Thanks for responding! I think you make fair points—I hadn’t seen the previous thread in detail, I just try to read all the posts but afaik there isn’t a good way of tracking which comment threads continue to live for a while.
I think the center of our disagreement on point 2 is a matter of the “purpose of LessWrong;” if you intend to use it as a place to have communal discussions of technical problems which you hope to make progress on through posts, then I agree that introducing more formal background is necessary even in the case that everyone has the needed foundations. I am skeptical that this will be a likely outcome, since the blog has cross purposes of building communities and general life rationality, and building technical foundations is rough for a blog post and might better be assigned to textbooks and meetup groups. That limits engagement much more heavily and I definitely don’t mean to suggest you shouldn’t try, but I wasn’t really in that mindset when first reading this. I had a more general response on the lines of “this person wants to do something mathematically rigorous but is a bit condescending and hasn’t written anything interesting.” I hope/believe that will change in future posts!
I personally would really like to see more direct technical work on LessWrong, though I am unsure about the best format. I am heavily in favor of people writing sequences of posts that introduce technical fields to the community, and think that a lot of the best content in the history of LessWrong was of that nature.
Strong +1. I’d love to see most of LW developing into object-level technical discussion of interesting things (object-level math, science, philosophy, etc.), skewed toward things that are neglected and either interesting or important; and very little meta or community-building stuff. Rationality should be an important part of all that, but most posts probably shouldn’t be solely about rationality techniques.
I have in the past engaged with a good amount of technical material (primarily MIRI’s agent foundation agenda). In general time is short though, and I can’t make any promises of participating in any specific effort.
I think so far I am not particularly compelled by the approach you are proposing in this and your next post, but am open to be convinced otherwise.
I don’t think I disagree with the claim you’re making here—I think formal background for things like decision theory is a big contributor to day to day rationality. But I think posts detailing formal background on this site will often be speaking either to people who already have the formal background, and be boring, or be speaking to people who do not, and it would be better to refer them to textbooks or online courses.
On the other hand, if someone wanted to take on the monumental task of opening up the possibility of running interactive jupyter notebooks to add coding exercises to notebooks and start building online courses here, I’d be excited for that to happen—it just seems like if we want to build more formal background it will be a struggle with the current site setup to match other resources.
Thanks for responding! I think you make fair points—I hadn’t seen the previous thread in detail, I just try to read all the posts but afaik there isn’t a good way of tracking which comment threads continue to live for a while.
I think the center of our disagreement on point 2 is a matter of the “purpose of LessWrong;” if you intend to use it as a place to have communal discussions of technical problems which you hope to make progress on through posts, then I agree that introducing more formal background is necessary even in the case that everyone has the needed foundations. I am skeptical that this will be a likely outcome, since the blog has cross purposes of building communities and general life rationality, and building technical foundations is rough for a blog post and might better be assigned to textbooks and meetup groups. That limits engagement much more heavily and I definitely don’t mean to suggest you shouldn’t try, but I wasn’t really in that mindset when first reading this. I had a more general response on the lines of “this person wants to do something mathematically rigorous but is a bit condescending and hasn’t written anything interesting.” I hope/believe that will change in future posts!
I personally would really like to see more direct technical work on LessWrong, though I am unsure about the best format. I am heavily in favor of people writing sequences of posts that introduce technical fields to the community, and think that a lot of the best content in the history of LessWrong was of that nature.
Strong +1. I’d love to see most of LW developing into object-level technical discussion of interesting things (object-level math, science, philosophy, etc.), skewed toward things that are neglected and either interesting or important; and very little meta or community-building stuff. Rationality should be an important part of all that, but most posts probably shouldn’t be solely about rationality techniques.
Time allowing!
I have in the past engaged with a good amount of technical material (primarily MIRI’s agent foundation agenda). In general time is short though, and I can’t make any promises of participating in any specific effort.
I think so far I am not particularly compelled by the approach you are proposing in this and your next post, but am open to be convinced otherwise.
I don’t think I disagree with the claim you’re making here—I think formal background for things like decision theory is a big contributor to day to day rationality. But I think posts detailing formal background on this site will often be speaking either to people who already have the formal background, and be boring, or be speaking to people who do not, and it would be better to refer them to textbooks or online courses.
On the other hand, if someone wanted to take on the monumental task of opening up the possibility of running interactive jupyter notebooks to add coding exercises to notebooks and start building online courses here, I’d be excited for that to happen—it just seems like if we want to build more formal background it will be a struggle with the current site setup to match other resources.