I’m usually confused by these kinds of comments. Reflections on rationality a year out had even less content and was less well-written and less detailed, but was massively upvoted. Kevin hit the nail on the head with his comment on my Existential Risk post:
I’d like to point out some lukeprog fatigue here, if anyone else wrote this article it would have way more points by now.
Also, this is a personal contribution to the long-running “What good is rationality?” discussion on LessWrong.
Well, yes, there is lukeprog fatigue, but not in the sense that you probably mean it. One, or even a couple, of such posts from the same person are fine. It’s good to have information about how rationality has impacted somebody, and it’s motivatonal as well. But when the same person keeps posting about the same things, over and over again, it ceases to have motivational value. And while it’s good to summarize old material, clarify it or make it sexier (your Existential Risk post was great, in those respects), simply linking to old stuff or restating it provides little of value.
“Power 1”, is basically a recap of What Curiosity Looks Like (which by itself is less than two weeks old!), plus it explains things about your Christian background that you’ve already told us about.
“Power 3” recaps parts of your personal history that most people here are already perfectly aware of.
You’re right in that a lot of this material would be more appreciated if it was coming from somebody else, but it’s not because we’ve started to take it for granted that you’re producing quality material. It’s because coming from somebody else, it would provide an independent datapoint about this stuff being useful for someone. You restating the ways in which this has been useful to you only tells us that you haven’t changed your mind about this being useful to you.
(And I second the “don’t take this personally” bit—I still upvote most of your posts, and I think you’re one of the best posters on the site. It’s just this particular series of posts that doesn’t thrill me.)
“Power 2” is a recap of The Neglected Value of Scholarship, as well as a plug for some of your later posts.
Not really. The previous post focused on the example of William Lane Craig, who is just an awful example for rationalists to emulate. This section is more “scholarship allowed me to do X, Y, and Z to make my own life better,” which is much more helpful.
Yeah. I’ve gotten that comment before. No offense taken. I haven’t devoted enough cycles to this problem yet. If suggestions come to mind, feel free to share them.
I’ve worked out some ways to avoid certain variants of this problem, but most of them really boil down to “trick people with framing,” which isn’t really desirable—both because it’s at least a little deceptive and because it generally minimizes legitimate progress and serves mostly to make the other party feel better about their existing state.
The tones of the two articles are very different, and that affects how we perceive the (lack of) content.
I think part of it is that you’ve broken the rule about making high-status claims in public (or to put it another way, you’ve broken the show don’t tell rule). We all already know that you’re intelligent, curious, persuasive, a good researcher, etc etc. because we’ve read your highly impressive posts where you’ve compressed ridiculous amounts of research into a nice readable form backed up with a million references. But now you’ve made a post that’s all about how great rationality has been for you, and a lot of it involves rehashing how great you are. You didn’t just improve Common Sense Atheism’s traffic, you made it one of the most popular atheism blogs on the internet. You didn’t just start working on x-risk, you were appointed Executive Director of SingInst. You haven’t just made progress against akrasia, you’ve mastered the algorithm. And so on.
Compare to the other post, where we didn’t already have overwhelming evidence of awesomeness and the tone is much more humble.
I also have a strong dislike of linkspam without supporting content and particularly disliked most of the linking in the last paragraph, but that’s probably more of a personal thing.
You didn’t just improve Common Sense Atheism’s traffic, you made it one of the most popular atheism blogs on the internet. You didn’t just start working on x-risk, you were appointed Executive Director of SingInst. You haven’t just made progress against akrasia, you’ve mastered the algorithm.
But these things are true, at least the first two are. And knowing what Luke feels helped him in achieving these things is very good to know. Previously, I hadn’t known Luke did a ton of research in driving traffic to make Common Sense Atheism what it was, and I’m glad to know that.
Kevin is correct, but there may also be an element of “What good is rationality?” fatigue involved. This discussion has gone on for quite a while but it’s mostly been dominated by applause light-ish anecdotes rather than deep theories. I suspect people are tiring of this kind of post, which would explain why your post has fewer upvotes than previous ones on the same topic.
That may also be the case. In my case, I used my personal reflections on the value of rationality as a first step in working towards a deep theory of why rationality helps sometimes and not others, so that I might take a crack at the hard problem of how to create superheroes.
