Yep, definitely! The reason why these are big tomes is IMO largely downstream of the distribution methods at the time.
Like, yes, totally, sometimes you have to cross large inferential distances. For example, the sequences are probably one of the most inferential-distance spanning artifacts that I have read in my life. Nevertheless, they were written one blogpost a day over the course of two years.
Many pieces of intellectual progress were also first made in the form of a lecture series, where each lecture was prepared after the previous one was finished. Then that lecture series was eventually written up into a book. Indeed, I think that is for most forms of intellectual progress, a better way of developing both ideas and pedagogical content knowledge.
I tend to write in large tomes that take months or years to complete, so I suppose I disagree with you too. Not that intellectual progress must consist of this, obviously, but that it can mark an importantly different kind of intellectual progress from the sort downstream of continuous shipping.
In particular, I think shipping constantly often causes people to be too moored to social reception, risks killing butterfly ideas, screens off deeper thought, and forces premature legibility. Like, a lot of the time I feel ready to publish something there is some bramble I pass in my writing, some inkling of “Is that really true? What exactly do I mean there?” These often spin up worthy investigations of their own, but I probably would’ve failed to notice them were I more focused on getting things out.
Intellectual labor should aggregate minute-by-minute with revolutionary insights aggregating from hundreds of small changes.
This doesn’t necessarily seem in conflict with “long tomes which take months to write.” My intellectual labor consists of insights aggregating from hundreds of small changes afaict, I just make those changes in my own headspace, or in contact with one or two other minds. Indeed, I have tried getting feedback on my work in this fashion and it’s almost universally failed to be helpful—not because everyone is terrible, but because it’s really hard to get someone loaded enough to give me relevant feedback at all.
Another way to put it: this sort of serial iteration can happen without publishing often, or even at all. It’s possible to do it on your own, in which case the question is more about what kind of feedback is valuable, and how much it makes sense to push for legibility versus pursuing the interesting thread formatted in your mentalese. I don’t really see one as obviously better than the other in general, and I think that doing either blindly can be pretty costly, so I’m wary of it being advocated as such.
I’m curious if we can somehow operationalize a bet between Lightcone-ish-folk and you/Adam. I think agree the social-environment-distortion is an important cost. I do think it’s probably necessary for genius thinkers to have a period of time where they are thinking alone.
But, I do think there are also important benefits to publishing more, esp. if you can develop an internal locus of “what’s important”. I also think doing things like “just publish on your private blog rather than LessWrong, such that a smaller number of higher-context people can way in” would help.
But, my gut says pretty strongly that you and Adam are erring way too far in the not-publishing direction, and like, I would pay money for you to publish more.
FWIW I think that much our epistemic environment is too far from the true/right path. I think Habryka is able to think for himself in public better than most, and this has involved being one of the most intellectually aggressive arguers on the internet. I am not sure that being more in touch with everyone and their feedback would be healthy. For similar reasons, I don’t tweet. I suspect I would become more insane.
my gut says pretty strongly that you and Adam are erring way too far in the not-publishing direction, and like, I would pay money for you to publish more.
I am interested in debating the principle here (e.g. whether it sometimes makes sense to write books, whether/why most scientific progress so far has involved writing books, etc), but I feel less interested in debating your gut take on the tradeoffs Aysja and I are making personally, since I expect you know nearly nothing about what those are? Most obviously, the dominant term has been illness rather than choices, but I expect you also have near-zero context on the choices, which we have spent really a lot of time and effort considering. I would… I guess be up for describing those in person, if you want.
Yep, definitely! The reason why these are big tomes is IMO largely downstream of the distribution methods at the time.
What distribution differences do you mean? Kepler and Bacon lived before academic journals, but I think all the others could easily have published papers; indeed Newton, Darwin and Maxwell published many, and while Carnot didn’t many around him did, so he would have known it was an option.
It seems more likely to me that they chose to write up these ideas as books rather than papers simply because the ideas were more “book-sized” than “paper-sized,” i.e. because they were trying to discover and describe a complicated cluster of related ideas that was inferentially far from existing understanding, and this tends to be hard to do briefly.
I think that is for most forms of intellectual progress, a better way of developing both ideas and pedagogical content knowledge
It sounds like you’re imagining that the process of writing such books tends to involve a bunch of waterfall-style batching, analogous to e.g. finishing the framing in each room of a house before moving on to the flooring, or something like that? If so, I’m confused why; at least my own experience with large writing projects has involved little of this, I think, though I’m sure writing processes vary widely.
I don’t think papers were set up for wide distribution at all. Like, how would Newton, Darwin and Maxwell have published 10+ papers and distributed them all to their target audience?
Papers and books are aimed at different audiences. Papers are aimed at a small community of experts which has a lot shared epistemic prerequisites, so the average contribution is short. Books are aimed at larger audiences.
