Zack’s series of posts in late 2020/early 2021 were really important to me. They were a sort of return to form for LessWrong, focusing on the valuable parts.
What are the parts of The Sequences which are still valuable? Mainly, the parts that build on top of Korzybski’s General Semantics and focus hard core on map-territory distinctions. This part is timeless and a large part of the value that you could get by (re)reading The Sequences today. Yudkowsky’s credulity about results from the social sciences and his mind projection fallacying his own mental quirks certainly hurt the work as a whole though, which is why I don’t recommend people read the majority of it.
The post is long though, but it kind of has to be. For reasons not directly related to the literal content of this essay, people seem to have collectively rejected the sort of map-territory thinking that we should bring from The Sequences into our own lives. This post has to be thorough because there are a number of common rejoinders that have to be addressed. This is why I think this post is better for inclusion than something like Communication Requires Common Interests or Differential Signal Costs, which is much shorter, but only addresses a subset of the problem.
Since the review instructions ask how this affected my thinking, well...
Zack writes generally, but he writes becausehe believes people are not correctly reasoning in a current politically contentious topic. But that topic is sort of irrelevant: the value comes in pointing out that high status members of the rationalist community are completely flubbing lawful thinking. That made it thinkable that actually, they might be failing in other contexts.
Would I have been receptive to Christiano’s point that MIRI doesn’t actually have a good prediction track record had Zack not written his sequence on this? That’s a hard counterfactual, especially since I had already lost a ton of respect for Yudkowsky by this point, in part because of the quality of thought in his other social media posting. But I think it’s probable enough and these series of posts certainly made the thought more available.
Zack’s series of posts in late 2020/early 2021 were really important to me. They were a sort of return to form for LessWrong, focusing on the valuable parts.
What are the parts of The Sequences which are still valuable? Mainly, the parts that build on top of Korzybski’s General Semantics and focus hard core on map-territory distinctions. This part is timeless and a large part of the value that you could get by (re)reading The Sequences today. Yudkowsky’s credulity about results from the social sciences and his mind projection fallacying his own mental quirks certainly hurt the work as a whole though, which is why I don’t recommend people read the majority of it.
The post is long though, but it kind of has to be. For reasons not directly related to the literal content of this essay, people seem to have collectively rejected the sort of map-territory thinking that we should bring from The Sequences into our own lives. This post has to be thorough because there are a number of common rejoinders that have to be addressed. This is why I think this post is better for inclusion than something like Communication Requires Common Interests or Differential Signal Costs, which is much shorter, but only addresses a subset of the problem.
Since the review instructions ask how this affected my thinking, well...
Zack writes generally, but he writes because he believes people are not correctly reasoning in a current politically contentious topic. But that topic is sort of irrelevant: the value comes in pointing out that high status members of the rationalist community are completely flubbing lawful thinking. That made it thinkable that actually, they might be failing in other contexts.
Would I have been receptive to Christiano’s point that MIRI doesn’t actually have a good prediction track record had Zack not written his sequence on this? That’s a hard counterfactual, especially since I had already lost a ton of respect for Yudkowsky by this point, in part because of the quality of thought in his other social media posting. But I think it’s probable enough and these series of posts certainly made the thought more available.