Good idea, but… I would guess that basically everyone who knew me growing up would say that I’m exactly the right sort of person for that strategy. And yet, in practice, I still find it has not worked very well. My attention has in fact been unhelpfully steered by local memetic currents to a very large degree.
For instance, I do love proving everyone else wrong, but alas reversed stupidity is not intelligence. People mostly don’t argue against the high-counterfactuality important things, they ignore the high-counterfactuality important things. Trying to prove them wrong about the things they do argue about is just another way of having one’s attention steered by the prevailing memetic currents.
People mostly don’t argue against the high-counterfactuality important things, they ignore the high-counterfactuality important things. Trying to prove them wrong about the things they do argue about is just another way of having one’s attention steered by the prevailing memetic currents.
This is true, but I still can’t let go of the fact that this fact itself ought to be a blindingly obvious first-order bit that anyone who calls zerself anything like “aspiring rationalist” would be paying a good chunk of attention to, and yet this does not seem to be the case. Like, motions in the genre of
huh I just had reaction XYZ to idea ABC generated by a naively-good search process, and it seems like this is probably a common reaction to ABC; but if people tend to react to ABC with XYZ, and with other things coming from the generators of XYZ, then such and such distortion in beliefs/plans would be strongly pushed into the collective consciousness, e.g. on first-order or on higher-order deference effects ; so I should look out for that, e.g. by doing some manual fermi estimates or other direct checking about ABC or by investigating the strength of the steelman of reaction XYZ, or by keeping an eye out for people systematically reacting with XYZ without good foundation so I can notice this,
where XYZ could centrally be things like e.g. copium or subtly contemptuous indifference, do not seem to be at all common motions.
So I should look out for that, e.g. by doing some manual fermi estimates or other direct checking about ABC or by investigating the strength of the steelman of reaction XYZ, or by keeping an eye out for people systematically reacting with XYZ without good foundation so I can notice this,
Accusing people in my head of not being numerate enough when this happens has helped, because then I don’t want to be a hypocrite. GPT4o or o1 are good at fermi estimates, making this even easier.
Good idea, but… I would guess that basically everyone who knew me growing up would say that I’m exactly the right sort of person for that strategy. And yet, in practice, I still find it has not worked very well. My attention has in fact been unhelpfully steered by local memetic currents to a very large degree.
For instance, I do love proving everyone else wrong, but alas reversed stupidity is not intelligence. People mostly don’t argue against the high-counterfactuality important things, they ignore the high-counterfactuality important things. Trying to prove them wrong about the things they do argue about is just another way of having one’s attention steered by the prevailing memetic currents.
This is true, but I still can’t let go of the fact that this fact itself ought to be a blindingly obvious first-order bit that anyone who calls zerself anything like “aspiring rationalist” would be paying a good chunk of attention to, and yet this does not seem to be the case. Like, motions in the genre of
where XYZ could centrally be things like e.g. copium or subtly contemptuous indifference, do not seem to be at all common motions.
Accusing people in my head of not being numerate enough when this happens has helped, because then I don’t want to be a hypocrite. GPT4o or o1 are good at fermi estimates, making this even easier.