(I don’t have good propositions of what to do, but probably it’s still better to just share my regrets, than to do nothing.)
When I’ve first read hpmor at 12 I’ve remembered Yudkowsky’s advice “read sequences, hpmor is just their shadow” and tried to read some sequence. I’ve read “Fable of Science and Politics” and… Well, Yudkowsky was just wrong about hpmor being shadow of that, hpmor is much cooler. So I decided to read it sometime later. I encountered nowhere phrase “do you want to be as cool as hjpev and even more? There is textbook for that—Rationality AZ” (I’ve read russian translation and then tried sequence as .fb2).
When I just started reading I’ve seen phrase about riddles, but not gave attention. I’d wanted better warning that it will be my alone chance in life to try to solve them, and how I may regret that I didn’t even tried it and hence was totally unprepared when the final exam came.
And also that was book so much better than any I have ever seen, that I decided to be cautious and not read that treasure to much, so it will not become too well known. I didn’t understand that such way I will just forget simultaneously rhythm, details and whole fragments.
And also I wasn’t trying to imagine myself in place of heroes, so I wasn’t quite learning their thinking. Actually, I wasn’t quite trying to imagine anything, I thought reading is when you look into words, say them with expression and understand their meaning.
Also I’d wanted to see not only “science is real science” but that it’s causal world like real one, things aren’t happening just for the sake of plot or fun like in whole lot of other fiction, especially that psychics shown works like real psychics, that wordless thoughts of Harry and internal voices aren’t just some magic like dark side, ability to be any person, occlumency… Except that those also aren’t just magic.
And also I want to say that despite of what is usually said, Russian translation of hpmor is really poor (no, it’s good that it exists, otherwise I wouldn’t read hpmor at all, probably until now), in breaking the style, in losing details, wrongly translating lw vocab and even doing really big factual errors like “if Harry is one on million, then there are 12 such smart boys in New York”, factual errors with important implications actually, because it would mean ~1200 for all ages and ~2400 for also woman, I would want to see all those 2400 people in New York who were at eleven as smart as HJPEV, I myself actually quite underestimated until this year how unusual are Harry’s shown capabilities.
When I actually read the sequences I already was against Putin and I was very suspicious to people who very saying that you should be apolitical. Because they usually continued it as something “politics is a dirty thing” (of course it will be dirty if everyone non dirty will avoid it by that logic!) or “just do little goods around you and everything will become better” (while it was obvious that you should do crucial changes like changing politics). And so I was really suspicious to Yudkowsky, Sequences, LessWrong and Bayesian epistemology as whole.
Though later I changed my opinion. I started to avoid Politics. I was into Science. Yeah, Our Science vs Their Nonscience (or Nonsense)! Science, cool! I’d really wanted so it clearly said “tribalism” instead of “politics”. And probably special choice of lenses for different countries. So people from eg Russia will be able to get their remarks (like “changing president is important, just your relative power here approximately 1/100M” and maybe a link into that post about politics being too centred in some directions, so it’s more effective to push in other) or whatever.
I generally think it will be good idea to have some more directed reading orders and lenses (or at least guides) like “if you know: common sense, science, skepticism, traditional rationality” or “for zoomers” (eg I was just sure that only thing you need to know is how to google something) or “for 12 year olds, 16, 20, 30, 40, 60, 80” and probably even personal qualities like “perfectionist” or “how diligent you was in school” or “automatic creative thinking” (I could easily right you a list of 200 usages of paperclip, but unprompted I would do things in Only Proper Way Taught To Me) etc. Or “programmer”. Maybe even g factor. And also be different for those who already read hpmor, will read later or will not. All that because, well, I understand that peoples who aren’t Russian perfectionist twelve programmers will have totally different asks than me.
Also I’d wanted to straightly go into lesswrong com with all it’s intelligent design, hypertext, posts, comments (now also reaction and inlines) etc, not switch between .fb2 sequences and lesswrong ru. Though I already said somewhere that I want translations to be lenses of wiki pages. And it also makes sense as just easier way to learn English meanwhile (eg by using touch-to-search, very convenient imo, much better than select and search google), or use machine translation (maybe even embed into lesswrong site, so working for comments and posts too, not only wiki).
