On a quick glance, the intuitive explanation article seems several times longer than people who would want to get a quick idea about what all the Bayes stuff is about would be prepared to read.
That’s another factor. But I just couldn’t get a feel for the numbers in the breast cancer example. This is noting that I found Bruce Schneier’s analogous numbers on why security theatre is actively damaging [couldn’t find the link, sorry] quite comprehensible.
(I certainly used to know maths. Did the Olympiad at high school. Always hated learning maths despite being able to, though, finally beaching about halfway through second-year engineering maths twenty years ago. I recently realised I’ve almost completely forgotten calculus. Obviously spent too long on word-oriented artistic pursuits. I suppose it’s back to the music industry for me.)
As someone who is definitely smart but has adopted a so far highly productive life strategy of associating with people who make me feel stupid by comparison, I am happy to be a test stupid person for these purposes.
I’m guessing this refers to books that start cults, not just books that will consume limitless amount of brainpower if you let them? In any case, quite interested in hearing more about this.
More a reference to how to cure a raging memetic cold. Cults count (I am/was an expert on Scientology ), Ayn Rand sure counts (this being the example that suggests a memetic cold is not curable from the outside and you have to let the disease run its course). What struck me was that quite innocuous works that I don’t get a cold from have clearly caused one in others.
“Memetic cold”: an inadequate piece of jargon I made up to describe the phenomenon of someone who gets a big idea that eats their life. As opposed to the situation where someone has a clear idea but is struggling to put it into words, I’m not even entirely sure I’m talking about an actual phenomenon. Hence the vagueness.
Possible alternate term: “sucker shoot” (Florence Littauer, who has much useful material but many of whose works should carry a “memetic hazard” warning sign). It’s full of apparent life and vitality, but sucks the energy out of the entire rest of your life. When you get an exciting new idea and you wake up a year later and you’ve been evicted and your boyfriend/girlfriend moved out and your friends look at you like you’re crazy because that’s the external appearance. Or you don’t wake up and you stay a crank. The catch then is when the idea is valid and it was all worth it. But that’s a compelling trope because it’s not the usual case.
I just looked over my notes and didn’t entirely understand them, which means I need to get to work if this is ever to make coherent sense and not just remain a couple of tantalising comments and an unreleased Google doc.
Another thing re. the Bayesian explanation. It’s probably quite a bad place to start reading LW content. It seems to really aim to get the reader to be able to do the math instead of just presenting the general idea. I find the newer sequence stuff a lot more approachable. Haven’t ever bothered to go through the Bayes article myself.
The memetic cold thing is interesting, in particular, like you said, because there isn’t a foolproof way of telling if the all-consuming weird preoccupation is fundamentally flawed, on the right track but most likely going to fail, or going to produce something genuinely useful. Recognizing mathematics in general as something other than a memetic cold before mathematics established itself as something useful might not have been entirely easy, and there’s still the tension between math obsession that gets you the Fields medal, math obsession that makes you write angry handwritten letters about your disproof of Cantor’s diagonalization argument for decades, and math obsession that makes you correlate numerological sums of the names of Fortune 500 CEOs with charts made from the pages of the Hebrew Bible to discover the identity of the Antichrist.
This also reminds me a bit of Robert Pirsig, both in the Motorcycle book and in Lila. Pirsig talks about the difficulty of discerning good stuff from bad stuff when the stuff goes outside a preset framework to evaluate it in, describes his personal sucker shoot episodes, and the books have probably started more than a few memetic colds themselves.
That’s an extreme failure mode of decompartmentalisation, of course. (Some lesser ones are on RationalWiki: Engineers and woo.) But when you see a new idea and you feel your eyes light up with the realisation that it’s compelling and brilliant, that’s precisely the time to put it in a sandbox.
Maybe. I’m not sure yet. It feels a bit like deliberate stupidity. On the other hand, we live in a world where the most virulent possible memes are used to sell toothpaste. Western civilisation has largely solved food and shelter for its residents, so using infectious waste as a token of social bonding appears to be what we do with the rest of our lives.
