A possible example of failure to apply lessons from Less Wrong
One issue that has been discussed here before is whether Less Wrong is causing readers and participants to behave more rationally or is primarily a time-sink. I recently encountered an example that seemed worth pointing out to the community that suggested mixed results. The entry for Less Wrong on RationalkWiki says ” In the outside world, the ugly manifests itself as LessWrong acolytes, minds freshly blown, metastasising to other sites, bringing the Good News for Modern Rationalists, without clearing their local jargon cache.” RationalWiki has a variety of issues that I’m not going to discuss in detail here (such as a healthy of dose of motivated cognition pervading the entire project and having serious mind-killing problems) but this sentence should be a cause for concern. What they are essentially talking about is LWians not realizing (or not internalizing) that there’s a serious problem of inferential distance between people who are familiar with many of the ideas here and people who are not. Since inferential distance is an issue that has been discussed here a lot, this suggests that some people who have read a lot here are not applying the lessons even when they are consciously talking about material related to those lessons. Of course, there’s no easy way to tell how representative a sample this is, how common it is, and given RW’s inclination to list every possible thing they don’t like about something, no matter how small, this may not be a serious issue at all. But it did seem to be serious enough to point out here.
People’s Front of Judea Syndrome—when two neighboring groups regroup similar people and have similar goals, they’ll start hating each other’s guts, or at least say nasty things about each other.
Possible reasons:
Disgruntled members leaving one group are likely to join the other group, biasing the flow of information.
People feel the need to explain why there are two groups (joining being often politically delicate), and the cheapest explanation is “they’re a bunch of wankers”.
Each group will see the other as a competitor, so members will signal group loyalty by badmouthing the other group.
Others?
I only read/participate in lesswrong, and I still hate it. It feels ugly and neurotic in here.
Maybe it’s just that I see reflections of my own ugly neuroses.
I like RationalWiki and try to write reasonable stuff there. (Particularly pleased with this one, which I just got to a silver rating.) That said, it really rubs some people up the wrong way. It’s a skeptics’ wiki and snarky as hell. It’s made of flaws and the flaws are people.
The important things to remember are:
RationalWiki is a silly wiki of no import in the wider world. It doesn’t pretend otherwise. It’s mostly read by its writers.
The only reason anyone on LessWrong has noticed its existence is that it’s one of the extremely few places that anyone has bothered writing about LessWrong.
The LessWrong article on RW is doing the job EY pointed out it would, i.e. luring us over here.
Taking something seriously just because it pays you attention may not be a good idea.
Upvoted for “Taking something seriously just because it pays you attention may not be a good idea.”
Yes. Even if, as is the case, RW loves LW really.
(I’m somewhat disconcerted that this quickly dashed off comment is so popular, given the several comments I made yesterday that I thought were quite important and worked hard on. Goldman’s Law applies.)
It is possible LessWrong is feeling the effects of too little outside feedback. The HP:MOR readers are drifting in. Would a publicity push for LessWrong be appropriate, to get it better feedback and make the Wikipedia link not just a redirect to EY’s article? What approach would best refine the art of human rationality?
(Related exercise for Wikipedians reading: WIkipedia put pretty much no effort into publicity or popularity, stumbled along with little or no outside feedback and suddenly found itself ridiculously famous and, indeed, mainstream. Was developing for a few years with no feedback a good idea? Should LessWrong ignore outside discussion in the same manner? Are there approaches Wikipedia could have reasonably taken that would have arguably worked out better? I’ve been in the guts of Wikipedia since 2004 and I have no damn idea. Over to you.)
Weird how hastily dashed off comments and posts frequently end up making more sense to more people than ones you put a lot of thought into.
One explanation that leaps to mind for this would be inferential distance. More time spent composing it could mean you are following more inferential links, some of which are unfamiliar or have a weaker relationship in the mind of the audience. Quickly made posts would tend to have shorter chains of reasoning, hence seem immediately stronger.
That sounds a bit just-so. Looking back through my comments, the “important” ones seem to have ended up grammatically contorted by the quest for robust precision.
Answer: work out how to write better.
Sure, but points involving longer inferential chains would be harder to write as succinctly. It could be that the problem isn’t writing skill, just the thoughts aren’t as easy to write.
Did Wikipedia really have no outside feedback? After all, it had a regular influx of new editors … I don’t really see what other kind of “outside feedback” you would have wanted to happen—it’s not as if there was a lot of people with experience on how to make a wiki work (a lot of those that did—c2 and MeatballWiki people—were already aware of and involved with wikipedia).
(I’ve also been on Wikipedia since 2004 (though not really ‘in the guts’, though I was involved in a few disputes), and was on MeatballWiki before that)
As late as 2004, people were still working out how to write an encyclopedia from first principles. There was not sufficient popularity to provide feedback as to how Wikipedia was doing in terms of usefulness to ordinary people, and how, or even whether, this would be widely useful. People were still thinking in terms of using the website as raw material for a finished product, and that finished product would be the real point.
