Duncan_Sabien

• Duncan_Sabien 14 Jan 2020 23:00 UTC

  13 points

  in reply to: pjeby’s comment on: CFAR Par­ti­ci­pant Hand­book now available to all

  As for the Un­der­stand­ing Shoulds sec­tion, that’s an­other ex­am­ple of the doc­u­ment be­ing tai­lor-made for a spe­cific tar­get au­di­ence; most peo­ple are in­deed “tak­ing far too se­ri­ously” their “ut­terly use­less shoulds,” but the CFAR work­shop au­di­ence was largely one pen­du­lum swing ahead of that state, and need­ing the next round of iter­ated ad­vice.

• Duncan_Sabien 14 Jan 2020 22:59 UTC

  10 points

  in reply to: pjeby’s comment on: CFAR Par­ti­ci­pant Hand­book now available to all

  Emailing CFAR is the best way to find out; pre­vi­ously the ques­tion wasn’t con­sid­ered in depth be­cause “well, we’re not sel­l­ing it, and we’re also not shar­ing it.” Now, the state is “well, they’re not sel­l­ing it, but they are shar­ing it,” so it’s un­clear.

  (Things like the XKCD comic be­ing uncited came about be­cause in con­text, some­thing like 95% of par­ti­ci­pants rec­og­nized XKCD im­me­di­ately and the other 5% were told in per­son when lec­tur­ers said stuff like “If you’ll look at the XKCD comic on page what­ever...” In other words, it was treated much more like an in­ter­nal hand­out shared among a nar­rowly se­lected, high-con­text group, than as product that needed to dot all of the i’s and cross all of the t’s. I agree that Ran­dall Mun­roe de­serves credit for his work, and that fu­ture ed­its would likely cor­rect things like that.)

• Duncan_Sabien 14 Jan 2020 19:19 UTC

  5 points

  in reply to: AABoyles’s comment on: CFAR Par­ti­ci­pant Hand­book now available to all

  Emailing peo­ple at CFAR di­rectly is the best way to find out, I think (I dunno how many of them are check­ing this thread).

• Duncan_Sabien 8 Jan 2020 19:27 UTC

  13 points

  in reply to: Raemon’s comment on: CFAR Par­ti­ci­pant Hand­book now available to all

  Note that this hand­book cov­ers maybe only about ²⁄₃ of the progress made in that pri­vate beta branch, with the re­main­ing third di­vided into “hap­pened while I was there but hasn’t been writ­ten up (hope­fully ‘yet’)” and “hap­pened since my de­par­ture, and un­clear whether any­one will have the time and pri­or­ity to ex­port it.”

• Duncan_Sabien 4 Jan 2020 5:29 UTC

  8 points

  in reply to: ozziegooen’s comment on: CFAR Par­ti­ci­pant Hand­book now available to all

  I don’t know the an­swer; the team made their de­ci­sion and then checked to see if I was okay with it; I wasn’t a part of any de­liber­a­tions or dis­cus­sions.

• Duncan_Sabien 4 Jan 2020 1:44 UTC

  11 points

  in reply to: Zack_M_Davis’s comment on: Meta-dis­cus­sion from “Cir­cling as Cousin to Ra­tion­al­ity”

  What I meant by the word “our” was “the broader con­text cul­ture-at-large,” not Less Wrong or my own per­sonal home cul­ture or any­thing like that. Apolo­gies, that could’ve been clearer.

  I think there’s an­other point on the spec­trum (plane?) that’s nei­ther “overt anti-in­tel­lec­tu­al­ism” nor “It seems to me that en­gag­ing with you will be un­pro­duc­tive and I should dis­en­gage.” That point be­ing some­thing like, “It’s rea­son­able and jus­tified to con­clude that this ques­tion­ing isn’t go­ing to be pro­duc­tive to the over­all goal of the dis­cus­sion, and is ei­ther mo­ti­vated-by or will-re­sult-in some other effect en­tirely.”

  Some­thing stronger than “I’m dis­en­gag­ing ac­cord­ing to my own bound­aries” and more like “this is sub­tly but sig­nifi­cantly trans­gres­sive, by abus­ing struc­tures that are in place for epistemic in­quiry.”