That’s another factor. But I just couldn’t get a feel for the numbers in the breast cancer example. This is noting that I found Bruce Schneier’s analogous numbers on why security theatre is actively damaging [couldn’t find the link, sorry] quite comprehensible.
(I certainly used to know maths. Did the Olympiad at high school. Always hated learning maths despite being able to, though, finally beaching about halfway through second-year engineering maths twenty years ago. I recently realised I’ve almost completely forgotten calculus. Obviously spent too long on word-oriented artistic pursuits. I suppose it’s back to the music industry for me.)
As someone who is definitely smart but has adopted a so far highly productive life strategy of associating with people who make me feel stupid by comparison, I am happy to be a test stupid person for these purposes.
More a reference to how to cure a raging memetic cold. Cults count (I am/was an expert on Scientology ), Ayn Rand sure counts (this being the example that suggests a memetic cold is not curable from the outside and you have to let the disease run its course). What struck me was that quite innocuous works that I don’t get a cold from have clearly caused one in others.
“Memetic cold”: an inadequate piece of jargon I made up to describe the phenomenon of someone who gets a big idea that eats their life. As opposed to the situation where someone has a clear idea but is struggling to put it into words, I’m not even entirely sure I’m talking about an actual phenomenon. Hence the vagueness.
Possible alternate term: “sucker shoot” (Florence Littauer, who has much useful material but many of whose works should carry a “memetic hazard” warning sign). It’s full of apparent life and vitality, but sucks the energy out of the entire rest of your life. When you get an exciting new idea and you wake up a year later and you’ve been evicted and your boyfriend/girlfriend moved out and your friends look at you like you’re crazy because that’s the external appearance. Or you don’t wake up and you stay a crank. The catch then is when the idea is valid and it was all worth it. But that’s a compelling trope because it’s not the usual case.
I just looked over my notes and didn’t entirely understand them, which means I need to get to work if this is ever to make coherent sense and not just remain a couple of tantalising comments and an unreleased Google doc.
Another thing re. the Bayesian explanation. It’s probably quite a bad place to start reading LW content. It seems to really aim to get the reader to be able to do the math instead of just presenting the general idea. I find the newer sequence stuff a lot more approachable. Haven’t ever bothered to go through the Bayes article myself.
The memetic cold thing is interesting, in particular, like you said, because there isn’t a foolproof way of telling if the all-consuming weird preoccupation is fundamentally flawed, on the right track but most likely going to fail, or going to produce something genuinely useful. Recognizing mathematics in general as something other than a memetic cold before mathematics established itself as something useful might not have been entirely easy, and there’s still the tension between math obsession that gets you the Fields medal, math obsession that makes you write angry handwritten letters about your disproof of Cantor’s diagonalization argument for decades, and math obsession that makes you correlate numerological sums of the names of Fortune 500 CEOs with charts made from the pages of the Hebrew Bible to discover the identity of the Antichrist.
This also reminds me a bit of Robert Pirsig, both in the Motorcycle book and in Lila. Pirsig talks about the difficulty of discerning good stuff from bad stuff when the stuff goes outside a preset framework to evaluate it in, describes his personal sucker shoot episodes, and the books have probably started more than a few memetic colds themselves.
You can get a bad memetic cold by deliberately compromising your memetic immune system: decompartmentalising too aggressively, getting a not quite so magical click and it all becomes terribly clear: the infidel must die!
That’s an extreme failure mode of decompartmentalisation, of course. (Some lesser ones are on RationalWiki: Engineers and woo.) But when you see a new idea and you feel your eyes light up with the realisation that it’s compelling and brilliant, that’s precisely the time to put it in a sandbox.
Maybe. I’m not sure yet. It feels a bit like deliberate stupidity. On the other hand, we live in a world where the most virulent possible memes are used to sell toothpaste. Western civilisation has largely solved food and shelter for its residents, so using infectious waste as a token of social bonding appears to be what we do with the rest of our lives.