Around 2005 it hit the twenties in Alexa and my phone started ringing a lot …
Now? I see advertisements in Tube stations advertising something as “THE WIKIPEDIA OF …” I forget what it was. But this was a poster on the wall of a subway station advertising to the general populace. How did we get here?
And the key point is that Wikipedia didn’t have any particular outside feedback until it was already famous. Probably the first bit that really brought home that there was a real world out there was the Siegenthaler incident. Until then I think we really were flying more or less blind, while even internally the quality control was based on theoretical considerations of what an encyclopedia might look like, rather than anything the end readers were actually using it for or its effects in the world.
I’m not sure it’s actually useful to compare Wikipedia’s trajectory to LessWrong, I’m more wondering if there’s comparable ideas based on LessWrong having almost no outside feedback. RationalWiki really doesn’t count. We’re idiots (though eloquent ones) writing for our own amusement. But it will be interesting to see the effect of the Harry Potter fans coming in.
Has anyone compiled a timeline of LessWrong as yet?
But what should that outside feedback have looked like? People talking about what they used Wikipedia for? I’m sure there was plenty of that on blogs. A committee of experts coming over and giving advice?
I can’t really imagine what kind of “outside feedback” would have changed Wikipedia’s trajectory—I don’t see what would have increased the “group rationality” of Wikipedia editors that they didn’t already have. Academics involved? check. People thinking hard about how to organize that thing? check. New people coming in with a new perspective? check.
Now, Wikipedia’s history could have varied with some internal changes—say policies on handling disputes, on anonymous editors, a clearer vision of Wikipedia “not as a scratch pad but as the final product”, etc. - but none of those seem more likely to be introduced by “outside feedback”.
Yeah, the idea of what I might be asking for is somewhat inchoate. I think I’m still shocked at Wikipedia getting a lot of outside feedback at all—actually becoming famous, then going beyond that to an assumed part of life. What? How on earth?
To bring it back to on-topicality, where is LessWrong now? It’s gaining participants slowly. What’s the aim? “Refine the art of human rationality.” How would that scale if readership doubled tomorrow? What would happen if LW got famous? How could that occur? What function would the site have?
I think about Inferential Distance a lot, and I still find it very hard to work around and find myself frequently hurt by underestimating it. Part of what you’re talking about might just be that dealing with Inferential Distance is just Darn Hard.
I’m often forced to choose between spending a long, long time explaining the underpinnings of an argument, or explaining about inferential distance and referring my interlocutor to a Bostrom essay or LW article or (recently) Permutation City. As long as we’ve stayed on the “mutual learning” side of such discussions, not the adversarial side, my interlocutor is at least mildly interested in the background material.
The quoted section doesn’t seem to claim that oldbies are going to other sites, and forgetting what they’ve learnt here; but rather that newbies@ are leaving and using lesswrong terminology; possibly without even fully understanding it.
@ (who haven’t actually internalised many of the concepts yet)
Before I started reading and participating in LessWrong myself, I got the idea from some of its apparent fans that it was way weirder than it actually turned out to be.
(It still has its weirdy bits, but they feel more like local colour now.)
Those links are awesome. The outside perspective is interesting and the pages within LW that they link to as “what the place is like” are also interesting.
A while back there was a discussion thread about what the “target audience” size for the Less Wrong sequences was. Specifically, how many people on the planet should one realistically expect to be familiar with the mindset here after fully productive PR saturation had occurred, given that lots of people are missing at least the time, inclination, ability, or interest to give us more than 20 seconds work of eyeball, if that.
I commented there (perhaps using too many references to an analogous model in physics) that the people who are likely candidates for LW’s content are not likely to exist as independent atoms but in social networks where they’re already connected to each other to some degree.
If you drew the social network with different colored nodes for people who were “not our audience”, “ready”, and “aware” then strict criteria imply that the ready and aware people probably form “islands of rationality in a sea of disinterest”.
We should expect that some islands of people who are potentially interested in LW have already formed themselves into social clusters and built their own jargon and set of habits and such. In this case they may have less need for LW in the first place…
And yet...
I’m pretty sure that Aumann’s theorem (to the effect that individual rationalists should generally not agree to disagree because they can take each other’s beleifs as evidence) could be applied to groups as well, just by redrawing the boundaries of one’s “agents” in the appropriate way. So I’m curious what it would look like for two rationalist groups to try update on the evidence that each has independently accumulated, until they are in agreement.
When I wrote the earlier comment, I didn’t even know that the rationalwiki existed, but now that I know about them, and know that they know about LW (to the degree of having an article about LW at least) I’m wondering what it would like if LW consciously tried to Aumann update as a group on the surprising content that they have accumulated. Also, what would be the reaction from the editors of their wiki?