Your experimental results might be indicative of something other than problems merely within LW...
I decided to test the hypothesis that LessWrongers practice weak scholarship in regards to jargon. In particular, that for many important terms the true source of knowledge has not been transmitted to community members. [bold added]
The problem here is that a better reference group than “LessWrongers” might be “scientists”?
Or perhaps the the group of “scholars” (understood as all the scientists, plus all the people “not doing real science” per whatever weird definition someone has for calling something “science”), or perhaps even the still larger category of “humans”?
There is a generalized problem with scholarship related cognition in the the widespread failure of humans to remember the source of the contents of their minds. Photographs of events you weren’t even alive for become vague visual memories. Hearsay becomes eyewitness report. Fishy stories from people you know you shouldn’t trust become stories you don’t remember the source of… and then become things you weakly believe… basically: in general, by default, human minds are terrible at retaining auditable fact profiles.
But suppose that we don’t expect that much of generic humans, and only hold scientists to high intellectual standards?
Still a no go!
As per Stigler’s Law Of Eponymy there are almost no laws which were actually named after their (carefully searched for) originators! The general pattern is similar to art: “Good scientists borrow, great scientists steal.”
In practice, the thing that will be remembered by large groups of people is good popularization, especially when a well received version keeps things simple and vivid and doesn’t even bother to mention the original source.
If LW can fix this, it will be doing something over and above what science itself has accomplished in terms of scholarly integrity. (Whether this will actually help with technological advances is perhaps a separate question?)
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For an example here, I know about “ugh fields” because I invented that term and know the details of its early linguistic history.
1. The coining in this case preceded the existence of the overcomingbias blog by a few years… it was coined in conversations in the 2001-2003 era in and around College of Creative Study (CCS) seminars at UC Santa Barbara (UCSB) between me and friends, some of whom later propagated the term into this community.
My use of the term was aimed at describing the subjective experience of catastrophic procrastination along with some causal speculation. It seemed that mild anxiety over a looming deadline could cause mild diversion into a nominally anxiety ameliorating behavior like video games… which made the deadline situation worse… and thereby turned into a positive feedback of “ugh”. These ugh fields would feel they have an external source whose apparent locus is “the deadline”, with the amount of ugh increasing exponentially as the deadline gets closer and closer.
(I failed a class or two back then more or less because of this dynamic until I restructured my soul into a somewhat more platonically moderate pattern using Allan Bloom’s translation of The Republic as my inspiration. Basically: consciously locally optimized hedonism has potentially unrecoverable failure modes and should be used with caution, if at all. Make lists! Perhaps amortize hedonism over times equal to or greater than your personal budgeting cycle? Or maybe better yet try to slowly junk hedonism in favor of duty and virtue? Anyway. This is a WIP for me still...)
2. Two of my friends from UCSB (Anna and Steve) were part of the conversations about me failing classes at UCSB and working out a causal model thereof, and in roughly 2008 brought the term to “Benton House” (which was the first “rationalist house” wherein lived participants in “the visiting fellows program” of the old version of MIRI which was then called “the Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence (SIAI)”).
3. The term then propagated through the chalk board culture of SIAI (and possibly into diaspora rationalist houses?) and eventually the concept turned into a LW post. The new site link for this post doesn’t work at the moment that I write this, but archive.org still remembers the 2010 article when I said of “ugh fields”:
It is a head trip to see a pet term for a quirk of behavior reflected back at me on the internet as an official name for a phenomenon.
4. And the term keeps rolling around. It basically has a life of its own now, accreting hypothetical mechanisms and stories and interpretations as it goes.
It would not surprise me if some academic (2 or 10 or 50 years from now) turns it into a law and the law gets named after them, in fulfillment of Stigler’s Law :-P
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The core thing I’m trying to communicate is that humans in general can only think sporadically, and with great effort, and misremember almost everything, and especially misremember sources/credit/trust issues. The world has too many details, and neurons are too expensive. External media is required.
Lesswrongers falling prey to attribution failures is to be expected by default, because Lesswrong is full of humans. The surprising thing would be generally high performance in this domain.
