peoples’ paths, and to have room for distinctively female rationalists and other cognitive types?
One possibility is for several individuals to painstakingly search out approaches that work for themselves in particular, and radio their paths to us, as Eliezer did. I expect this image is what was behind, say, Eliezer’s discussion of mandatory secret identities.
A second possibility is for individuals (or the LW community) to painstakingly search out approaches (or distributions of approaches) that work for many different people, including people who are not yet master rationalists and who don’t yet have the skills to pick out their own paths all that efficiently. So, in addition to figuring out what works for me in my own attempts to protect what I protect, I could make extensive, active attempts to understand how a variety of other people think, and what techniques do and do not help those individuals. This would involve painstakingly gathering data, interacting with many different people as they experiment with different technique-components, offering suggestions and carefully watching what my interlocutors do with a given suggestion, etc. On this model, seeing what works for other people (even people who are not master rationalists, and who are not more skilled than me) would be a substantial part of what pushed my own art of rationality: both the art I use myself, and the art I share with others.
To bring in a concrete example, pjeby sounds like he is taking this second approach—so his art may more naturally grow the faces or approaches that work well for distinctively female practitioners of the art he is trying to develop, and for others who differ from himself in various ways. Not because he has the model “woman” inside himself well enough to write distinctively female characters, but because he is actively experimenting on a large number of actual women, and on students who differ from himself in other ways, and is using their responses to update his models of what works for people in general.
Along similar lines, a skilled facilitator who knows how to detect progress or promise, and who knows how to help many individuals work usefully on a common query, may be able to draw from a group knowledge that neither the facilitator nor the group would have been able to produce alone.
I’m not sure how different this is from Eliezer’s picture—certainly Eliezer has spent time modeling how others learn, and learning how to break his pathways into pieces others can take in. Incredibly successfully—many of us became much better thinkers as a result of his writing. But I’m trying to draw out a feeling of different-paradigm that I get from e.g. the metaphor above about radioing back our solitary paths through the labyrinth, and the fact that Eliezer’s OB posts on rationality techniques neither came with meta-info on what kinds or fractions of people the technique had proved useful for, in what contexts, nor asked for such info from commenters (though he did ask in his book-planning threads here).