I don’t think that if any other organization were posting classified ads here that it would be tolerated.
However ugly it sounds, you’ve been using Less Wrong as a soap box. Regardless of our statement of purpose, you have made it, in part, about you and SIAI.
So I for one think that the OP’s post isn’t particularly out of place.
Edit: For the record I like most of your fiction. I just don’t think it belongs here anymore.
To be honest, maybe they didn’t. Those crude analogies interspersed between the chapters—some as long as a chapter itself! - were too often unnecessary. The book was long enough without them… but with them? Most could have been summed up in a paragraph.
If you need magical stories about turtles and crabs drinking hot tea before a rabbit shows up with a device which allows him to enter paintings to understand recursion, then you’re never going to get it.
On the other hand, if the author’s introduction of stories in that manner is necessary to explain his subject or thesis, then something is either wrong with the subject or with his expose of it.
I know GEB is like the Book around Less Wrong, but what I’m saying here isn’t heresy. Admittedly, Hofstadter had to write I Am a Strange Loop because people couldn’t understand GEB.
It’s a question of aesthetics. Of course math doesn’t have to be presented this way, but a lot of people like the presentation.
You should make explicit what you are arguing. It seems to me that the cause of your argument is simply “I don’t like the presentation”, but you are trying to argue (rationalize) it as a universal. There is a proper generalization somewhere in between, like “it’s not an efficient way to [something specific]”.
Admittedly, Hofstadter had to write I Am a Strange Loop because people couldn’t understand GEB.
Wait, what? I Am a Strange Loop was written about 30 years later. Hofstadter wrote four other books on mind and pattern in the meantime, so this doesn’t make any sense.
What led you to write the book? (I Am a Strange Loop)
. . . two philosophers [Ken Williford and Uriah Kriegel] asked me if I would write about my thoughts about what an “I” is. They said that they had appreciated what I had said of these ideas in Gödel, Escher, Bach many years ago, but that they knew that I felt that my message had not really been absorbed—that Gödel, Escher, Bach had become popular but that the driving force behind the book had not really been perceived by most readers, let alone absorbed by a large number of people, and I was frustrated with this. I felt I had reached people, but not exactly as I had hoped. I had greater success with the book than I’d ever expected, but I didn’t have the exact type of success that I wanted. . .
I thought, “This is a good opportunity to at least address the world of philosophers of mind. It’s a narrow world, but if I can say it well, at least they’ll know what I intended to do in my book GEB almost 30 years ago.”
I don’t think that if any other organization were posting classified ads here that it would be tolerated.
Actually, that’s not true, classified ads for both SIAI and the Future of Humanity Institute have been posted. The sponsors of Overcoming Bias and Less Wrong have posted such announcements, and others haven’t, which is an intelligible and not particularly ugly principle.
I’m having some slight difficulty putting perceptions into words—just as I can’t describe in full detail everything I do to craft my fictions—but I can certainly tell the difference between that and this.
Since I haven’t spent a lot of time here talking about ideas along the lines of Pirsig’s Quality, there are readers who will think this is a copout. And if I wanted to be manipulative, I would go ahead and offer up a decoy reason they can verbally acknowledge in order to justify their intuitive perceptions of difference—something along the lines of “Demanding that a specific person justify specific decisions in a top-level post doesn’t encourage the spreading threads of casual conversation about rationality” or “In the end, every OBLW post was about rationality even if it didn’t look that way at the time, just as much as the Quantum Physics Sequence amazingly ended up being about rationality after all.” Heck, if I was a less practiced rationalist, I would be inventing verbal excuses like that to justify my intuitive perceptions to myself. As it is, though, I’ll just say that I can see the difference perceptually, and leave it at that—after adding some unnecessary ornaments to prevent this reply from being voted down by people who are still too focused on the verbal.
You could have just not replied at all. It would have saved me the time spent trying to write up a response to a reply which is nearly devoid of any content.
Incidentally, I don’t have “intuitive” perceptions of difference here. It’s pretty clear to me, and I can explain why. Though in my estimation, you don’t care.
Incidentally, I don’t have “intuitive” perceptions of difference here. It’s pretty clear to me, and I can explain why. Though in my estimation, you don’t care.
