I agree. Let me elaborate, hopefully clarifying the post to Viliam (and others).
Regarding the basics of rationality, there’s this cluster of concepts that includes “think in distributions, not binary categories”, “Distributions Are Wide, wider than you think”, selection effects, unrepresentative data, filter bubbles and so on. This cluster is clearly present in the essay. (There are other such clusters present as well—perhaps something about incentive structures? - but I can’t name them as well.)
Hence, my reaction reading this essay was “Wow, what a sick combo!”
You have these dozens of basic concepts, then you combine them in the right way, and bam, you get Social Dark Matter.
Sure, yes, really the thing here is many smaller things in disguise—but those smaller basic things are not the point. The point is the combination!
It’s hard to describe (especially in lay terms) the experience of reading through (and finally absorbing) the sections of this paper one by one; the best analogy I can come up with would be watching an expert video game player nimbly navigate his or her way through increasingly difficult levels of some video game, with the end of each level (or section) culminating in a fight with a huge “boss” that was eventually dispatched using an array of special weapons that the player happened to have at hand.
This passage is from Terence Tao, describing his experiences reading a paper by Jean Bourgain, but it fits my experience reading this essay as well.
I definitely read all examples as “both at the same time.”
1) Whatever X publicly condemned thing you can think of, it exists on a spectrum.
2) There is a lot more of all instances of it happening than you think there are.
3) A lot of it does not look like the kind you are most likely to notice and condemn.
I agree. Let me elaborate, hopefully clarifying the post to Viliam (and others).
Regarding the basics of rationality, there’s this cluster of concepts that includes “think in distributions, not binary categories”, “Distributions Are Wide, wider than you think”, selection effects, unrepresentative data, filter bubbles and so on. This cluster is clearly present in the essay. (There are other such clusters present as well—perhaps something about incentive structures? - but I can’t name them as well.)
Hence, my reaction reading this essay was “Wow, what a sick combo!”
You have these dozens of basic concepts, then you combine them in the right way, and bam, you get Social Dark Matter.
Sure, yes, really the thing here is many smaller things in disguise—but those smaller basic things are not the point. The point is the combination!
This passage is from Terence Tao, describing his experiences reading a paper by Jean Bourgain, but it fits my experience reading this essay as well.