It’s a CFAR term inspired by the story in which Hamming went up to a bunch of people and asked them “what’s the most important problem in your field?” and then, after hearing their answers, “why aren’t you working on it?” It means, roughly, the most important problem in your life.
(There actually isn’t any standard explanation online one can link to, not even a bad one.)
(Maybe someone could write a sequence of the most useful ideas CFAR has come up with and then—if it’s well-written, by an actual CFAR tutor—I can curate it and thus encourage everyone to read it, and give users badges when they’ve read it and then you can see at a glance if another reader has the background knowledge. And then we won’t have to have conversations like this one ever again.)
I expect such a norm to basically prevent 80% of conversations in almost any organization or local community from being written down. I am strongly in favor of minimizing the costs to people writing stuff down.
(a) What does what you said have to do with this post? This doesn’t look like a conversation, it looks like… just, a blog post. I am confused about why you are bringing up conversations.
(b) What organization or community has anywhere close to 80% of its conversations being written down?! (Certainly not the rationalist community, or CFAR… I mean, that’s… that’s the whole problem here! That no one has written down what I assume have been conversations about this term “Hamming question”!)
(c) How does the practice of adding explanations of unusual terms when making public posts, prevent you (or anyone else) from writing things down…?
I believe Oli’s point is that a norm for giving full explanations for every non-standard term you wish to use is an added burden to the task of writing one’s thoughts down, and while you might think it is very important, it is going to reduce the total amount of conversations that get turned into insightful blog posts.
You correctly point out the problem of people not writing down their interesting conversations—but if you want to help that happen you want to reduce the barriers to people writing things, not increase them.
Response to a:
As I understand Oli’s comment, you’re correct that it’s not a direct response to this post. It’s a response to your proposed norm. Right now, most of the insights in our community from the past five years have not been written up, and this was salient to Oli as an important source of value, and the situation is such that if you want those ideas written up, you want to do everything you can to remove barriers to writing, and make it easier for people to write the ideas up.
But the argument also applies in the example of this blog post—having norms about extra work you have to do before posting is going to increase the cost of writing regardless of the source of the ideas, and thus is a disincentive to writing (while nonetheless increasing the immediate understandability of whatever writing still gets published).
Thank you, that clarifies things a lot. So, when you (and Oliver) say “written down”, you meant “… and posted publicly”, I guess. So here’s my question:
Is the current situation, that most things of interest have been (literally) written down but not published (meaning, posted as posts on LW, etc.)? Or, have they physically not actually even been written down?
These seem like distinct situations. If the former, well, go ahead and publish them, and then we can all collectively work on adding explanations what need be added. If the latter, then the norm of “add explanations to unusual terms when making a public post” can hardly be at fault!
(As an aside: the proportion of CFAR-source and CFAR-adjacent ideas that have been publicly posted is so low (I think… I mean, I can’t be sure, obviously, but that’s the impression I get) that it’s hard to see how much of a difference adding or not adding explanations could make. It’s not like we’re starting from a place of many things being published, and worrying about reducing that to few…)
the norm of “add explanations to unusual terms when making a public post” can hardly be at fault!
That norm is probably not a major reason why they don’t get written, but I would guess a contributing factor. And since right now very things get written down, the marginal value of increasing that is particularly high.
I think you are missing my point, maybe because my wording was a little bit convoluted. I am saying:
The norm of “add explanations when publishing” cannot possibly affect whether conversations get written down in the first place (regardless of whether or not they then get published).
(As for the marginal value of increasing how many things get published, yes, perhaps it is high, but we are not talking about that, right? We’re talking about not decreasing it, which is not quite the same thing. After all—as evidenced by the OP—the said norm clearly does not exist, as things stand…)
The norm of “add explanations when publishing” cannot possibly affect whether conversations get written down in the first place (regardless of whether or not they then get published).
That seems wrong to me. A lot of the payoff of writing things down comes from publishing the things I’ve written and getting recognition for that. So increasing the cost of publishing reduces the likelihood of me writing things down in the first place, since it reduces the total cost/benefit ratio of writing things down (whose positive term in large parts consists of the benefits of publishing them).
The problem I have with your model is that it doesn’t seem to predict reality. Consider:
Eliezer wrote the Sequences, despite explaining everything (usually multiple times, and at length), linking everything to everything, and generally taking tremendous effort.
People of the Less Wrong (and adjacent) community today (CFAR included, but certainly not exclusively) are (apparently? [1]) for the most part neither writing anything down nor publishing it (despite the norm of “explain and/or link things” clearly not being nearly strong enough to result in “Yudkowskian levels of hyperlinking” or anything close to it).
I am all for more things being written down and then published! So your general point—that barriers to writing/publishing ought to be minimized—is one which I wholeheartedly endorse. But I question whether it makes sense to object to this particular barrier, because it seems to already be absent, and yet the thing we are worried about not stifling—dissemination of the community’s current ideas and so on—is mostly not there to be stifled in the first place. Clearly, some larger problem obtains, and it’s only in the context of a discussion of that larger problem that we can discuss norms about explaining and/or linking. (One might call it an isolated demand for rigor.)
[1] I say “apparently” because, obviously, I have no real way of knowing how much (ideas, concepts, techniques, whatever) there is to be written down and published; though I do get the vague sense, from things said here and there, that there’s quite a bit of it.
Yep, I think we agree on the broader picture then. I actually think this specific requirement has a pretty decent effect size, and so exploring that specific disagreement about effect size and impact in the larger context seems like a good next thing to do, though probably in meta and not here.
It’s a CFAR term inspired by the story in which Hamming went up to a bunch of people and asked them “what’s the most important problem in your field?” and then, after hearing their answers, “why aren’t you working on it?” It means, roughly, the most important problem in your life.