My working understanding is that many of the original english language enlightenment folks were mindful of the problem and worked to deal with it by mostly distrusting words and instead constantly returning to detailed empirical observations (or written accounts thereof), over and over, at every event where it was hoped that true knowledge of the world might be “verbally” transmitted.
Your experimental results might be indicative of something other than problems merely within LW...
The problem here is that a better reference group than “LessWrongers” might be “scientists”?
Or perhaps the the group of “scholars” (understood as all the scientists, plus all the people “not doing real science” per whatever weird definition someone has for calling something “science”), or perhaps even the still larger category of “humans”?
There is a generalized problem with scholarship related cognition in the the widespread failure of humans to remember the source of the contents of their minds. Photographs of events you weren’t even alive for become vague visual memories. Hearsay becomes eyewitness report. Fishy stories from people you know you shouldn’t trust become stories you don’t remember the source of… and then become things you weakly believe… basically: in general, by default, human minds are terrible at retaining auditable fact profiles.
But suppose that we don’t expect that much of generic humans, and only hold scientists to high intellectual standards?
Still a no go!
As per Stigler’s Law Of Eponymy there are almost no laws which were actually named after their (carefully searched for) originators! The general pattern is similar to art: “Good scientists borrow, great scientists steal.”
In practice, the thing that will be remembered by large groups of people is good popularization, especially when a well received version keeps things simple and vivid and doesn’t even bother to mention the original source.
If LW can fix this, it will be doing something over and above what science itself has accomplished in terms of scholarly integrity. (Whether this will actually help with technological advances is perhaps a separate question?)
----
For an example here, I know about “ugh fields” because I invented that term and know the details of its early linguistic history.
1. The coining in this case preceded the existence of the overcomingbias blog by a few years… it was coined in conversations in the 2001-2003 era in and around College of Creative Study (CCS) seminars at UC Santa Barbara (UCSB) between me and friends, some of whom later propagated the term into this community.
My use of the term was aimed at describing the subjective experience of catastrophic procrastination along with some causal speculation. It seemed that mild anxiety over a looming deadline could cause mild diversion into a nominally anxiety ameliorating behavior like video games… which made the deadline situation worse… and thereby turned into a positive feedback of “ugh”. These ugh fields would feel they have an external source whose apparent locus is “the deadline”, with the amount of ugh increasing exponentially as the deadline gets closer and closer.
(I failed a class or two back then more or less because of this dynamic until I restructured my soul into a somewhat more platonically moderate pattern using Allan Bloom’s translation of The Republic as my inspiration. Basically: consciously locally optimized hedonism has potentially unrecoverable failure modes and should be used with caution, if at all. Make lists! Perhaps amortize hedonism over times equal to or greater than your personal budgeting cycle? Or maybe better yet try to slowly junk hedonism in favor of duty and virtue? Anyway. This is a WIP for me still...)
2. Two of my friends from UCSB (Anna and Steve) were part of the conversations about me failing classes at UCSB and working out a causal model thereof, and in roughly 2008 brought the term to “Benton House” (which was the first “rationalist house” wherein lived participants in “the visiting fellows program” of the old version of MIRI which was then called “the Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence (SIAI)”).
3. The term then propagated through the chalk board culture of SIAI (and possibly into diaspora rationalist houses?) and eventually the concept turned into a LW post. The new site link for this post doesn’t work at the moment that I write this, but archive.org still remembers the 2010 article when I said of “ugh fields”:
4. And the term keeps rolling around. It basically has a life of its own now, accreting hypothetical mechanisms and stories and interpretations as it goes.
It would not surprise me if some academic (2 or 10 or 50 years from now) turns it into a law and the law gets named after them, in fulfillment of Stigler’s Law :-P
----
The core thing I’m trying to communicate is that humans in general can only think sporadically, and with great effort, and misremember almost everything, and especially misremember sources/credit/trust issues. The world has too many details, and neurons are too expensive. External media is required.
Lesswrongers falling prey to attribution failures is to be expected by default, because Lesswrong is full of humans. The surprising thing would be generally high performance in this domain.
My working understanding is that many of the original english language enlightenment folks were mindful of the problem and worked to deal with it by mostly distrusting words and instead constantly returning to detailed empirical observations (or written accounts thereof), over and over, at every event where it was hoped that true knowledge of the world might be “verbally” transmitted.