It looks like a lot of people are of a similar mind. Judging by the comments, most people seem to be taking this merely as a way around writer’s block, or a praise of depth first analysis as a way to narrow down to “a topic about which others haven’t already said everything”. The most insightful comment (at least to my sense of quality) proclaims this:
If Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance were a math textbook, the rule would be clear: “if you examine something, you will have something to say about it.”
There is of course The Virtue of Narrowness, but what I think what Phaedrus is getting at is that people in general, not just in their writing, tend not to put much effort into thinking new thoughts and thinking for themselves. One tool he has apparently employed successfully on his students is to have them narrow the scopes of their essays, forcing them to think for themselves rather than echo back what other people had already said. But reading just this segment of the story out of context might be a little like reading one of Yudkowsky’s later sequences without reading earlier ones. Allow me to supply some of that context.
The book is about Phaedrus’s ongoing obsession with finding his own specific version of the nebulous “ultimate good” or “objective morality” that so many philosophers have sought after. He calls his form “quality”, which is a mixture of the mechanical/analytic structure of science/rationality with the organic/emotional creativity of art/spirituality. The character is unique in the world with this particular brand of philosophy, and so does a lot of original thinking, placing little value on traditional Aristotelian thought. There are 2 types of people in the world: Aristotelians and Platonists, and he is neither.
Given this, I would suggest that Phaedrus is trying hard to think new thoughts himself, and places little value in small adaptations of existing philosophy. The character would suggest that humanity made a wrong turn in Plato’s time, with the divide between passion and logic. Fixing this requires an extraordinary amount of out-of-the-box thinking. Science needs to take seriously the quest to learn where hypotheses come from, and how best to nurture passion, creativity, insight, etc and make them a real part of the scientific process. On the other hand, our culture needs to learn to appreciate beautiful engineering alongside beautiful art, and to find Joy in the Merely Real instead of mystery. These efforts call for new paradigms, new ideas, new modes of thought, and an entire upheaval of societal norms, not unlike during the enlightenment and scientific revolution.
The single concept he sees as uniting those two worlds is “Quality”. Quality implies both sound engineering, and elegant, desirable form. It’s at once beautiful and offers utility. It can’t be defined, because to define it you would have to define every whim of an entire human mind. Even so, we all know intuitively what quality is, because we can all agree that one essay is well written or poorly written, even if we squabble about the precise letter grade it deserves. Quality isn’t just what people like. The word “just” has no place in that sentence. Quality IS what people like; everything that we can appreciate, for it’s design, it’s elegance, it’s beauty, it’s ingenuity… everything.
If any of this piques your interest, I recommend reading the book itself. What I’ve done is rather like trying to summarize all of The Sequences in one small post. But the point is, we are not talking about a technique to get over writer’s block; the author and Yudkowsky are definitely hinting at insights into the human mind. Our minds are predominately an echo chambers of everything we learn from others, but we must try and add an original thought to the mix every now and then, if we want to improve this world we live in.
It’s funny that to understand the “open-eyed look” people didn’t have enough open-eyed look. Coincidentally, I looked into the comments and saw this one only after, on this reading, I finally didn’t take it as just a nicely written fable. The fact is that some time ago I noticed that for the first time in a very long time I looked inside myself, and did not choose the most harmonious of other people’s opinions. This is similar to one of the posts where someone says that for the first time in their life they realized that they did not like the taste of food, but the social sense of status that eating this food gave. I also had a literal difficulty coming up with original plot twists and generally writing non-fan fiction in my attempts at fiction. And then I recently started posting my notes here on lesswrong, and in the process of thinking about it, I realized how few good thoughts I have that were created by me, and not taken from someone else. In fact, I almost never got more than a step, two at the most, from someone else’s ideas. Reminds me of Yudkowsky’s post I recently read about crossing the Rubicon, where he says that he really thinks the way he writes, reaching a huge depth of recursion in reflection, for example, not just experiencing emotion, but thinking that he is experiencing these emotions, whether he wants them to test whether he wants to want to experience them, and then in the same way thinking about his thoughts about his emotions and about thoughts about thoughts. It seems that with original thinking and attempts to go further than one step from other people’s thoughts, one should do about the same. And I miss both options. Perhaps it was this post and its similarity that gave me the idea. In general, only recently I realized that in the case of other people’s ideas, only pride in one’s erudition is appropriate, but not in one’s mind, because it was not you who came up with these ideas, these are not your thoughts. So, already trying to generate thoughts from looking inside myself, or at least moving many steps forward from other people’s thoughts, I read this post and at the phrase “she did not know other people’s words that can be repeated” I “clicked”, as they say. P.S. I remembered that at the first reading this moment was perceived as that this girl did not understand that when you write an essay you have to invent something yourself, and not retell Wikipedia or other people’s articles, and this became obvious only when she realized that no one in all over the world did not write an article about each specific brick.
