a lot of unconventional people choose intentionally to ignore normie-legible status systems. this can take the form of either expert consensus or some form of feedback from reality that is widely accepted. for example, many researchers especially around these parts just don’t publish at all in normal ML conferences at all, opting instead to depart into their own status systems. or they don’t care whether their techniques can be used to make very successful products, or make surprisingly accurate predictions etc. instead, they substitute some alternative status system, like approval of a specific subcommunity.
there’s a grain of truth to this, which is that the normal status system is often messed up (academia has terrible terrible incentives). it is true that many people overoptimize the normal status system really hard and end up not producing very much value.
but the problem with starting your own status system (or choosing to compete in a less well-agreed-upon one) is that it’s unclear to other people how much stock to put in your status points. it’s too easy to create new status systems. the existing ones might be deeply flawed, but at least their difficulty is a known quantity.
one common retort is that it’s not worth proving yourself to people who are too closed minded and only accept ideas if they are validated by some legible status system. this is true to some extent, and i’m generally against people spending too much effort to optimize normie status too hard (e.g i think people should be way less worried about getting a degree in order to be taken seriously / get a job offer), but it’s possible to take too far.
a rational decision maker should in fact discount claims of extremely illegible quality, because there are simply too many of them and it’s too hard to pick out the good ones even if they were there (that’s sort of the whole thing about illegibillity!). it seems bad to only bestow the truth upon people who happen to be irrational in ways that cause them to take you seriously by chance. if left unchecked, this kind of thing can also very easily evolve into a cult, where the unmooring from reality checks allows huge epistemic distortions.
a good in between approach might be to do some very legibly impressive things, just to prove that you can in fact do well at the legible status system if you chose to, and are intentionally choosing not to (as opposed to choosing alternative status systems because you’re not capable of getting status in the legible system).
This comment seems to implicitly assume markers of status are the only way to judge quality of work. You can just, y’know, look at it? Even without doing a deep dive, the sort of papers or blog posts which present good research have a different style and rhythm to them than the crap. And it’s totally reasonable to declare that one’s audience is the people who know how to pick up on that sort of style.
The bigger reason we can’t entirely escape “status”-ranking systems is that there’s far too much work to look at it all, so people have to choose which information sources to pay attention to.
It’s a question of resolution. Just looking at things for vibes is a pretty good way of filtering wheat from chaff, but you don’t give scarce resources like jobs or grants to every grain of wheat that comes along. When I sit on a hiring committee, the discussions around the table are usually some mix of status markers and people having done the hard work of reading papers more or less carefully (this consuming time in greater-than-linear proportion to distance from your own fields of expertise). Usually (unless nepotism is involved) someone who has done that homework can wield more power than they otherwise would at that table, because people respect strong arguments and understand that status markers aren’t everything.
Still, at the end of day, an Annals paper is an Annals paper. It’s also true that to pass some of the early filters you either need (a) someone who speaks up strongly for you or (b) pass the status marker tests.
I am sometimes in a position these days of trying to bridge the academic status system and the Berkeley-centric AI safety status system, e.g. by arguing to a high status mathematician that someone with illegible (to them) status is actually approximately equivalent in “worthiness of being paid attention to” as someone they know with legible status. Small increases in legibility can have outsize effects in how easy my life is in those conversations.
Otherwise it’s entirely down to me putting social capital on the table (“you think I’m serious, I think this person is very serious”). I’m happy to do this and continue doing this, but it’s not easily scalable, because it depends on my personal relationships.
Generally, it is about heuristics we can use to find quality in the oceans of crap. If we assume that people are sane to some degree, status is an imperfect proxy for quality. If we assume that people don’t use AIs to polish their writing styles, the writing style is an imperfect proxy for quality.
I have no experience reading research. I suspect that there are also crackpots who can write using the right kind of style. For example, they may be experts at their own line of research, and also speak overconfidently about different things they do not understand.
So if you want to be taken seriously, you probably need to know what kind of crackpot do you remind others of, and then find a way how to distinguish yourself from this kind of crackpot specifically.
At some moment it would probably easier to simply do your homework, once, and then have something you can point at. For example, you don’t need to publish everything in the established journals, but it would probably help to publish there once—just to show that if you want, you can; that this is about your priorities, not about lack of quality.
There are probably other ways, for example if you don’t wont to get involved too much with the system, find someone who already is, and maybe offer them co-authorship in return for jumping through all the hoops.
I guess my model is that the costs of complying with the standard system are high but constant. So the more time you spend complaining about the system not taking your seriously, the greater the chance that complying with the system would have actually been cheaper than the accumulating opportunity costs.
there is always too much information to pay attention to. without an inexpensive way to filter, the field would grind to a complete halt. style is probably a worse thing to select on than even academia cred, just because it’s easier to fake.
A thing that I often see happening when people talk about “normie-legible status systems” is that they gaslight themselves into believing that some status system that is extraordinarily legible, or they are part of, is something that is consensus.
Academia is the most intense example of this. Most people don’t care that much about academic status! This also happens in the other direction. Youtube is a major source of status in much of the world, especially among young people, but is considered low-brow whenever people argue about this, and so people dismiss it.
