Note that I’m using an upgraded version of the concept of “babble”, in which you acknowledge that your pruning/reinforcement learning gradually pushes all your skills down and makes them implicit in your babble network.
In this sense, sufficiently advanced babble contains structured arguments. So I stand behind my assesment of Rao’s internal process as being extremely and consciously babble-heavy (this is not related to what Rao says, just what I recognize as a certain way of handling your mind which I can replicate sufficiently to know the signs).
In fact, if I model how “not spoon feeding anyone” feels from the inside, it seems to use the very same mental motions that I call babble-heavy.
“Anyone” includes yourself, too. Why would you deny yourself the internal experience of babbling, while being gracious enough to not deny your audience the same pleasure? Does this even happen?
On a related note, when I see that someone’s writing is super clear and bright and pointed towards a conclusion I will quite happily predict that their inner experience of generating it is on the extreme other end of the scale.
Which is not a bad thing but means you place more burden on your better readers, and less on your worse readers.
Vao knows this better than anyone, and he does the correct thing and consistently optimizes for the very best kind of readers and I love him for it. This is obviously not pure altruism, because in the same motion he also optimizes his writing for himself so that he can think bigger and better and sneakier.
Could someone briefly summarise why so many people seem to like Venkatesh Rao? I tried reading a few of his essays but didn’t find much to write home about.
From the posts of his I’ve liked, I enjoy his style of allowing ideas to emerge through the haze with an abundance of metaphor and sideplots (i.e. Babble). Good writing needs to simultaneously carry important points and appease the Art God. See for example The Gervais Principle, Premium Mediocre.
I really like the idea that Prune gradually pushes your skills down and makes them implicit in your Babble. It feels something like if your Prune allows stuff through, your Babble goes back and retrains on that stuff and eventually you start just Babbling what you wanted, no filter necessary. It seems retroactively obvious that this is how the exact adversarial training works.
I also definitely see what you’re saying about Rao, my experience of reading him is roughly similar to my experience reading Moldbug in that I end up Pruning some small subset that feels extraordinarily insightful without having the energy to understand the main arc of the argument.
This seems sufficiently far from the initial usage in the discourse that a typology is in order that clearly distinguishes obviously different things. Alkjash’s initial post seemed like it was talking about pretty much the thing Hanson was talking about, which he was explicitly contrasting with an approach that attempts to learn deep generative structure.
Trying to test deep hypotheses efficiently seems like it’s totally outside the Babble/Prune paradigm, and that seems really important to understand and have an account of. Likewise map-territory distinctions.
I actually didn’t know about Hanson’s usage and my definition of Babble allows for pieces that contain entire cached arguments and that can generate deep content. I wanted it to be sufficiently general to contain most patterns of unfiltered thoughts that appear in my head.
Note that I’m using an upgraded version of the concept of “babble”, in which you acknowledge that your pruning/reinforcement learning gradually pushes all your skills down and makes them implicit in your babble network.
In this sense, sufficiently advanced babble contains structured arguments. So I stand behind my assesment of Rao’s internal process as being extremely and consciously babble-heavy (this is not related to what Rao says, just what I recognize as a certain way of handling your mind which I can replicate sufficiently to know the signs).
In fact, if I model how “not spoon feeding anyone” feels from the inside, it seems to use the very same mental motions that I call babble-heavy.
“Anyone” includes yourself, too. Why would you deny yourself the internal experience of babbling, while being gracious enough to not deny your audience the same pleasure? Does this even happen?
On a related note, when I see that someone’s writing is super clear and bright and pointed towards a conclusion I will quite happily predict that their inner experience of generating it is on the extreme other end of the scale.
Which is not a bad thing but means you place more burden on your better readers, and less on your worse readers.
Vao knows this better than anyone, and he does the correct thing and consistently optimizes for the very best kind of readers and I love him for it. This is obviously not pure altruism, because in the same motion he also optimizes his writing for himself so that he can think bigger and better and sneakier.
Could someone briefly summarise why so many people seem to like Venkatesh Rao? I tried reading a few of his essays but didn’t find much to write home about.
From the posts of his I’ve liked, I enjoy his style of allowing ideas to emerge through the haze with an abundance of metaphor and sideplots (i.e. Babble). Good writing needs to simultaneously carry important points and appease the Art God. See for example The Gervais Principle, Premium Mediocre.
I really like the idea that Prune gradually pushes your skills down and makes them implicit in your Babble. It feels something like if your Prune allows stuff through, your Babble goes back and retrains on that stuff and eventually you start just Babbling what you wanted, no filter necessary. It seems retroactively obvious that this is how the exact adversarial training works.
I also definitely see what you’re saying about Rao, my experience of reading him is roughly similar to my experience reading Moldbug in that I end up Pruning some small subset that feels extraordinarily insightful without having the energy to understand the main arc of the argument.
This seems sufficiently far from the initial usage in the discourse that a typology is in order that clearly distinguishes obviously different things. Alkjash’s initial post seemed like it was talking about pretty much the thing Hanson was talking about, which he was explicitly contrasting with an approach that attempts to learn deep generative structure.
Trying to test deep hypotheses efficiently seems like it’s totally outside the Babble/Prune paradigm, and that seems really important to understand and have an account of. Likewise map-territory distinctions.
I actually didn’t know about Hanson’s usage and my definition of Babble allows for pieces that contain entire cached arguments and that can generate deep content. I wanted it to be sufficiently general to contain most patterns of unfiltered thoughts that appear in my head.