It looks like a lot of people are of a similar mind. Judging by the comments, most people seem to be taking this merely as a way around writer’s block, or a praise of depth first analysis as a way to narrow down to “a topic about which others haven’t already said everything”. The most insightful comment (at least to my sense of quality) proclaims this:
There is of course The Virtue of Narrowness, but what I think what Phaedrus is getting at is that people in general, not just in their writing, tend not to put much effort into thinking new thoughts and thinking for themselves. One tool he has apparently employed successfully on his students is to have them narrow the scopes of their essays, forcing them to think for themselves rather than echo back what other people had already said. But reading just this segment of the story out of context might be a little like reading one of Yudkowsky’s later sequences without reading earlier ones. Allow me to supply some of that context.
The book is about Phaedrus’s ongoing obsession with finding his own specific version of the nebulous “ultimate good” or “objective morality” that so many philosophers have sought after. He calls his form “quality”, which is a mixture of the mechanical/analytic structure of science/rationality with the organic/emotional creativity of art/spirituality. The character is unique in the world with this particular brand of philosophy, and so does a lot of original thinking, placing little value on traditional Aristotelian thought. There are 2 types of people in the world: Aristotelians and Platonists, and he is neither.
Given this, I would suggest that Phaedrus is trying hard to think new thoughts himself, and places little value in small adaptations of existing philosophy. The character would suggest that humanity made a wrong turn in Plato’s time, with the divide between passion and logic. Fixing this requires an extraordinary amount of out-of-the-box thinking. Science needs to take seriously the quest to learn where hypotheses come from, and how best to nurture passion, creativity, insight, etc and make them a real part of the scientific process. On the other hand, our culture needs to learn to appreciate beautiful engineering alongside beautiful art, and to find Joy in the Merely Real instead of mystery. These efforts call for new paradigms, new ideas, new modes of thought, and an entire upheaval of societal norms, not unlike during the enlightenment and scientific revolution.
The single concept he sees as uniting those two worlds is “Quality”. Quality implies both sound engineering, and elegant, desirable form. It’s at once beautiful and offers utility. It can’t be defined, because to define it you would have to define every whim of an entire human mind. Even so, we all know intuitively what quality is, because we can all agree that one essay is well written or poorly written, even if we squabble about the precise letter grade it deserves. Quality isn’t just what people like. The word “just” has no place in that sentence. Quality IS what people like; everything that we can appreciate, for it’s design, it’s elegance, it’s beauty, it’s ingenuity… everything.
If any of this piques your interest, I recommend reading the book itself. What I’ve done is rather like trying to summarize all of The Sequences in one small post. But the point is, we are not talking about a technique to get over writer’s block; the author and Yudkowsky are definitely hinting at insights into the human mind. Our minds are predominately an echo chambers of everything we learn from others, but we must try and add an original thought to the mix every now and then, if we want to improve this world we live in.
It’s funny that to understand the “open-eyed look” people didn’t have enough open-eyed look. Coincidentally, I looked into the comments and saw this one only after, on this reading, I finally didn’t take it as just a nicely written fable. The fact is that some time ago I noticed that for the first time in a very long time I looked inside myself, and did not choose the most harmonious of other people’s opinions. This is similar to one of the posts where someone says that for the first time in their life they realized that they did not like the taste of food, but the social sense of status that eating this food gave. I also had a literal difficulty coming up with original plot twists and generally writing non-fan fiction in my attempts at fiction. And then I recently started posting my notes here on lesswrong, and in the process of thinking about it, I realized how few good thoughts I have that were created by me, and not taken from someone else. In fact, I almost never got more than a step, two at the most, from someone else’s ideas. Reminds me of Yudkowsky’s post I recently read about crossing the Rubicon, where he says that he really thinks the way he writes, reaching a huge depth of recursion in reflection, for example, not just experiencing emotion, but thinking that he is experiencing these emotions, whether he wants them to test whether he wants to want to experience them, and then in the same way thinking about his thoughts about his emotions and about thoughts about thoughts. It seems that with original thinking and attempts to go further than one step from other people’s thoughts, one should do about the same. And I miss both options. Perhaps it was this post and its similarity that gave me the idea. In general, only recently I realized that in the case of other people’s ideas, only pride in one’s erudition is appropriate, but not in one’s mind, because it was not you who came up with these ideas, these are not your thoughts. So, already trying to generate thoughts from looking inside myself, or at least moving many steps forward from other people’s thoughts, I read this post and at the phrase “she did not know other people’s words that can be repeated” I “clicked”, as they say. P.S. I remembered that at the first reading this moment was perceived as that this girl did not understand that when you write an essay you have to invent something yourself, and not retell Wikipedia or other people’s articles, and this became obvious only when she realized that no one in all over the world did not write an article about each specific brick.