And also I once read here wondering how is it to go into Bayesian rationality not already knowing “Traditional” rationality previously. Well, in my experience—badly. It looks like I didn’t have crucial basic skills which you are getting from books like “You are surely joking mr Feynman” such as “your own direct observation is primary source of knowledge, not someone words or even scientific papers” and “even if you can’t calculate formula in real time, you still can see right in world in real time it’s general meaning” and “learn first what you will use in practice” and even “there is nothing wrong in learning being funny and non serious, actually funny and easygoing is better”. And also reading them probably would be really could just so, but is dim after reading hpmor and sequences.
And actually not only Traditional Rationality was something I was lacking. Common sense too. Like… Chesterton Fence? (it was really enlightening for me). Though at the same time some “advanced” things were quite obvious to me, like Orthogonality (I had troubles to understand which point Sorting Pebbles at all is trying to make) or Security Mindset (when I was a kid I was checking passwords to only stored hashes even if with no salt, transferring data with RSA, keeping encrypted important values in RAM, even though I heard about first two, not thought by myself). And also I already was pretty pessimistic (I’d wanted to know that I don’t owe to reject positive thinking because of that), a lot of times even too much.
Actually, I think Rationality AZ is pretty terrible name, it gives really wrong connotations for the sake of a pun. It’s not a-z, it’s aab-acy or something. Or better, rationality 101, and then Tradional will 051 and also some 001 of common sense. Or Rationality: Intro [point] by Eliezer Yudkowsky. There are some things before it. And a lot of after. Or, more precisely, infinity after, there always will be more of complicated rationality concepts to share. And it’s not mentioning that except concepts there are also techniques, habits, skill trainings, fictional experiences etc.
And also of course I’d wanted to know earlier that no, you will not “remember everything which is actually important”, that memory fades without repeating. And that you in fact can make better by training your imagination, memory, willpower, introspection and actually any property of mind (including personality) or skill, that you in fact can control your thoughts and your emotions.
And also probably explanation that learning math, competing in math Olympiads is good, not bad (I avoided math because it was too suspiciously appealing and because I’ve seen a stereotype of completely unbound to reality math liker while I wanted to become a programmer and do really useful things and be able to write script for my own needs and have lots of money).
And explanation why you need to somehow at all interact with other people who are interested in that topic, instead of just reading everything by yourself only.
Also I was eager to listen to any advices how to get more of rationality into my head. But I just couldn’t, because I didn’t know English. And also disliked to read, especially books instead of hypertexts. And also read 200wpm or even less, and since I was listening to audiobooks, lectures at x2 (up to 300 wpm, and also you can add video to audio) I also stuck in local maximum. I would prefer to have some ready fixes for such problems. Because it may be really unobvious to somebody who didn’t yet read Sequences, and because of that can’t.
(That’s not all my stream of consciousness about regrets, probably I will add continuation as comment to that post.)
I was very suspicious to people who very saying that you should be apolitical. Because they usually continued it as something “politics is a dirty thing” (of course it will be dirty if everyone non dirty will avoid it by that logic!) or “just do little goods around you and everything will become better” (while it was obvious that you should do crucial changes like changing politics).
This is tricky. Depends on what you mean by “being political”. I suspect that for most people it means choosing one political tribe more or less randomly (depending on which tribe your parents or friends support), screaming in their support, and ignoring all parts of reality that disagree with their slogans.
The world won’t get better by having more of that. At it seems to be a natural attractor; even otherwise smart people often start doing this when they discuss politics, or just notice that something has a political connotation.
Then there is an approach that goes like this: get a better model of the world, find out which actions make the world a better place and which make it a worse place, and then judge politicians and political parties by what kind of actions they make. I think that is a good thing, and we should have more of that. Two problems, though:
1) I am not sure whether everyone is actually capable of doing that. Seems to require some basic intelligence and sanity. Perhaps the people who lack that should remain apolitical—because the only alternative for them is joining a random side, or often the side with better propaganda.