I also think people tend to do a fallacy of gray thing where if a status system is not maximally legible (like writing popular blogposts, or running a popular podcast, or making popular Youtube videos, or being popular on Twitter), they dismiss the status system as not real and “illegible”.
I think modeling the real status and reputation systems that are present in the world is important, but for example, trying to ascent the academic status hierarchy is a bad use of time and resources. It’s extremely competitive, and not actually that influential outside of the academic bubble. It is in some fields better correlated with actual skills and integrity and intelligence, and so I still think a reasonable thing to consider, but I think most people are better placed to trade off a bit of legibility against a whole amount of net realness in status (this importantly does not mean your LW quick takes will be the thing that causes you to become world-renowned, I am not saying “just say smart things and the world will recognize you”, I am saying “don’t think that only the most legible status systems, or the one with the most mobs hunting dissenters from the status system are the only real ways of gaining recognition in the world”).
sure, the thing you’re looking for is the status system that jointly optimizes for alignedness with what you care about, and how legible it is to the people you are trying to convince.
(My guess is you meant to agree with that, but kind of the whole point of my comment was that the dimension that is more important than legibility and alignment with you is the buy-in your audience has for a given status system. Youtube is not very legible, and not that aligned, but for some audiences has very high buy-in.)
but for example, trying to ascent the academic status hierarchy is a bad use of time and resources
For some fields such as biotech, it’s difficult to get access to labs outside of academia. And you can’t learn without lab access because the cutting edge experiments don’t get posted to YouTube (yet).
There is a passage from Jung’s “Modern man in search of a soul” that I think about fairly often, on this point (p.229 in my edition)
I know that the idea of proficiency is especially repugnant to the pseudo-moderns, for it reminds them unpleasantly of their deceits. This, however, cannot prevent us from taking it as our criterion of the modern man. We are even forced to do so, for unless he is proficient, the man who claims to be modern is nothing but an unscrupulous gambler. He must be proficient in the highest degree, for unless he can atone by creative ability for his break with tradition, he is merely disloyal to the past
It’s possible that this wouldn’t work for everyone, but so far I am very satisfied working on a PhD on agent foundations (AIXI). There are a lot of complaints here about academic incentives, but mostly I just ignore them. Possibly this will eventually interfere with my academic career prospects, but in the meantime I get years to work on basically whatever I think is interesting and important, and at the end of it I can reasonably expect to end up with a PhD and a thesis I’m proud of, which seems like enough to land on my feet. Looks like the best of both worlds to me.
What kind of changes or outcomes would you expect to see if people around these parts instead of publishing their work independently started trying to get it into traditional ML conferences and related publications?
a lot of unconventional people choose intentionally to ignore normie-legible status systems. this can take the form of either expert consensus or some form of feedback from reality that is widely accepted. for example, many researchers especially around these parts just don’t publish at all in normal ML conferences at all, opting instead to depart into their own status systems. or they don’t care whether their techniques can be used to make very successful products, or make surprisingly accurate predictions etc. instead, they substitute some alternative status system, like approval of a specific subcommunity.
there’s a grain of truth to this, which is that the normal status system is often messed up (academia has terrible terrible incentives). it is true that many people overoptimize the normal status system really hard and end up not producing very much value.
but the problem with starting your own status system (or choosing to compete in a less well-agreed-upon one) is that it’s unclear to other people how much stock to put in your status points. it’s too easy to create new status systems. the existing ones might be deeply flawed, but at least their difficulty is a known quantity.
one common retort is that it’s not worth proving yourself to people who are too closed minded and only accept ideas if they are validated by some legible status system. this is true to some extent, and i’m generally against people spending too much effort to optimize normie status too hard (e.g i think people should be way less worried about getting a degree in order to be taken seriously / get a job offer), but it’s possible to take too far.
a rational decision maker should in fact discount claims of extremely illegible quality, because there are simply too many of them and it’s too hard to pick out the good ones even if they were there (that’s sort of the whole thing about illegibillity!). it seems bad to only bestow the truth upon people who happen to be irrational in ways that cause them to take you seriously by chance. if left unchecked, this kind of thing can also very easily evolve into a cult, where the unmooring from reality checks allows huge epistemic distortions.
a good in between approach might be to do some very legibly impressive things, just to prove that you can in fact do well at the legible status system if you chose to, and are intentionally choosing not to (as opposed to choosing alternative status systems because you’re not capable of getting status in the legible system).
This comment seems to implicitly assume markers of status are the only way to judge quality of work. You can just, y’know, look at it? Even without doing a deep dive, the sort of papers or blog posts which present good research have a different style and rhythm to them than the crap. And it’s totally reasonable to declare that one’s audience is the people who know how to pick up on that sort of style.
The bigger reason we can’t entirely escape “status”-ranking systems is that there’s far too much work to look at it all, so people have to choose which information sources to pay attention to.
