This post seems to do a fairly complicated thing, that some of the old Eliezer posts did for free will – take a concept that is often deeply confusing, and examine it closely enough to actually see the moving parts beneath it.
After reading this post I still feel a bit confused about freedom as a concept… but I have an additional lens to look at that concept through that might (eventually) be clear enough for me to actually manipulate the underlying gears on purpose.
I think there may be additional lenses to look at freedom through, which’d probably have more to do with cognitive science and evo-psych (why do people care about freedom, either as optimization or as arbitrariness, in the first place?)
This post was fairly long and I bounced off it the first time I read it. I feel like there is some room to improve it’s structure and comprehensibility (possibly giving the different sections headings, so that you can after the fact skim it to more easily recall the overall structure).
But I could imagine a legitimate case that “no, this is actually a complex topic, if you try to simplify it for comprehensibility you’re more likely to oversimplify than learn the right thing. And it’s better to force the reader to carefully read through the whole thing.”
Curated.
This post seems to do a fairly complicated thing, that some of the old Eliezer posts did for free will – take a concept that is often deeply confusing, and examine it closely enough to actually see the moving parts beneath it.
After reading this post I still feel a bit confused about freedom as a concept… but I have an additional lens to look at that concept through that might (eventually) be clear enough for me to actually manipulate the underlying gears on purpose.
I think there may be additional lenses to look at freedom through, which’d probably have more to do with cognitive science and evo-psych (why do people care about freedom, either as optimization or as arbitrariness, in the first place?)
This post was fairly long and I bounced off it the first time I read it. I feel like there is some room to improve it’s structure and comprehensibility (possibly giving the different sections headings, so that you can after the fact skim it to more easily recall the overall structure).
But I could imagine a legitimate case that “no, this is actually a complex topic, if you try to simplify it for comprehensibility you’re more likely to oversimplify than learn the right thing. And it’s better to force the reader to carefully read through the whole thing.”