2) Developing a good model of the world takes a lot of time. Until you complete that project, you probably should not voice strong political opinions—chances are, a few years later you will be ashamed of them. You should balanced this against the obviousness of the opinion: things like “it is bad to torture people” are safe to express after short study, opinions on whether minimum wage is good or bad require longer study.
So much for theory. In practice, the people who are too stupid to be able to do politics properly are also too stupid to listen to this advice, so it helps no one.
And also I once read here wondering how is it to go into Bayesian rationality not already knowing “Traditional” rationality previously. [...] And also reading [Feynman] probably would be really could just so, but is dim after reading hpmor and sequences.
To me this is very ironic, as I recently despaired about the lack of books like Три дня в Карликании in English (and other languages). I guess the grass is always greener on the other side.
What I think we should do is select the best books for developing scientific thinking, for all age groups, in all languages, and then (fuck copyright) translate them to as many languages as possible, and distribute them as a huge ZIP file full of PDFs and e-books.
Common sense too. Like… Chesterton Fence?
Some things seem to come with age. I guess you need a lot of data points to be properly calibrated. Sometimes you need to break a rule. Sometimes you need to follow the rules. One of those comes natural to you (following the rules for some people, breaking the rules for others), the other you need to learn; and the most difficult lesson is to figure out what is the right moment for which one, because you can’t succeed without both. The pendulum needs to take a few swings until it stabilizes; you need to experience getting burned by going too far on either side.
The median aspiring rationalist seems to be in the rebel phase. But we seem to be improving, slowly.
Rationality: Intro [point] by Eliezer Yudkowsky. There are some things before it. And a lot of after. Or, more precisely, infinity after, there always will be more of complicated rationality concepts to share. And it’s not mentioning that except concepts there are also techniques, habits, skill trainings, fictional experiences etc.
100% agree.
And also of course I’d wanted to know earlier that no, you will not “remember everything which is actually important”, that memory fades without repeating. And that you in fact can make better by training your imagination, memory, willpower, introspection and actually any property of mind (including personality) or skill, that you in fact can control your thoughts and your emotions.
I suspect that this works better in a group, because people instinctively copy others around them. It would probably work even better if we had some rationalist equivalent of “Sunday at church”, a place to repeat the basics, together.
Also I was eager to listen to any advices how to get more of rationality into my head. But I just couldn’t, because I didn’t know English. And also disliked to read, especially books instead of hypertexts.
These seem like problems that could be solved (for the next generation) with the help of AI. We still need to choose the right texts, and modify them so that they can be read (i.e. no complex equations or pictures). But the right texts could be translated with the help of AI, and narrated by AI.
(I don’t have good propositions of what to do, but probably it’s still better to just share my regrets, than to do nothing.)
When I’ve first read hpmor at 12 I’ve remembered Yudkowsky’s advice “read sequences, hpmor is just their shadow” and tried to read some sequence. I’ve read “Fable of Science and Politics” and… Well, Yudkowsky was just wrong about hpmor being shadow of that, hpmor is much cooler. So I decided to read it sometime later. I encountered nowhere phrase “do you want to be as cool as hjpev and even more? There is textbook for that—Rationality AZ” (I’ve read russian translation and then tried sequence as .fb2).
When I just started reading I’ve seen phrase about riddles, but not gave attention. I’d wanted better warning that it will be my alone chance in life to try to solve them, and how I may regret that I didn’t even tried it and hence was totally unprepared when the final exam came.
And also that was book so much better than any I have ever seen, that I decided to be cautious and not read that treasure to much, so it will not become too well known. I didn’t understand that such way I will just forget simultaneously rhythm, details and whole fragments.
And also I wasn’t trying to imagine myself in place of heroes, so I wasn’t quite learning their thinking. Actually, I wasn’t quite trying to imagine anything, I thought reading is when you look into words, say them with expression and understand their meaning.
Also I’d wanted to see not only “science is real science” but that it’s causal world like real one, things aren’t happening just for the sake of plot or fun like in whole lot of other fiction, especially that psychics shown works like real psychics, that wordless thoughts of Harry and internal voices aren’t just some magic like dark side, ability to be any person, occlumency… Except that those also aren’t just magic.
