No, it’s called “lying”. The text that he produces as a result of these social pressures does not reflect his actual thought processes. You can’t judge a belief on the basis of a bunch of ex post facto arguments people make up to rationalize it—the method by which they came to hold the belief is much more informative, and for those of us with very roundabout styles of thinking (such as myself) being forced into this self-censorship and modification of our thought patterns into something “coherent” and easy to read actually destroys all the evidence of how we actually came to the idea, and thus destroys much of your ability to effectively examine its validity!
Communicating how you came to an idea you think is good is a third thing.
All three are great, none of them are lying, and skipping the “communicating a good idea” one in hopes that you’ll get it for free when you communicate how you came to the idea is worse (but easier!) than also, separately, figuring out how to communicate the good idea.
(Here “communicate” refers to whatever gets the idea from your head into someone else’s, and, for instance, someone beginning to read a transcript of your roundabout thought patterns, bouncing off, and never having the idea cohere in their own heads counts as a failure to communicate.)
If you’ve got a written description of the thought process by which you came to the idea, keep that! But the thing that should be published should be the thing that is that plus supporting evidence like citations and logical reasoning describing how such a thing could have come to be the case. Simply don’t destroy the evidence, and what you’ve got is pure improvement. If the non-rational hunch and analogy part seems hard to fit in to the cited polished product, then keep them as separate docs with links to each other.
Disagree. It’s valuable to flag the causal process generating an idea, but it’s also valuable to provide legible argumentation, because most people can’t describe the factors which led them to their beliefs in sufficient detail to actually be compelling. Indeed, this is specifically why science works so well: people stopped arguing about intuitions, and started arguing about evidence. And the lack of this is why LW is so bad at arguing about AI risk: people are uninterested in generating legible evidence, and instead focus on presenting intuitions that are typically too fuzzy to examine or evaluate.
It’s valuable to flag the causal process generating an idea, but it’s also valuable to provide legible argumentation, because most people can’t describe the factors which led them to their beliefs in sufficient detail to actually be compelling.
To add to that, trying to provide legible argumentation can also be good because it can convince you that your idea actually doesn’t make sense, or doesn’t make sense as stated, if that is indeed the case.
This sounds like a really good thing, not a bad thing. I’m proud of a community which exerts social pressure for people to do this. Good job us!
No, it’s called “lying”. The text that he produces as a result of these social pressures does not reflect his actual thought processes. You can’t judge a belief on the basis of a bunch of ex post facto arguments people make up to rationalize it—the method by which they came to hold the belief is much more informative, and for those of us with very roundabout styles of thinking (such as myself) being forced into this self-censorship and modification of our thought patterns into something “coherent” and easy to read actually destroys all the evidence of how we actually came to the idea, and thus destroys much of your ability to effectively examine its validity!
Thinking and coming to good ideas is one thing.
Communicating a good idea is another thing.
Communicating how you came to an idea you think is good is a third thing.
All three are great, none of them are lying, and skipping the “communicating a good idea” one in hopes that you’ll get it for free when you communicate how you came to the idea is worse (but easier!) than also, separately, figuring out how to communicate the good idea.
(Here “communicate” refers to whatever gets the idea from your head into someone else’s, and, for instance, someone beginning to read a transcript of your roundabout thought patterns, bouncing off, and never having the idea cohere in their own heads counts as a failure to communicate.)
If you’ve got a written description of the thought process by which you came to the idea, keep that! But the thing that should be published should be the thing that is that plus supporting evidence like citations and logical reasoning describing how such a thing could have come to be the case. Simply don’t destroy the evidence, and what you’ve got is pure improvement. If the non-rational hunch and analogy part seems hard to fit in to the cited polished product, then keep them as separate docs with links to each other.
Disagree. It’s valuable to flag the causal process generating an idea, but it’s also valuable to provide legible argumentation, because most people can’t describe the factors which led them to their beliefs in sufficient detail to actually be compelling. Indeed, this is specifically why science works so well: people stopped arguing about intuitions, and started arguing about evidence. And the lack of this is why LW is so bad at arguing about AI risk: people are uninterested in generating legible evidence, and instead focus on presenting intuitions that are typically too fuzzy to examine or evaluate.
To add to that, trying to provide legible argumentation can also be good because it can convince you that your idea actually doesn’t make sense, or doesn’t make sense as stated, if that is indeed the case.