I’ve heard this sort of statement repeatedly about pjeby’s writing style, from different people, and I have a theory as to why. It’s a timing pattern, which I will illustrate with some lorem ipsum:
Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit. Donec pharetra varius nisl, quis interdum lectus porta vel...
Main point!
Nullam sit amet risus nibh. Suspendisse ut sapien et tellus semper scelerisque.
The main points are set off from the flow of the text by ellipses and paragraph breaks. This gives them much more force, but also brings to mind other works that use the same timing pattern. Most essays don’t do this, or do it exactly once when introducing the thesis. On the other hand, television commercials and sales pitches use it routinely. It is possible that some people have built up an aversion to this particular timing pattern, by watching commercials and not wanting to be influenced by them. If that’s the problem, then when those people read it they’ll feel bothered by the text, but probably won’t know why, and will attribute it to whatever minor flaws they happen to notice, even if unrelated. People who only watch DVDs and internet downloads, like me, won’t be bothered, nor will people who developed different mechanisms for resisting commercials. This is similar to the “banner blindness” issue identified in website usability testing with eye trackers, where people refuse to look at anything that looks even remotely like a banner ad, even if it’s not a banner ad but the very thing they’re supposed to be looking for.
If this is true, then fixing the style issue is simply a matter of removing some of the italics, ellipses and paragraph breaks in editing. It should be possible to find out whether this is the problem by giving A/B tests to people who dislike your writing.
This is a fascinating suggestion and might well be correct. Certainly, my inability to read more than a paragraph of PJ Eby’s writing definitely has something to do with it “sounding like a sales pitch”. May be a matter of word choice or even (gulp) content too, though.
I suppose for me it’s the sort of breathless enthusiastic presentation of the latest brainstorm as The Answer. Also I believe I am biased against ideas that proceed from an assumption that our minds are simple.
Still, in a rationalist forum, if one is to not be bothered by dismissing the content of material based on the form of its presentation, one must be pretty confident of the correlation. Since a few people who seem pretty smart overall think there might be something useful here, I’ll spend some time exploring it.
I am wondering about the proposed ease with which we can purposefully rewire control circuits. It is counterintuitive to me, given that “bad” ones (in me at least) do not appear to have popped up one afternoon but rather have been reinforced slowly over time.
If anybody does manage to achieve lasting results that seem like purposeful rewiring, I’m sure we’d all like to hear descriptions of your methods and experience.
I am wondering about the proposed ease with which we can purposefully rewire control circuits. It is counterintuitive to me, given that “bad” ones (in me at least) do not appear to have popped up one afternoon but rather have been reinforced slowly over time.
This is one place where PCT is not as enlightening without adding a smidge of HTM, or more precisely, the memory-prediction framework.
The MPF says that we match patterns as sequences of subpattern: if one subpattern “A” is often followed by “B”″, our brain compresses this by creating (at a higher layer) a symbol that means “AB”. However, in order for this to happen, the A->B correlation has to happen at a timescale where we can “notice” it. If “A” happens today, and “B” tomorrow (for example), we are much less likely to notice!
Coming back to your question: most of our problematic controller structures are problematic at too long of a timescale for it to be easily detected (and extinguished). So PCT-based approaches to problem solving work by forcing the pieces together in short-term memory so that an A->B sequence fires off … at which point you then experience an “aha”, and change the intercontroller connections or reference levels. (Part of PCT theory is that the function of conscious awareness may well be to provide this sort of “debugging support” function, that would otherwise not exist.)
PCT also has some interesting things to say about reinforcement, by the way, that completely turn the standard ideas upside down, and I would really love to see some experiments done to confirm or deny. In particular, it has a novel and compact explanation of why variable-schedule reinforcement works better for certain things, and why certain schedules produce variable or “superstitious” action patterns.
As SA says, I did not write the article for the LW audience. However, D-P=E is a straightforward colloquial reframing of PCT’s “r-p=e” formula, i.e. reference signal minus perception signal equals error, which then gets multiplied by something and fed off to an effector.
Obviously, it was written with a very different demographic in mind than LW. I imagine many of the people that article was written for would find the material here to be unfriendly, cryptic, and opaque.