And also I want to say that despite of what is usually said, Russian translation of hpmor is really poor (no, it’s good that it exists, otherwise I wouldn’t read hpmor at all, probably until now), in breaking the style, in losing details, wrongly translating lw vocab and even doing really big factual errors like “if Harry is one on million, then there are 12 such smart boys in New York”, factual errors with important implications actually, because it would mean ~1200 for all ages and ~2400 for also woman, I would want to see all those 2400 people in New York who were at eleven as smart as HJPEV, I myself actually quite underestimated until this year how unusual are Harry’s shown capabilities.
When I actually read the sequences I already was against Putin and I was very suspicious to people who very saying that you should be apolitical. Because they usually continued it as something “politics is a dirty thing” (of course it will be dirty if everyone non dirty will avoid it by that logic!) or “just do little goods around you and everything will become better” (while it was obvious that you should do crucial changes like changing politics). And so I was really suspicious to Yudkowsky, Sequences, LessWrong and Bayesian epistemology as whole.
Though later I changed my opinion. I started to avoid Politics. I was into Science. Yeah, Our Science vs Their Nonscience (or Nonsense)! Science, cool! I’d really wanted so it clearly said “tribalism” instead of “politics”. And probably special choice of lenses for different countries. So people from eg Russia will be able to get their remarks (like “changing president is important, just your relative power here approximately 1/100M” and maybe a link into that post about politics being too centred in some directions, so it’s more effective to push in other) or whatever.
I generally think it will be good idea to have some more directed reading orders and lenses (or at least guides) like “if you know: common sense, science, skepticism, traditional rationality” or “for zoomers” (eg I was just sure that only thing you need to know is how to google something) or “for 12 year olds, 16, 20, 30, 40, 60, 80” and probably even personal qualities like “perfectionist” or “how diligent you was in school” or “automatic creative thinking” (I could easily right you a list of 200 usages of paperclip, but unprompted I would do things in Only Proper Way Taught To Me) etc. Or “programmer”. Maybe even g factor. And also be different for those who already read hpmor, will read later or will not. All that because, well, I understand that peoples who aren’t Russian perfectionist twelve programmers will have totally different asks than me.
Also I’d wanted to straightly go into lesswrong com with all it’s intelligent design, hypertext, posts, comments (now also reaction and inlines) etc, not switch between .fb2 sequences and lesswrong ru. Though I already said somewhere that I want translations to be lenses of wiki pages. And it also makes sense as just easier way to learn English meanwhile (eg by using touch-to-search, very convenient imo, much better than select and search google), or use machine translation (maybe even embed into lesswrong site, so working for comments and posts too, not only wiki).
And also I once read here wondering how is it to go into Bayesian rationality not already knowing “Traditional” rationality previously. Well, in my experience—badly. It looks like I didn’t have crucial basic skills which you are getting from books like “You are surely joking mr Feynman” such as “your own direct observation is primary source of knowledge, not someone words or even scientific papers” and “even if you can’t calculate formula in real time, you still can see right in world in real time it’s general meaning” and “learn first what you will use in practice” and even “there is nothing wrong in learning being funny and non serious, actually funny and easygoing is better”. And also reading them probably would be really could just so, but is dim after reading hpmor and sequences.
And actually not only Traditional Rationality was something I was lacking. Common sense too. Like… Chesterton Fence? (it was really enlightening for me). Though at the same time some “advanced” things were quite obvious to me, like Orthogonality (I had troubles to understand which point Sorting Pebbles at all is trying to make) or Security Mindset (when I was a kid I was checking passwords to only stored hashes even if with no salt, transferring data with RSA, keeping encrypted important values in RAM, even though I heard about first two, not thought by myself). And also I already was pretty pessimistic (I’d wanted to know that I don’t owe to reject positive thinking because of that), a lot of times even too much.