When I read Eliezer’s fiction the concepts from dozens of lesswrong posts float to the surface of my mind, are processed and the implications become more intuitively grasped. Your brain may be wired somewhat differently but for me fiction is useful.
PPS: Probing my intuitions further, I suspect that if the above post had been questioning e.g. komponisto’s rationality in the same tone and manner, I would have had around the same reaction of offtopicness for around the same reason.
Then from whence came the Q&A with Eliezer Yudkowsky, your fiction submissions (which I think lately have become of questionable value to LW), and other such posts which properly belong on either your personal blog or the SIAI blog?
I don’t think that if any other organization were posting classified ads here that it would be tolerated.
However ugly it sounds, you’ve been using Less Wrong as a soap box. Regardless of our statement of purpose, you have made it, in part, about you and SIAI.
So I for one think that the OP’s post isn’t particularly out of place.
Edit: For the record I like most of your fiction. I just don’t think it belongs here anymore.
That’s like saying the Dialogues don’t belong in Godel, Escher, Bach.
To be honest, maybe they didn’t. Those crude analogies interspersed between the chapters—some as long as a chapter itself! - were too often unnecessary. The book was long enough without them… but with them? Most could have been summed up in a paragraph.
If you need magical stories about turtles and crabs drinking hot tea before a rabbit shows up with a device which allows him to enter paintings to understand recursion, then you’re never going to get it.
On the other hand, if the author’s introduction of stories in that manner is necessary to explain his subject or thesis, then something is either wrong with the subject or with his expose of it.
I know GEB is like the Book around Less Wrong, but what I’m saying here isn’t heresy. Admittedly, Hofstadter had to write I Am a Strange Loop because people couldn’t understand GEB.
It’s a question of aesthetics. Of course math doesn’t have to be presented this way, but a lot of people like the presentation.
You should make explicit what you are arguing. It seems to me that the cause of your argument is simply “I don’t like the presentation”, but you are trying to argue (rationalize) it as a universal. There is a proper generalization somewhere in between, like “it’s not an efficient way to [something specific]”.
Wait, what? I Am a Strange Loop was written about 30 years later. Hofstadter wrote four other books on mind and pattern in the meantime, so this doesn’t make any sense.
An interview with Douglas R. Hofstadter
Actually, that’s not true, classified ads for both SIAI and the Future of Humanity Institute have been posted. The sponsors of Overcoming Bias and Less Wrong have posted such announcements, and others haven’t, which is an intelligible and not particularly ugly principle.
You’re right. It is the sponsor’s prerogative.
I’m having some slight difficulty putting perceptions into words—just as I can’t describe in full detail everything I do to craft my fictions—but I can certainly tell the difference between that and this.
Since I haven’t spent a lot of time here talking about ideas along the lines of Pirsig’s Quality, there are readers who will think this is a copout. And if I wanted to be manipulative, I would go ahead and offer up a decoy reason they can verbally acknowledge in order to justify their intuitive perceptions of difference—something along the lines of “Demanding that a specific person justify specific decisions in a top-level post doesn’t encourage the spreading threads of casual conversation about rationality” or “In the end, every OBLW post was about rationality even if it didn’t look that way at the time, just as much as the Quantum Physics Sequence amazingly ended up being about rationality after all.” Heck, if I was a less practiced rationalist, I would be inventing verbal excuses like that to justify my intuitive perceptions to myself. As it is, though, I’ll just say that I can see the difference perceptually, and leave it at that—after adding some unnecessary ornaments to prevent this reply from being voted down by people who are still too focused on the verbal.
PS: We post classified ads for FHI, too.
You could have just not replied at all. It would have saved me the time spent trying to write up a response to a reply which is nearly devoid of any content.
Incidentally, I don’t have “intuitive” perceptions of difference here. It’s pretty clear to me, and I can explain why. Though in my estimation, you don’t care.
When I read Eliezer’s fiction the concepts from dozens of lesswrong posts float to the surface of my mind, are processed and the implications become more intuitively grasped. Your brain may be wired somewhat differently but for me fiction is useful.
PPS: Probing my intuitions further, I suspect that if the above post had been questioning e.g. komponisto’s rationality in the same tone and manner, I would have had around the same reaction of offtopicness for around the same reason.