Kabir Kumar: I find it annoying how much discussion of P there is. It’s fine to have a bit of discussion of P, but obsession with P or not P and putting probabilities on P is so ingroupy and not actually communicating much. It’s mostly just an enjoyment of the ingroup, which LessWrong rewards and enjoys far, far too much.
It vividly illustrates something I’ve been wondering about for a while, namely why even the closest humans (e.g. Paul and I, who share very similar backgrounds and interests, even independently inventing the same ideas) are so different in thinking styles and conclusions.
I think a big factor is that people often come to be idiosyncratic thinkers in the first place via a motivation to be unique or interesting. As some evidence for this, we see the exact opposite—surprising convergence on positions and very similar thinking styles—in most other human subcultures that are not focused on interesting thinking.
Any particular reason? To be clear, I’m not accusing anyone of bad faith—it just shapes deep reflexes of salience, attention and sensemaking. I feel like Wei Dai would actually agree with this to some extent, since he’s always going on about status motivations.
Huh, actually surprised by the disagreevotes. I would’ve thought this would be relatively uncontroversial. Can’t help but suspect this is a big blindspot here. Like, I’m being interpreted as attacking the locally sacred value of idiosyncratic thinking, or local high-status people, or something?
On the original question—there are also other factors, of course, like the world being so big/complex that the right worldview is underdetermined by the evidence, and skill in a domain (here, verbal thinking) allowing more nuanced and specific expression of one’s aesthetic preferences and personality.
re: thinking styles I’m reminded of mathematicians and their tribes and I’ve been wondering how this looks like outside of math, particularly in AI alignment. I guess one shortcoming of the math-derived examples is nobody is really good at strategic thinking (cf. one of your recent comments—edit: this one).
I think it’s valuable for this to be highly upvoted.
There is indeed an ingroup and in this particular domain the ingroup being well-known and vocal in public is to all our benefit. Posts like this valorize it, create more attention/engagement with it, hence encouraging its continued public discourse. Sociocultural transparency in AI, to whatever degree we can get it, is a public good.
Memes do actual epistemic work (e.g. this post, I claim) and on the margin I‘d prefer more memes (in absolute, not proportional, terms). But some cultures only incentivise memes, which would suck for this community bc much of our work is by necessity unfunny.
Fwiw I think our community rewards unfunny stuff, so I’m not too worried. For example, the top LW post is Alex Turner’s which has zero jokes.
I find it annoying that this is so highly upvoted. The post is a fine bit of satire/humor, but it’s so ingroupy and not actually saying much.
It’s mostly just an enjoyment of the ingroup, which LessWrong rewards and enjoys far, far too much.
Kabir Kumar: I find it annoying how much discussion of P there is. It’s fine to have a bit of discussion of P, but obsession with P or not P and putting probabilities on P is so ingroupy and not actually communicating much. It’s mostly just an enjoyment of the ingroup, which LessWrong rewards and enjoys far, far too much.
In perhaps, a caricature of myself, I laughed and then found it slightly annoying I found this funny, lol
It vividly illustrates something I’ve been wondering about for a while, namely why even the closest humans (e.g. Paul and I, who share very similar backgrounds and interests, even independently inventing the same ideas) are so different in thinking styles and conclusions.
I think a big factor is that people often come to be idiosyncratic thinkers in the first place via a motivation to be unique or interesting. As some evidence for this, we see the exact opposite—surprising convergence on positions and very similar thinking styles—in most other human subcultures that are not focused on interesting thinking.
I don’t think this is a big component of the explanation.
Any particular reason? To be clear, I’m not accusing anyone of bad faith—it just shapes deep reflexes of salience, attention and sensemaking. I feel like Wei Dai would actually agree with this to some extent, since he’s always going on about status motivations.
Huh, actually surprised by the disagreevotes. I would’ve thought this would be relatively uncontroversial. Can’t help but suspect this is a big blindspot here. Like, I’m being interpreted as attacking the locally sacred value of idiosyncratic thinking, or local high-status people, or something?
On the original question—there are also other factors, of course, like the world being so big/complex that the right worldview is underdetermined by the evidence, and skill in a domain (here, verbal thinking) allowing more nuanced and specific expression of one’s aesthetic preferences and personality.
re: thinking styles I’m reminded of mathematicians and their tribes and I’ve been wondering how this looks like outside of math, particularly in AI alignment. I guess one shortcoming of the math-derived examples is nobody is really good at strategic thinking (cf. one of your recent comments—edit: this one).
Huh, this seems like a really important question.
I think it’s valuable for this to be highly upvoted.
There is indeed an ingroup and in this particular domain the ingroup being well-known and vocal in public is to all our benefit. Posts like this valorize it, create more attention/engagement with it, hence encouraging its continued public discourse. Sociocultural transparency in AI, to whatever degree we can get it, is a public good.
Yeah, incentive gradients point towards meming already, not towards Cultivating the Art of Human Rationality.
I really feel like we don’t have that much meme content on LW.
Memes do actual epistemic work (e.g. this post, I claim) and on the margin I‘d prefer more memes (in absolute, not proportional, terms). But some cultures only incentivise memes, which would suck for this community bc much of our work is by necessity unfunny.
Fwiw I think our community rewards unfunny stuff, so I’m not too worried. For example, the top LW post is Alex Turner’s which has zero jokes.