Thanks.
(It is probably best to link to a definition of terms like this, when using them.)
(There actually isn’t any standard explanation online one can link to, not even a bad one.)
(Maybe someone could write a sequence of the most useful ideas CFAR has come up with and then—if it’s well-written, by an actual CFAR tutor—I can curate it and thus encourage everyone to read it, and give users badges when they’ve read it and then you can see at a glance if another reader has the background knowledge. And then we won’t have to have conversations like this one ever again.)
(But whatever. I’m sure we’ll get to it.)
Ah. Well, in that case, it’s probably best to explain the term when using it (until such time as a linkable explanation is written)…
I expect such a norm to basically prevent 80% of conversations in almost any organization or local community from being written down. I am strongly in favor of minimizing the costs to people writing stuff down.
I… don’t understand this comment at all. :(
(a) What does what you said have to do with this post? This doesn’t look like a conversation, it looks like… just, a blog post. I am confused about why you are bringing up conversations.
(b) What organization or community has anywhere close to 80% of its conversations being written down?! (Certainly not the rationalist community, or CFAR… I mean, that’s… that’s the whole problem here! That no one has written down what I assume have been conversations about this term “Hamming question”!)
(c) How does the practice of adding explanations of unusual terms when making public posts, prevent you (or anyone else) from writing things down…?
I am very, very confused.
Response to c and b:
I believe Oli’s point is that a norm for giving full explanations for every non-standard term you wish to use is an added burden to the task of writing one’s thoughts down, and while you might think it is very important, it is going to reduce the total amount of conversations that get turned into insightful blog posts.
You correctly point out the problem of people not writing down their interesting conversations—but if you want to help that happen you want to reduce the barriers to people writing things, not increase them.
Response to a:
As I understand Oli’s comment, you’re correct that it’s not a direct response to this post. It’s a response to your proposed norm. Right now, most of the insights in our community from the past five years have not been written up, and this was salient to Oli as an important source of value, and the situation is such that if you want those ideas written up, you want to do everything you can to remove barriers to writing, and make it easier for people to write the ideas up.
But the argument also applies in the example of this blog post—having norms about extra work you have to do before posting is going to increase the cost of writing regardless of the source of the ideas, and thus is a disincentive to writing (while nonetheless increasing the immediate understandability of whatever writing still gets published).
Thank you, that clarifies things a lot. So, when you (and Oliver) say “written down”, you meant “… and posted publicly”, I guess. So here’s my question:
Is the current situation, that most things of interest have been (literally) written down but not published (meaning, posted as posts on LW, etc.)? Or, have they physically not actually even been written down?
These seem like distinct situations. If the former, well, go ahead and publish them, and then we can all collectively work on adding explanations what need be added. If the latter, then the norm of “add explanations to unusual terms when making a public post” can hardly be at fault!
(As an aside: the proportion of CFAR-source and CFAR-adjacent ideas that have been publicly posted is so low (I think… I mean, I can’t be sure, obviously, but that’s the impression I get) that it’s hard to see how much of a difference adding or not adding explanations could make. It’s not like we’re starting from a place of many things being published, and worrying about reducing that to few…)
That norm is probably not a major reason why they don’t get written, but I would guess a contributing factor. And since right now very things get written down, the marginal value of increasing that is particularly high.
But the value is dramatically reduced if most of the potential audience doesn’t understand what’s been written down due to unexplained jargon.
I think you are missing my point, maybe because my wording was a little bit convoluted. I am saying:
The norm of “add explanations when publishing” cannot possibly affect whether conversations get written down in the first place (regardless of whether or not they then get published).
(As for the marginal value of increasing how many things get published, yes, perhaps it is high, but we are not talking about that, right? We’re talking about not decreasing it, which is not quite the same thing. After all—as evidenced by the OP—the said norm clearly does not exist, as things stand…)
That seems wrong to me. A lot of the payoff of writing things down comes from publishing the things I’ve written and getting recognition for that. So increasing the cost of publishing reduces the likelihood of me writing things down in the first place, since it reduces the total cost/benefit ratio of writing things down (whose positive term in large parts consists of the benefits of publishing them).
True! This is certainly a good point.
The problem I have with your model is that it doesn’t seem to predict reality. Consider:
Eliezer wrote the Sequences, despite explaining everything (usually multiple times, and at length), linking everything to everything, and generally taking tremendous effort.
People of the Less Wrong (and adjacent) community today (CFAR included, but certainly not exclusively) are (apparently? [1]) for the most part neither writing anything down nor publishing it (despite the norm of “explain and/or link things” clearly not being nearly strong enough to result in “Yudkowskian levels of hyperlinking” or anything close to it).
I am all for more things being written down and then published! So your general point—that barriers to writing/publishing ought to be minimized—is one which I wholeheartedly endorse. But I question whether it makes sense to object to this particular barrier, because it seems to already be absent, and yet the thing we are worried about not stifling—dissemination of the community’s current ideas and so on—is mostly not there to be stifled in the first place. Clearly, some larger problem obtains, and it’s only in the context of a discussion of that larger problem that we can discuss norms about explaining and/or linking. (One might call it an isolated demand for rigor.)
[1] I say “apparently” because, obviously, I have no real way of knowing how much (ideas, concepts, techniques, whatever) there is to be written down and published; though I do get the vague sense, from things said here and there, that there’s quite a bit of it.
Yep, I think we agree on the broader picture then. I actually think this specific requirement has a pretty decent effect size, and so exploring that specific disagreement about effect size and impact in the larger context seems like a good next thing to do, though probably in meta and not here.
Yep, that’s an accurate summary. Sorry for being unclear.