(I will consider it as getting some evidence, so, thanks)
I mean, I just thought in the way of “yeah, not all of people on twitter will come to LW”, but I was on LW even though I wasn’t on twitter. And there are also Facebook, Reddit, SSC and other PBlogs, and people who prefer to meetup instead of using online, and people in other countries.
And also so much people read HPMoR. And I personally, if look back on my life story, don’t see any division moments where I was prone even a little to change my direction in which I was going after reading HPMoR, way could be different, but direction is the same.
May be, I was just wrong that I am not unusual. Like, I was probably the best pupil in my class, but that just gives sort of lower bound. What is after that? May be I should take IQ or SAT. But it’s long, hard and has side effects.
The most close thing that I’ve done was to take Vocabulary tests. And I actually found just one (1) site that wasn’t terrible. https://www.myvocab.info/ In difference with all the other, it uses adaptive testing, so it takes just like 20 questions and 2 minutes, and author says “Bayes” in description, which are, in the surface, good signs.
And I’ve got 99.9% for my age. (which is just knowing twice as many words as average, not so much). And I can’t remember specifically doing something that could optimise over vocab test.
I don’t know, may be almost everyone on LW will get 99.9% for their age or something? (Though, of course I took the test in my native Russian, and for English it’s different).
Unusual is not a binary, it is a “more or less” thing, but yes, you may be much more unusual in some regards than you expected.
Actually, looking at your bio, it may be a cultural taboo for you to admit that you are exceptional. I grew up in communist Czechoslovakia, and the thought “I may be different from most other people, in a good way” went completely against all my conditioning. That’s not what you are supposed to ever say, unless you want to get in deep trouble.
It’s not just about intelligence, although high intelligence may be a prerequisite. Most people, even the intelligent ones, simply don’t give a fuck about many things that we value at LW, such as having a correct model of the world as opposed to merely winning verbal battles., or preferring to know the truth even if it makes you sad as opposed to just enjoying happy thoughts no matter how unrelated to reality they are. Most people just don’t click with this, because… I guess they don’t see a reason why. Why do things, if they don’t make you happy? (Yeah, in theory, looking reality in its face could save your life or something, but in practice, it’s not like rationalists are famous in the outside world for actually winning at life, so maybe this all is just our version of wishful thinking.)
So, yeah, actual rationalists are very rare. I couldn’t find ten of them in my country. (And I am not familiar with the Bay Area community, but sometimes I suspect that many people are there simply for the vibes. Some people enjoy hanging out with rationalists, even if they don’t share the fundamentals. It’s just another social activity for them.)
Then there is also the fact that people are busy. Not everyone who has the potential to become a rationalist also has time to spend on LW website. Such people usually have a lot of work they could do instead.
I might hugely underestimate my own ability to contribute something significant
I think I written my bio in some biased way. But yeah, even in modern Russia it’s not a very popular frame that you are so unique and exceptional. And our teacher said us “not to run faster than a whole train”. And modesty is a virtue, but admitting how very excellent are is not at all.
And in part it were things like my parents were trying to make me less perfectionist about grades by saying that “grades doesn’t really matter”, then I continued be a perfectionist, but now just thought that grades are not at all a measure of intelligence.
Or that I was programming at 9y because it was interesting and then saying to myself that it’s not a reason to be proud by my interests, if they were interested they obviously could too.
Or that I’ve seen that prideful people in fiction were just doing some stupid short termed or evil things, like beating people because someone said something wrong, and next I concluded that whole emotion of pride is something awful.
And also it young me’s failure of putting myself into others shoes. Like, obviously most of kids were not invited to the stage at every end of year, but for me it was just something that happened from the beginning of the time.
And I was very distrusting to people who were saying things like “oh, you know, you are not like the other kids, you are smarter than your age” etc, of course they were just trying to flatter you.
A lot of such things. I actually ended up almost full blown Modest Epistemology by my own.
And that an interesting observation. I somehow missed THAT as a part of my rationalist leanings, but yeah, I can remember reading about Pollyanna (it was before HPMoR) and being outraged about her attitude “how glad I am about crutches as a gift, I don’t need them” because...
