I liked the text, but I don’t like that liked it, as I started to suspect that rationality movement may fail into the trap discussed into the text.
That is, the main art of a rationalist is to write rationality blog posts, and all the system is optimised to write better, more beuatiful and more likable posts.
As a result, it is great writing school, but it was not intended to be a school of text writing. It is inadequate equlibria for the rationality community. Shorter and less beutiful texts with condensed TL;DR may help to cure the beauty.
I believe that equilibria has already arrived...and at no real surprise, since no preventive measures were ever put into place.
The reason this equilibria occurs is because there is a social norm that says “upvote if this post is both easy to understand and contains at least one new insight.” If a post contains lots of deep and valuable insights, this increases the likelihood that it is complex, dense, and hard to understand. Hard to understand posts often get mistaken for poor writing (or worse, will be put in a separate class and compared against academic writing) and will face higher scrutiny. Only rarely and with much effort will someone be able to successfully write things that are easy to understand and contain deep insights. (As an example, consider MIRI’s research papers, which are more likely to contain much more valuable progress towards a specific problem, but also recieve little attention, and are often compared against other academic works where they face an uphill battle to gain wider acceptance.)
The way around this, if you choose to optimize for social approval and prestige, is to write beautifully written posts that explain a relatively simple concept. Generally, it is much easier to be a brilliant writer than someone who uncovers truly original ideas. It’s much easier to use this strategy with our current reward system.
Therefore, what results is basically a lot of amazingly-written articles that very clearly explain a concept you probably could have learned somewhere else.
But we’re in for a real treat with this sequence, since it openly acknowledges that it’s hard to know if you’ve found a genuine insight. It’s going to get really meta...
(This is one of the primary reasons why a post being in featured is not decided by the number of upvotes or downvotes, but by moderator decision. We have a bunch of ability to push back against this incentive gradient.)
Counterargument, depending on what you view the goal of the rationality movement is: If we want to raise the sanity waterline and get the benefits from having a lot of people armed with new insights, we need to be able to explain those insights to people. Take literacy- there’s a real benefit to getting a majority of a population fluent in that technique, something distinct from what you get from having a few people able to read. Imagine if the three rationality techniques most important to you were so widespread that it would be genuinely surprising if a random adult on the street wasn’t capable with them. What would the last year have looked like if every adult knew that arguments are not soldiers, or that beliefs should pay rent? (My social media would be a much more pleasant place if everyone on it knew that nobody is perfect but everything is commensurable.)
We teach math by starting with counting, then addition, then subtraction, then multiplication, and so on until differential equations or multivariable calculus or wherever ones math education stops. One can argue that we teach math badly (and I would be pretty sympathetic to that argument) but I don’t think “too many easy to understand lessons that teach only one new insight” is the problem. I might go so far as to say we need multiple well written articles on the most important insights, written in a variety of styles to appeal to a wide variety of reader.
The analogy to focusing really hard on the basics (like math) to create a situation where your actual anticipations of the world is a really good framing that I hadn’t explicitly considered before. Thanks for pointing it out.
The analogy to focusing really hard on the basics (like math) to create a situation where your actual anticipations of the world is a really good framing that I hadn’t explicitly considered before.
Was there a word missing after “anticipations of the world”? I’m having trouble parsing as is.
This is an important failure mode to consider, to be sure, but why do you think we’ve fallen into it? And more relevantly, is this something you’re saying you’ve observed about LessWrong 2.0 in particular, or the rationalist movement in general?
As someone just really getting up to speed, I find myself both enjoying the very-long-posts, but FWIW, few of my friends would ever sit down to read them.
I expect this is a trite and repetitive comment in this community, though.
I liked the text, but I don’t like that liked it, as I started to suspect that rationality movement may fail into the trap discussed into the text.
That is, the main art of a rationalist is to write rationality blog posts, and all the system is optimised to write better, more beuatiful and more likable posts.
As a result, it is great writing school, but it was not intended to be a school of text writing. It is inadequate equlibria for the rationality community. Shorter and less beutiful texts with condensed TL;DR may help to cure the beauty.
I believe that equilibria has already arrived...and at no real surprise, since no preventive measures were ever put into place.
The reason this equilibria occurs is because there is a social norm that says “upvote if this post is both easy to understand and contains at least one new insight.” If a post contains lots of deep and valuable insights, this increases the likelihood that it is complex, dense, and hard to understand. Hard to understand posts often get mistaken for poor writing (or worse, will be put in a separate class and compared against academic writing) and will face higher scrutiny. Only rarely and with much effort will someone be able to successfully write things that are easy to understand and contain deep insights. (As an example, consider MIRI’s research papers, which are more likely to contain much more valuable progress towards a specific problem, but also recieve little attention, and are often compared against other academic works where they face an uphill battle to gain wider acceptance.)
The way around this, if you choose to optimize for social approval and prestige, is to write beautifully written posts that explain a relatively simple concept. Generally, it is much easier to be a brilliant writer than someone who uncovers truly original ideas. It’s much easier to use this strategy with our current reward system.
Therefore, what results is basically a lot of amazingly-written articles that very clearly explain a concept you probably could have learned somewhere else.
But we’re in for a real treat with this sequence, since it openly acknowledges that it’s hard to know if you’ve found a genuine insight. It’s going to get really meta...
(This is one of the primary reasons why a post being in featured is not decided by the number of upvotes or downvotes, but by moderator decision. We have a bunch of ability to push back against this incentive gradient.)
Counterargument, depending on what you view the goal of the rationality movement is: If we want to raise the sanity waterline and get the benefits from having a lot of people armed with new insights, we need to be able to explain those insights to people. Take literacy- there’s a real benefit to getting a majority of a population fluent in that technique, something distinct from what you get from having a few people able to read. Imagine if the three rationality techniques most important to you were so widespread that it would be genuinely surprising if a random adult on the street wasn’t capable with them. What would the last year have looked like if every adult knew that arguments are not soldiers, or that beliefs should pay rent? (My social media would be a much more pleasant place if everyone on it knew that nobody is perfect but everything is commensurable.)
We teach math by starting with counting, then addition, then subtraction, then multiplication, and so on until differential equations or multivariable calculus or wherever ones math education stops. One can argue that we teach math badly (and I would be pretty sympathetic to that argument) but I don’t think “too many easy to understand lessons that teach only one new insight” is the problem. I might go so far as to say we need multiple well written articles on the most important insights, written in a variety of styles to appeal to a wide variety of reader.
The analogy to focusing really hard on the basics (like math) to create a situation where your actual anticipations of the world is a really good framing that I hadn’t explicitly considered before. Thanks for pointing it out.
Was there a word missing after “anticipations of the world”? I’m having trouble parsing as is.
This is an important failure mode to consider, to be sure, but why do you think we’ve fallen into it? And more relevantly, is this something you’re saying you’ve observed about LessWrong 2.0 in particular, or the rationalist movement in general?
As someone just really getting up to speed, I find myself both enjoying the very-long-posts, but FWIW, few of my friends would ever sit down to read them.
I expect this is a trite and repetitive comment in this community, though.