I’m usually confused by these kinds of comments. Reflections on rationality a year out had even less content and was less well-written and less detailed, but was massively upvoted. Kevin hit the nail on the head with his comment on my Existential Risk post:
Also, this is a personal contribution to the long-running “What good is rationality?” discussion on LessWrong.
Well, yes, there is lukeprog fatigue, but not in the sense that you probably mean it. One, or even a couple, of such posts from the same person are fine. It’s good to have information about how rationality has impacted somebody, and it’s motivatonal as well. But when the same person keeps posting about the same things, over and over again, it ceases to have motivational value. And while it’s good to summarize old material, clarify it or make it sexier (your Existential Risk post was great, in those respects), simply linking to old stuff or restating it provides little of value.
This is your third “yay rationality” post within a relatively short time: it was preceded by Can the Chain Still Hold You and What Curiosity Looks Like. So the motivational impact is rapidly hitting zero.
“Power 1”, is basically a recap of What Curiosity Looks Like (which by itself is less than two weeks old!), plus it explains things about your Christian background that you’ve already told us about.
“Power 2” is a recap of The Neglected Value of Scholarship, as well as a plug for some of your later posts.
“Power 3” recaps parts of your personal history that most people here are already perfectly aware of.
You’re right in that a lot of this material would be more appreciated if it was coming from somebody else, but it’s not because we’ve started to take it for granted that you’re producing quality material. It’s because coming from somebody else, it would provide an independent datapoint about this stuff being useful for someone. You restating the ways in which this has been useful to you only tells us that you haven’t changed your mind about this being useful to you.
(And I second the “don’t take this personally” bit—I still upvote most of your posts, and I think you’re one of the best posters on the site. It’s just this particular series of posts that doesn’t thrill me.)
Not really. The previous post focused on the example of William Lane Craig, who is just an awful example for rationalists to emulate. This section is more “scholarship allowed me to do X, Y, and Z to make my own life better,” which is much more helpful.
You’re harder to relate to now that you’ve made progress on problems the rest of us are still struggling with. Don’t take it personally.
Yeah. I’ve gotten that comment before. No offense taken. I haven’t devoted enough cycles to this problem yet. If suggestions come to mind, feel free to share them.
I’ve worked out some ways to avoid certain variants of this problem, but most of them really boil down to “trick people with framing,” which isn’t really desirable—both because it’s at least a little deceptive and because it generally minimizes legitimate progress and serves mostly to make the other party feel better about their existing state.
The tones of the two articles are very different, and that affects how we perceive the (lack of) content.
I think part of it is that you’ve broken the rule about making high-status claims in public (or to put it another way, you’ve broken the show don’t tell rule). We all already know that you’re intelligent, curious, persuasive, a good researcher, etc etc. because we’ve read your highly impressive posts where you’ve compressed ridiculous amounts of research into a nice readable form backed up with a million references. But now you’ve made a post that’s all about how great rationality has been for you, and a lot of it involves rehashing how great you are. You didn’t just improve Common Sense Atheism’s traffic, you made it one of the most popular atheism blogs on the internet. You didn’t just start working on x-risk, you were appointed Executive Director of SingInst. You haven’t just made progress against akrasia, you’ve mastered the algorithm. And so on.
Compare to the other post, where we didn’t already have overwhelming evidence of awesomeness and the tone is much more humble.
I also have a strong dislike of linkspam without supporting content and particularly disliked most of the linking in the last paragraph, but that’s probably more of a personal thing.
But these things are true, at least the first two are. And knowing what Luke feels helped him in achieving these things is very good to know. Previously, I hadn’t known Luke did a ton of research in driving traffic to make Common Sense Atheism what it was, and I’m glad to know that.
The visceral reaction to a high-status claim has nothing to do with truth values.
Same here, but that doesn’t detract from any tone issues.
Kevin is correct, but there may also be an element of “What good is rationality?” fatigue involved. This discussion has gone on for quite a while but it’s mostly been dominated by applause light-ish anecdotes rather than deep theories. I suspect people are tiring of this kind of post, which would explain why your post has fewer upvotes than previous ones on the same topic.
That may also be the case. In my case, I used my personal reflections on the value of rationality as a first step in working towards a deep theory of why rationality helps sometimes and not others, so that I might take a crack at the hard problem of how to create superheroes.