Doesn’t she see how bad everything around her is? She can’t see reality. Blind. Lobotomisedly happy not being able to internally react on environment. For me it felt like something worse than death.
And not surprisingly, I was also much more unhappier whole my life than the other people.
(That very resembles EY’s attitude. But now I don’t believe anymore than emotions are a part of world modeling, of what should reflects traits of reality, and an instrumental good for neural reinforcement by 1 and 2 derivatives of current situation, staying in right mental poses for some activity and others)
And I admit I have much more free time than the most of people. But I am not sure I understood, people with potential didn’t have enough time to read LW to become rationalists? Or rationalists don’t have time for LW? Isn’t posting your thoughts in net is usually a very cost benefit action where thousands of people can read post written once?
Edited: also, I’ve seen A LOT OF recommendations of HPMoR. And I probably overestimated how much people read it after it. Because I go and it literally after hearing about it the first time in literally the form of pair of fanfic comments “—Wow, this fic is excellent! - No, it’s average, excellent is HP and Methods of Rationality”
From inside, almost everything I can do is “easy”. Otherwise I wouldn’t be able to do it, right? The trick is noticing that many things that are “easy” for me are actually quite difficult for other people. And even there, who do you compare yourself to? If you are constantly surrounded by experts, the things that are considered “easy” by your entire bubble can still be a mystery for 99.9% of population.
people with potential didn’t have enough time to read LW to become rationalists? Or rationalists don’t have time for LW?
Both of that. There are probably some people out there, who would be a great fit for LW, but instead they are busy doing research or making money or changing the world somehow. Also, some people who have formerly spent a lot of time on LW are now doing something more efficient with their time.
Isn’t posting your thoughts in net is usually a very cost benefit action where thousands of people can read post written once?
Yeah, but 99.9% of those people won’t remember what you wrote the next day, so the actual impact can be very small. Also, instead on LW you could post on your own blog, or maybe write a book, those are also ways to approach many people. Some of those may be more efficient.
It’s good that we have the LW books for busy people; selection of the best articles instead of having read all of that.
And I admit I have much more free time than the most of people.
That is a great starting position (much better than having no free time—then it is very difficult to think about your life or try to improve it, if there is no time to do that). But if you use that free time to figure out what you want to do and actually start doing it, then… probably in a year, you will have less free time. Not necessarily in a bad way; you can be busy doing things that you totally love. But you won’t have so much time to read LW anymore.
This is a paradox of self-improvement groups (and LW kinda belongs to that category). If you actually keep improving, at some moment you will probably leave the group, because some other action will be more useful for you than staying at the group. That’s the entire point—the group is supposed to make you more efficient at the life outside the group. If it fails to achieve that, then the group is not really good at its stated goal.
(There was some errors, message hadn’t sent before now)
Becoming stronger feels like things became lighter. But a lot of things I trying to do are not “just easy”? Also I thought about it more like finding things which you found too hard and gave up. And I am not sure how to just pinpoint easy things, it’s like finding details of how you are moving.
(Though I probably should expect that for a lot of people it’s actually hard to from the first try read/remember even single time new long words like “cefoperazone” and “ceftazidime” and that wasn’t just a trope)
99.9%??? Are you serious? I thought I have a bad memory, but I don’t think I will forget more than 70% of what I read THE NEXT DAY. Like, I can remember which tweets and shortforms I’ve read in the last few days, just trying to remember what I read, not because I found myself in relevant situation.
And that is for random post which I didn’t considered important to me like “what to do with AI for a layman?”. I remember much better posts which I did considered important, like the one LW about effectively explaining things in the way of “it’s like airbnb, but for boats”.
I think about it in the way of “which time I can spare if I will find something really important”, it’s not like now I am going and saying “oh, again I have no idea what to do with my time”. It’s just that I am not compelled to work, don’t have kids etc.
I don’t think about it quite that way. Isn’t the sense in sharing ideas? You have have ideas, some are more important, and share them is easier than invent and different people find different ideas. So you have a benefit from sharing with each other. So if it was like that I’d expected more like 30K of people showing with great ideas on lesswrong once a week each.