This is probably a rational approach to marketing on P. J. Eby’s part, but it does make it hard for some people here to read his other work.
I found the article painful reading. Things like the section entitled “Desire minus Perception equals Energy” very rapidly make me switch off.
I’ve heard this sort of statement repeatedly about pjeby’s writing style, from different people, and I have a theory as to why. It’s a timing pattern, which I will illustrate with some lorem ipsum:
The main points are set off from the flow of the text by ellipses and paragraph breaks. This gives them much more force, but also brings to mind other works that use the same timing pattern. Most essays don’t do this, or do it exactly once when introducing the thesis. On the other hand, television commercials and sales pitches use it routinely. It is possible that some people have built up an aversion to this particular timing pattern, by watching commercials and not wanting to be influenced by them. If that’s the problem, then when those people read it they’ll feel bothered by the text, but probably won’t know why, and will attribute it to whatever minor flaws they happen to notice, even if unrelated. People who only watch DVDs and internet downloads, like me, won’t be bothered, nor will people who developed different mechanisms for resisting commercials. This is similar to the “banner blindness” issue identified in website usability testing with eye trackers, where people refuse to look at anything that looks even remotely like a banner ad, even if it’s not a banner ad but the very thing they’re supposed to be looking for.
If this is true, then fixing the style issue is simply a matter of removing some of the italics, ellipses and paragraph breaks in editing. It should be possible to find out whether this is the problem by giving A/B tests to people who dislike your writing.
This is a fascinating suggestion and might well be correct. Certainly, my inability to read more than a paragraph of PJ Eby’s writing definitely has something to do with it “sounding like a sales pitch”. May be a matter of word choice or even (gulp) content too, though.
I suppose for me it’s the sort of breathless enthusiastic presentation of the latest brainstorm as The Answer. Also I believe I am biased against ideas that proceed from an assumption that our minds are simple.
Still, in a rationalist forum, if one is to not be bothered by dismissing the content of material based on the form of its presentation, one must be pretty confident of the correlation. Since a few people who seem pretty smart overall think there might be something useful here, I’ll spend some time exploring it.
I am wondering about the proposed ease with which we can purposefully rewire control circuits. It is counterintuitive to me, given that “bad” ones (in me at least) do not appear to have popped up one afternoon but rather have been reinforced slowly over time.
If anybody does manage to achieve lasting results that seem like purposeful rewiring, I’m sure we’d all like to hear descriptions of your methods and experience.
This is one place where PCT is not as enlightening without adding a smidge of HTM, or more precisely, the memory-prediction framework.
The MPF says that we match patterns as sequences of subpattern: if one subpattern “A” is often followed by “B”″, our brain compresses this by creating (at a higher layer) a symbol that means “AB”. However, in order for this to happen, the A->B correlation has to happen at a timescale where we can “notice” it. If “A” happens today, and “B” tomorrow (for example), we are much less likely to notice!
Coming back to your question: most of our problematic controller structures are problematic at too long of a timescale for it to be easily detected (and extinguished). So PCT-based approaches to problem solving work by forcing the pieces together in short-term memory so that an A->B sequence fires off … at which point you then experience an “aha”, and change the intercontroller connections or reference levels. (Part of PCT theory is that the function of conscious awareness may well be to provide this sort of “debugging support” function, that would otherwise not exist.)
PCT also has some interesting things to say about reinforcement, by the way, that completely turn the standard ideas upside down, and I would really love to see some experiments done to confirm or deny. In particular, it has a novel and compact explanation of why variable-schedule reinforcement works better for certain things, and why certain schedules produce variable or “superstitious” action patterns.
Thank you for the detailed reply, I think I’ll read the book and revisit your take on it afterward.
As SA says, I did not write the article for the LW audience. However, D-P=E is a straightforward colloquial reframing of PCT’s “r-p=e” formula, i.e. reference signal minus perception signal equals error, which then gets multiplied by something and fed off to an effector.
Obviously, it was written with a very different demographic in mind than LW. I imagine many of the people that article was written for would find the material here to be unfriendly, cryptic, and opaque.
This is probably a rational approach to marketing on P. J. Eby’s part, but it does make it hard for some people here to read his other work.