This is definitely the use-case where “explain how you came to think Y” is hardest; there’s a vague ball of intuitions playing a major role in the causal pathway. On the other hand, making those intuitions more legible (e.g. by using analogies between psych and ML) tends to have unusually high value.
I suspect that, from Eliezer’s perspective, a lot of sequences came from roughly this process. He was trying to work back through his own pile of intuitions and where they came from, then serialize and explain as much of it as possible. It’s been a generator for a lot of my own writing as well—for instance, the Constraints/Scarcity posts came from figuring out how to make a broad class of intuitions legible, and the review of Design Principles of Biological Circuits came from realizing that the book had been upstream of a bunch of my intuitions about AI. It’s not coincidence that those were relatively popular posts—figuring out the logic which drives some intuitions, and making that logic legible, is valuable. It allows us to more directly examine and discuss the previously-implicit/intuitive arguments.
I wouldn’t quite liken it to persuasion. I think the thing you’re trying to point to is that the author does most of the work of crossing the inductive gap. In general, when two people communicate, either one can do the work of translating into terms the other person understands (or they can split that work, or a third party can help, etc… the point is that someone has to do it.). When trying to persuade someone, that burden is definitely on the persuader. But that’s not exclusively a feature of persuasion—it’s a useful habit to have in general, to try to cross most of the inductive gap oneself, and it’s important for clear writing in general. The goal is still to accurately convey some idea/intuition/information, not to persuade the reader that the idea/intuition/information is right.
This is definitely the use-case where “explain how you came to think Y” is hardest; there’s a vague ball of intuitions playing a major role in the causal pathway. On the other hand, making those intuitions more legible (e.g. by using analogies between psych and ML) tends to have unusually high value.
I suspect that, from Eliezer’s perspective, a lot of sequences came from roughly this process. He was trying to work back through his own pile of intuitions and where they came from, then serialize and explain as much of it as possible. It’s been a generator for a lot of my own writing as well—for instance, the Constraints/Scarcity posts came from figuring out how to make a broad class of intuitions legible, and the review of Design Principles of Biological Circuits came from realizing that the book had been upstream of a bunch of my intuitions about AI. It’s not coincidence that those were relatively popular posts—figuring out the logic which drives some intuitions, and making that logic legible, is valuable. It allows us to more directly examine and discuss the previously-implicit/intuitive arguments.
I wouldn’t quite liken it to persuasion. I think the thing you’re trying to point to is that the author does most of the work of crossing the inductive gap. In general, when two people communicate, either one can do the work of translating into terms the other person understands (or they can split that work, or a third party can help, etc… the point is that someone has to do it.). When trying to persuade someone, that burden is definitely on the persuader. But that’s not exclusively a feature of persuasion—it’s a useful habit to have in general, to try to cross most of the inductive gap oneself, and it’s important for clear writing in general. The goal is still to accurately convey some idea/intuition/information, not to persuade the reader that the idea/intuition/information is right.