(I will consider it as getting some evidence, so, thanks)
I mean, I just thought in the way of “yeah, not all of people on twitter will come to LW”, but I was on LW even though I wasn’t on twitter. And there are also Facebook, Reddit, SSC and other PBlogs, and people who prefer to meetup instead of using online, and people in other countries.
And also so much people read HPMoR. And I personally, if look back on my life story, don’t see any division moments where I was prone even a little to change my direction in which I was going after reading HPMoR, way could be different, but direction is the same.
May be, I was just wrong that I am not unusual. Like, I was probably the best pupil in my class, but that just gives sort of lower bound. What is after that? May be I should take IQ or SAT. But it’s long, hard and has side effects.
The most close thing that I’ve done was to take Vocabulary tests. And I actually found just one (1) site that wasn’t terrible. https://www.myvocab.info/ In difference with all the other, it uses adaptive testing, so it takes just like 20 questions and 2 minutes, and author says “Bayes” in description, which are, in the surface, good signs.
And I’ve got 99.9% for my age. (which is just knowing twice as many words as average, not so much). And I can’t remember specifically doing something that could optimise over vocab test.
I don’t know, may be almost everyone on LW will get 99.9% for their age or something? (Though, of course I took the test in my native Russian, and for English it’s different).
Unusual is not a binary, it is a “more or less” thing, but yes, you may be much more unusual in some regards than you expected.
Actually, looking at your bio, it may be a cultural taboo for you to admit that you are exceptional. I grew up in communist Czechoslovakia, and the thought “I may be different from most other people, in a good way” went completely against all my conditioning. That’s not what you are supposed to ever say, unless you want to get in deep trouble.
It’s not just about intelligence, although high intelligence may be a prerequisite. Most people, even the intelligent ones, simply don’t give a fuck about many things that we value at LW, such as having a correct model of the world as opposed to merely winning verbal battles., or preferring to know the truth even if it makes you sad as opposed to just enjoying happy thoughts no matter how unrelated to reality they are. Most people just don’t click with this, because… I guess they don’t see a reason why. Why do things, if they don’t make you happy? (Yeah, in theory, looking reality in its face could save your life or something, but in practice, it’s not like rationalists are famous in the outside world for actually winning at life, so maybe this all is just our version of wishful thinking.)
So, yeah, actual rationalists are very rare. I couldn’t find ten of them in my country. (And I am not familiar with the Bay Area community, but sometimes I suspect that many people are there simply for the vibes. Some people enjoy hanging out with rationalists, even if they don’t share the fundamentals. It’s just another social activity for them.)
Then there is also the fact that people are busy. Not everyone who has the potential to become a rationalist also has time to spend on LW website. Such people usually have a lot of work they could do instead.
Maybe, I guess you won’t know until you try.
I think I written my bio in some biased way. But yeah, even in modern Russia it’s not a very popular frame that you are so unique and exceptional. And our teacher said us “not to run faster than a whole train”. And modesty is a virtue, but admitting how very excellent are is not at all.
And in part it were things like my parents were trying to make me less perfectionist about grades by saying that “grades doesn’t really matter”, then I continued be a perfectionist, but now just thought that grades are not at all a measure of intelligence.
Or that I was programming at 9y because it was interesting and then saying to myself that it’s not a reason to be proud by my interests, if they were interested they obviously could too.
Or that I’ve seen that prideful people in fiction were just doing some stupid short termed or evil things, like beating people because someone said something wrong, and next I concluded that whole emotion of pride is something awful.
And also it young me’s failure of putting myself into others shoes. Like, obviously most of kids were not invited to the stage at every end of year, but for me it was just something that happened from the beginning of the time.
And I was very distrusting to people who were saying things like “oh, you know, you are not like the other kids, you are smarter than your age” etc, of course they were just trying to flatter you.
A lot of such things. I actually ended up almost full blown Modest Epistemology by my own.
