The notion of paradigm shifts has felt pretty key to how I think about intellectual progress (which in turn means “how do I think about lesswrong?”). A lot of my thinking about this comes from listening to talks by Geoff Anders (huh, I just realized I was literally at a retreat organized by an org called Paradigm at the time, which was certainly not coincidence).
In particular, I apply the paradigm-theory towards how to think about AI Alignment and Rationality progress, both of which are some manner of “pre-paradigmatic.”
I think this post is a good writeup of the concepts. I found this post pretty helpful both for helping me to think about how paradigms might form, with lots of examples (apparently no thanks to Kuhn?), as well as what the limits of the paradigm-paradigm.
I’m curious if there are other existing summaries that I could contrast this with.
Predictive Coding
One weirdness I observe while reading this is, 3⁄4 through the post, Scott suddenly brings up predictive coding. And I… think I’m supposed to have some context on that? (“There goes Scott again, seeing predictive coding in everything”.) I assume this was a hot-topic on Slatestarcodex 2019. He explains it well enough that I only feel lost for a minute, but it’s pretty jarring. If this post ends up being a longterm reference for paradigm-thinking, it might make sense to edit a bit.
Book Reviews and the LW Review
I don’t actually think “Is this a good fit for the Best Of Book?” is quite the question I want most people asking in these reviews. I’d rather reviewers just convey information about the post. But, I think it’s worth thinking about it sometimes from a broader view of “okay, what is the Best Of Book supposed to do? What should the LW Review be doing if we’re maximizing intellectual progress flow-throw.”
I think book reviews are totally fine to include. I acknowledge it’s a bit weird, but if a post is useful to read it’s useful to read. This one in particular seems to do a lot of good interpretive/distillation effort.
But one thing that strikes me this year is thinking “hmm, there are actually a lot of book reviews up for nomination. And I could imagine that maybe if a number of them all got voted favorably, we might want to put together a special “book review book” that clustered them together.
Followup work
This post largely made we want to see a ton more work exploring lots of scientific paradigm evolutions, and see how well this model actually matched them. I feel like surely someone must have done this already (outside of LW). If not, I think that’d be a great contribution to human knowledge/theory. If someone DID already do this, I think writing a summary post connecting it to other LW topics would still be valuable.
The notion of paradigm shifts has felt pretty key to how I think about intellectual progress (which in turn means “how do I think about lesswrong?”). A lot of my thinking about this comes from listening to talks by Geoff Anders (huh, I just realized I was literally at a retreat organized by an org called Paradigm at the time, which was certainly not coincidence).
In particular, I apply the paradigm-theory towards how to think about AI Alignment and Rationality progress, both of which are some manner of “pre-paradigmatic.”
I think this post is a good writeup of the concepts. I found this post pretty helpful both for helping me to think about how paradigms might form, with lots of examples (apparently no thanks to Kuhn?), as well as what the limits of the paradigm-paradigm.
I’m curious if there are other existing summaries that I could contrast this with.
Predictive Coding
One weirdness I observe while reading this is, 3⁄4 through the post, Scott suddenly brings up predictive coding. And I… think I’m supposed to have some context on that? (“There goes Scott again, seeing predictive coding in everything”.) I assume this was a hot-topic on Slatestarcodex 2019. He explains it well enough that I only feel lost for a minute, but it’s pretty jarring. If this post ends up being a longterm reference for paradigm-thinking, it might make sense to edit a bit.
Book Reviews and the LW Review
I don’t actually think “Is this a good fit for the Best Of Book?” is quite the question I want most people asking in these reviews. I’d rather reviewers just convey information about the post. But, I think it’s worth thinking about it sometimes from a broader view of “okay, what is the Best Of Book supposed to do? What should the LW Review be doing if we’re maximizing intellectual progress flow-throw.”
I think book reviews are totally fine to include. I acknowledge it’s a bit weird, but if a post is useful to read it’s useful to read. This one in particular seems to do a lot of good interpretive/distillation effort.
But one thing that strikes me this year is thinking “hmm, there are actually a lot of book reviews up for nomination. And I could imagine that maybe if a number of them all got voted favorably, we might want to put together a special “book review book” that clustered them together.
Followup work
This post largely made we want to see a ton more work exploring lots of scientific paradigm evolutions, and see how well this model actually matched them. I feel like surely someone must have done this already (outside of LW). If not, I think that’d be a great contribution to human knowledge/theory. If someone DID already do this, I think writing a summary post connecting it to other LW topics would still be valuable.