It’s a question of resolution. Just looking at things for vibes is a pretty good way of filtering wheat from chaff, but you don’t give scarce resources like jobs or grants to every grain of wheat that comes along. When I sit on a hiring committee, the discussions around the table are usually some mix of status markers and people having done the hard work of reading papers more or less carefully (this consuming time in greater-than-linear proportion to distance from your own fields of expertise). Usually (unless nepotism is involved) someone who has done that homework can wield more power than they otherwise would at that table, because people respect strong arguments and understand that status markers aren’t everything.
Still, at the end of day, an Annals paper is an Annals paper. It’s also true that to pass some of the early filters you either need (a) someone who speaks up strongly for you or (b) pass the status marker tests.
I am sometimes in a position these days of trying to bridge the academic status system and the Berkeley-centric AI safety status system, e.g. by arguing to a high status mathematician that someone with illegible (to them) status is actually approximately equivalent in “worthiness of being paid attention to” as someone they know with legible status. Small increases in legibility can have outsize effects in how easy my life is in those conversations.
Otherwise it’s entirely down to me putting social capital on the table (“you think I’m serious, I think this person is very serious”). I’m happy to do this and continue doing this, but it’s not easily scalable, because it depends on my personal relationships.
Generally, it is about heuristics we can use to find quality in the oceans of crap. If we assume that people are sane to some degree, status is an imperfect proxy for quality. If we assume that people don’t use AIs to polish their writing styles, the writing style is an imperfect proxy for quality.
I have no experience reading research. I suspect that there are also crackpots who can write using the right kind of style. For example, they may be experts at their own line of research, and also speak overconfidently about different things they do not understand.
So if you want to be taken seriously, you probably need to know what kind of crackpot do you remind others of, and then find a way how to distinguish yourself from this kind of crackpot specifically.
At some moment it would probably easier to simply do your homework, once, and then have something you can point at. For example, you don’t need to publish everything in the established journals, but it would probably help to publish there once—just to show that if you want, you can; that this is about your priorities, not about lack of quality.
There are probably other ways, for example if you don’t wont to get involved too much with the system, find someone who already is, and maybe offer them co-authorship in return for jumping through all the hoops.
I guess my model is that the costs of complying with the standard system are high but constant. So the more time you spend complaining about the system not taking your seriously, the greater the chance that complying with the system would have actually been cheaper than the accumulating opportunity costs.
there is always too much information to pay attention to. without an inexpensive way to filter, the field would grind to a complete halt. style is probably a worse thing to select on than even academia cred, just because it’s easier to fake.
A thing that I often see happening when people talk about “normie-legible status systems” is that they gaslight themselves into believing that some status system that is extraordinarily legible, or they are part of, is something that is consensus.
Academia is the most intense example of this. Most people don’t care that much about academic status! This also happens in the other direction. Youtube is a major source of status in much of the world, especially among young people, but is considered low-brow whenever people argue about this, and so people dismiss it.
I also think people tend to do a fallacy of gray thing where if a status system is not maximally legible (like writing popular blogposts, or running a popular podcast, or making popular Youtube videos, or being popular on Twitter), they dismiss the status system as not real and “illegible”.
I think modeling the real status and reputation systems that are present in the world is important, but for example, trying to ascent the academic status hierarchy is a bad use of time and resources. It’s extremely competitive, and not actually that influential outside of the academic bubble. It is in some fields better correlated with actual skills and integrity and intelligence, and so I still think a reasonable thing to consider, but I think most people are better placed to trade off a bit of legibility against a whole amount of net realness in status (this importantly does not mean your LW quick takes will be the thing that causes you to become world-renowned, I am not saying “just say smart things and the world will recognize you”, I am saying “don’t think that only the most legible status systems, or the one with the most mobs hunting dissenters from the status system are the only real ways of gaining recognition in the world”).
sure, the thing you’re looking for is the status system that jointly optimizes for alignedness with what you care about, and how legible it is to the people you are trying to convince.
(My guess is you meant to agree with that, but kind of the whole point of my comment was that the dimension that is more important than legibility and alignment with you is the buy-in your audience has for a given status system. Youtube is not very legible, and not that aligned, but for some audiences has very high buy-in.)
For some fields such as biotech, it’s difficult to get access to labs outside of academia. And you can’t learn without lab access because the cutting edge experiments don’t get posted to YouTube (yet).
There is a passage from Jung’s “Modern man in search of a soul” that I think about fairly often, on this point (p.229 in my edition)
It’s possible that this wouldn’t work for everyone, but so far I am very satisfied working on a PhD on agent foundations (AIXI). There are a lot of complaints here about academic incentives, but mostly I just ignore them. Possibly this will eventually interfere with my academic career prospects, but in the meantime I get years to work on basically whatever I think is interesting and important, and at the end of it I can reasonably expect to end up with a PhD and a thesis I’m proud of, which seems like enough to land on my feet. Looks like the best of both worlds to me.
Two common failure modes to avoid when doing the legibly impressive things
1. Only caring instrumentally about the project (decreases motivation)
2. Doing “net negative” projects
What kind of changes or outcomes would you expect to see if people around these parts instead of publishing their work independently started trying to get it into traditional ML conferences and related publications?