Actually, I think Rationality AZ is pretty terrible name, it gives really wrong connotations for the sake of a pun. It’s not a-z, it’s aab-acy or something. Or better, rationality 101, and then Tradional will 051 and also some 001 of common sense. Or Rationality: Intro [point] by Eliezer Yudkowsky. There are some things before it. And a lot of after. Or, more precisely, infinity after, there always will be more of complicated rationality concepts to share. And it’s not mentioning that except concepts there are also techniques, habits, skill trainings, fictional experiences etc.
And also of course I’d wanted to know earlier that no, you will not “remember everything which is actually important”, that memory fades without repeating. And that you in fact can make better by training your imagination, memory, willpower, introspection and actually any property of mind (including personality) or skill, that you in fact can control your thoughts and your emotions.
And also probably explanation that learning math, competing in math Olympiads is good, not bad (I avoided math because it was too suspiciously appealing and because I’ve seen a stereotype of completely unbound to reality math liker while I wanted to become a programmer and do really useful things and be able to write script for my own needs and have lots of money).
And explanation why you need to somehow at all interact with other people who are interested in that topic, instead of just reading everything by yourself only.
Also I was eager to listen to any advices how to get more of rationality into my head. But I just couldn’t, because I didn’t know English. And also disliked to read, especially books instead of hypertexts. And also read 200wpm or even less, and since I was listening to audiobooks, lectures at x2 (up to 300 wpm, and also you can add video to audio) I also stuck in local maximum. I would prefer to have some ready fixes for such problems. Because it may be really unobvious to somebody who didn’t yet read Sequences, and because of that can’t.
(That’s not all my stream of consciousness about regrets, probably I will add continuation as comment to that post.)
This is tricky. Depends on what you mean by “being political”. I suspect that for most people it means choosing one political tribe more or less randomly (depending on which tribe your parents or friends support), screaming in their support, and ignoring all parts of reality that disagree with their slogans.
The world won’t get better by having more of that. At it seems to be a natural attractor; even otherwise smart people often start doing this when they discuss politics, or just notice that something has a political connotation.
Then there is an approach that goes like this: get a better model of the world, find out which actions make the world a better place and which make it a worse place, and then judge politicians and political parties by what kind of actions they make. I think that is a good thing, and we should have more of that. Two problems, though:
1) I am not sure whether everyone is actually capable of doing that. Seems to require some basic intelligence and sanity. Perhaps the people who lack that should remain apolitical—because the only alternative for them is joining a random side, or often the side with better propaganda.
2) Developing a good model of the world takes a lot of time. Until you complete that project, you probably should not voice strong political opinions—chances are, a few years later you will be ashamed of them. You should balanced this against the obviousness of the opinion: things like “it is bad to torture people” are safe to express after short study, opinions on whether minimum wage is good or bad require longer study.
So much for theory. In practice, the people who are too stupid to be able to do politics properly are also too stupid to listen to this advice, so it helps no one.
To me this is very ironic, as I recently despaired about the lack of books like Три дня в Карликании in English (and other languages). I guess the grass is always greener on the other side.
What I think we should do is select the best books for developing scientific thinking, for all age groups, in all languages, and then (fuck copyright) translate them to as many languages as possible, and distribute them as a huge ZIP file full of PDFs and e-books.
Some things seem to come with age. I guess you need a lot of data points to be properly calibrated. Sometimes you need to break a rule. Sometimes you need to follow the rules. One of those comes natural to you (following the rules for some people, breaking the rules for others), the other you need to learn; and the most difficult lesson is to figure out what is the right moment for which one, because you can’t succeed without both. The pendulum needs to take a few swings until it stabilizes; you need to experience getting burned by going too far on either side.
The median aspiring rationalist seems to be in the rebel phase. But we seem to be improving, slowly.
100% agree.
I suspect that this works better in a group, because people instinctively copy others around them. It would probably work even better if we had some rationalist equivalent of “Sunday at church”, a place to repeat the basics, together.
These seem like problems that could be solved (for the next generation) with the help of AI. We still need to choose the right texts, and modify them so that they can be read (i.e. no complex equations or pictures). But the right texts could be translated with the help of AI, and narrated by AI.