And that an interesting observation. I somehow missed THAT as a part of my rationalist leanings, but yeah, I can remember reading about Pollyanna (it was before HPMoR) and being outraged about her attitude “how glad I am about crutches as a gift, I don’t need them” because...
Doesn’t she see how bad everything around her is? She can’t see reality. Blind. Lobotomisedly happy not being able to internally react on environment. For me it felt like something worse than death.
And not surprisingly, I was also much more unhappier whole my life than the other people.
(That very resembles EY’s attitude. But now I don’t believe anymore than emotions are a part of world modeling, of what should reflects traits of reality, and an instrumental good for neural reinforcement by 1 and 2 derivatives of current situation, staying in right mental poses for some activity and others)
And I admit I have much more free time than the most of people. But I am not sure I understood, people with potential didn’t have enough time to read LW to become rationalists? Or rationalists don’t have time for LW? Isn’t posting your thoughts in net is usually a very cost benefit action where thousands of people can read post written once?
Edited: also, I’ve seen A LOT OF recommendations of HPMoR. And I probably overestimated how much people read it after it. Because I go and it literally after hearing about it the first time in literally the form of pair of fanfic comments “—Wow, this fic is excellent! - No, it’s average, excellent is HP and Methods of Rationality”
From inside, almost everything I can do is “easy”. Otherwise I wouldn’t be able to do it, right? The trick is noticing that many things that are “easy” for me are actually quite difficult for other people. And even there, who do you compare yourself to? If you are constantly surrounded by experts, the things that are considered “easy” by your entire bubble can still be a mystery for 99.9% of population.
Both of that. There are probably some people out there, who would be a great fit for LW, but instead they are busy doing research or making money or changing the world somehow. Also, some people who have formerly spent a lot of time on LW are now doing something more efficient with their time.
Yeah, but 99.9% of those people won’t remember what you wrote the next day, so the actual impact can be very small. Also, instead on LW you could post on your own blog, or maybe write a book, those are also ways to approach many people. Some of those may be more efficient.
It’s good that we have the LW books for busy people; selection of the best articles instead of having read all of that.
That is a great starting position (much better than having no free time—then it is very difficult to think about your life or try to improve it, if there is no time to do that). But if you use that free time to figure out what you want to do and actually start doing it, then… probably in a year, you will have less free time. Not necessarily in a bad way; you can be busy doing things that you totally love. But you won’t have so much time to read LW anymore.
This is a paradox of self-improvement groups (and LW kinda belongs to that category). If you actually keep improving, at some moment you will probably leave the group, because some other action will be more useful for you than staying at the group. That’s the entire point—the group is supposed to make you more efficient at the life outside the group. If it fails to achieve that, then the group is not really good at its stated goal.
(There was some errors, message hadn’t sent before now)
Becoming stronger feels like things became lighter. But a lot of things I trying to do are not “just easy”? Also I thought about it more like finding things which you found too hard and gave up. And I am not sure how to just pinpoint easy things, it’s like finding details of how you are moving.
(Though I probably should expect that for a lot of people it’s actually hard to from the first try read/remember even single time new long words like “cefoperazone” and “ceftazidime” and that wasn’t just a trope)
99.9%??? Are you serious? I thought I have a bad memory, but I don’t think I will forget more than 70% of what I read THE NEXT DAY. Like, I can remember which tweets and shortforms I’ve read in the last few days, just trying to remember what I read, not because I found myself in relevant situation.
And that is for random post which I didn’t considered important to me like “what to do with AI for a layman?”. I remember much better posts which I did considered important, like the one LW about effectively explaining things in the way of “it’s like airbnb, but for boats”.
I think about it in the way of “which time I can spare if I will find something really important”, it’s not like now I am going and saying “oh, again I have no idea what to do with my time”. It’s just that I am not compelled to work, don’t have kids etc.
I don’t think about it quite that way. Isn’t the sense in sharing ideas? You have have ideas, some are more important, and share them is easier than invent and different people find different ideas. So you have a benefit from sharing with each other. So if it was like that I’d expected more like 30K of people showing with great ideas on lesswrong once a week each.