The modern internet enables you to write in small batches to both audiences (or any audience) really. I am more talking about the ability to write things like blogpost series, or have people follow your Youtube channel, or follow your Twitter, etc. (Like, I am not saying Youtube and Twitter are bastions of intellectual progress, but they enable distribution mechanisms that I think generally outperform previous ones).
Yep, definitely! The reason why these are big tomes is IMO largely downstream of the distribution methods at the time.
Like, yes, totally, sometimes you have to cross large inferential distances. For example, the sequences are probably one of the most inferential-distance spanning artifacts that I have read in my life. Nevertheless, they were written one blogpost a day over the course of two years.
Many pieces of intellectual progress were also first made in the form of a lecture series, where each lecture was prepared after the previous one was finished. Then that lecture series was eventually written up into a book. Indeed, I think that is for most forms of intellectual progress, a better way of developing both ideas and pedagogical content knowledge.
I tend to write in large tomes that take months or years to complete, so I suppose I disagree with you too. Not that intellectual progress must consist of this, obviously, but that it can mark an importantly different kind of intellectual progress from the sort downstream of continuous shipping.
In particular, I think shipping constantly often causes people to be too moored to social reception, risks killing butterfly ideas, screens off deeper thought, and forces premature legibility. Like, a lot of the time I feel ready to publish something there is some bramble I pass in my writing, some inkling of “Is that really true? What exactly do I mean there?” These often spin up worthy investigations of their own, but I probably would’ve failed to notice them were I more focused on getting things out.
This doesn’t necessarily seem in conflict with “long tomes which take months to write.” My intellectual labor consists of insights aggregating from hundreds of small changes afaict, I just make those changes in my own headspace, or in contact with one or two other minds. Indeed, I have tried getting feedback on my work in this fashion and it’s almost universally failed to be helpful—not because everyone is terrible, but because it’s really hard to get someone loaded enough to give me relevant feedback at all.
Another way to put it: this sort of serial iteration can happen without publishing often, or even at all. It’s possible to do it on your own, in which case the question is more about what kind of feedback is valuable, and how much it makes sense to push for legibility versus pursuing the interesting thread formatted in your mentalese. I don’t really see one as obviously better than the other in general, and I think that doing either blindly can be pretty costly, so I’m wary of it being advocated as such.
I’m curious if we can somehow operationalize a bet between Lightcone-ish-folk and you/Adam. I think agree the social-environment-distortion is an important cost. I do think it’s probably necessary for genius thinkers to have a period of time where they are thinking alone.
But, I do think there are also important benefits to publishing more, esp. if you can develop an internal locus of “what’s important”. I also think doing things like “just publish on your private blog rather than LessWrong, such that a smaller number of higher-context people can way in” would help.
But, my gut says pretty strongly that you and Adam are erring way too far in the not-publishing direction, and like, I would pay money for you to publish more.
FWIW I think that much our epistemic environment is too far from the true/right path. I think Habryka is able to think for himself in public better than most, and this has involved being one of the most intellectually aggressive arguers on the internet. I am not sure that being more in touch with everyone and their feedback would be healthy. For similar reasons, I don’t tweet. I suspect I would become more insane.
I am interested in debating the principle here (e.g. whether it sometimes makes sense to write books, whether/why most scientific progress so far has involved writing books, etc), but I feel less interested in debating your gut take on the tradeoffs Aysja and I are making personally, since I expect you know nearly nothing about what those are? Most obviously, the dominant term has been illness rather than choices, but I expect you also have near-zero context on the choices, which we have spent really a lot of time and effort considering. I would… I guess be up for describing those in person, if you want.
Makes sense, it is possible that after illness were factored out it wouldn’t seem so obvious to me.
What distribution differences do you mean? Kepler and Bacon lived before academic journals, but I think all the others could easily have published papers; indeed Newton, Darwin and Maxwell published many, and while Carnot didn’t many around him did, so he would have known it was an option.
It seems more likely to me that they chose to write up these ideas as books rather than papers simply because the ideas were more “book-sized” than “paper-sized,” i.e. because they were trying to discover and describe a complicated cluster of related ideas that was inferentially far from existing understanding, and this tends to be hard to do briefly.
It sounds like you’re imagining that the process of writing such books tends to involve a bunch of waterfall-style batching, analogous to e.g. finishing the framing in each room of a house before moving on to the flooring, or something like that? If so, I’m confused why; at least my own experience with large writing projects has involved little of this, I think, though I’m sure writing processes vary widely.
I don’t think papers were set up for wide distribution at all. Like, how would Newton, Darwin and Maxwell have published 10+ papers and distributed them all to their target audience?
Papers and books are aimed at different audiences. Papers are aimed at a small community of experts which has a lot shared epistemic prerequisites, so the average contribution is short. Books are aimed at larger audiences.
The modern internet enables you to write in small batches to both audiences (or any audience) really. I am more talking about the ability to write things like blogpost series, or have people follow your Youtube channel, or follow your Twitter, etc. (Like, I am not saying Youtube and Twitter are bastions of intellectual progress, but they enable distribution mechanisms that I think generally outperform previous ones).