  If the term “seal­ion­ing” is too tainted by con­no­ta­tion to serve, then it’s clearly the wrong word to use; TIL. But I dis­agree that we don’t need or shouldn’t have any short, sim­ple han­dle in this con­cept space; it still seems use­ful to me to be able to la­bel the hy­poth­e­sis with­out (as Oliver did) hav­ing to write words and words and words and words. The anal­ogy to the use­ful­ness of the term “witch­hunt” was care­fully cho­sen; it’s the sort of thing that’s hard to see at first, and once you’ve put forth the effort to see it, it’s worth … idk, cacheing or some­thing?

• Duncan_Sabien 3 Jan 2020 18:12 UTC

  3 points

  in reply to: habryka’s comment on: Meta-dis­cus­sion from “Cir­cling as Cousin to Ra­tion­al­ity”

  I agree that you’ve said this mul­ti­ple times, in mul­ti­ple places; I wanted you to be able to say it shortly and sim­ply. To be able to do some­thing analo­gous to say­ing “from where I’m cur­rently stand­ing, this looks to me like a witch­hunt” rather than hav­ing to spell out, in many differ­ent sen­tences, what a witch­hunt is and why it’s bad and how this situ­a­tion re­sem­bles that one.

  My caveats and hedges were mainly not want­ing to be seen as putting words in your mouth, or pre­sup­pos­ing your en­dorse­ment of the par­tic­u­lar short sen­tence I pro­posed.

• Duncan_Sabien 3 Jan 2020 16:39 UTC

  4 points

  in reply to: habryka’s comment on: Meta-dis­cus­sion from “Cir­cling as Cousin to Ra­tion­al­ity”

  I note that we, as a cul­ture, have reified a term for this, which is “seal­ion­ing.”

  Nam­ing the prob­lem is not solv­ing the prob­lem; stick­ing a la­bel on some­thing is not the same as win­ning an ar­gu­ment; the tricky part is in de­ter­min­ing which com­men­tary is rea­son­ably de­scribed by the term and which isn’t (and which is con­tro­ver­sial, or costly-but-use­ful, and so forth).

  But as I read through this whole com­ment chain, I no­ticed that I kept want­ing Oliver to be able to say the short, sim­ple sen­tence:

  “My past ex­pe­rience has led me to have a prior that threads from you be­gin­ning like this turn out to be seal­ion­ing way more of­ten than similar threads from other peo­ple.”

  Note that that’s my model of Oliver; the real Oliver has not ac­tu­ally ex­pressed that [edit: ex­act] sen­ti­ment [edit: in those ex­act words] and may have crit­i­cal dis­agree­ments with my model of him, or crit­i­cal caveats re­gard­ing the use of the term.

CFAR Par­ti­ci­pant Hand­book now available to all

• Duncan_Sabien 22 Dec 2019 5:31 UTC

  9 points

  in reply to: Timothy Telleen-Lawton’s comment on: We run the Cen­ter for Ap­plied Ra­tion­al­ity, AMA

  (I ex­pect the an­swer to 2 will still be the same from your per­spec­tive, af­ter read­ing this com­ment, but I just wanted to point out that not all in­fluences of a CFAR staff mem­ber cash out in things-visi­ble-in-the-work­shop; the part of my FB post that you de­scribe as 2 was about strat­egy and re­search and in­ter­nal cul­ture as much as work­shop con­tent and ex­e­cu­tion. I’m sort of sad that mul­ti­ple an­swers have had a slant that im­plies “Dun­can only mat­tered at work­shops/​Dun­can leav­ing only threat­ened to nega­tively im­pact work­shops.”)

• Duncan_Sabien 22 Dec 2019 4:12 UTC

  34 points

  in reply to: AnnaSalamon’s comment on: We run the Cen­ter for Ap­plied Ra­tion­al­ity, AMA

  On read­ing Anna’s above an­swer (which seems true to me, and also satis­fies a lot of the cu­ri­os­ity I was ex­pe­rienc­ing, in a good way), I noted a feel­ing of some­thing like “read­ing this, the me­dian LWer will con­clude that my con­tri­bu­tion was pri­mar­ily just ops-y and lo­gis­ti­cal, and the main thing that was at threat when I left was that the ma­chine sur­round­ing the in­tel­lec­tual work would get rusty.”

  It seems worth not­ing that my model of CFAR (sub­ject to dis­agree­ment from ac­tual CFAR) is view­ing that stuff as a do­main of study, in and of it­self—how groups co­op­er­ate and func­tion, what makes up things like leg­i­bil­ity and in­tegrity, what sorts of wor­ld­view clashes are be­hind e.g. peo­ple who think it’s valuable to be on time and peo­ple who think punc­tu­al­ity is no big deal, etc.

  But this is not nec­es­sar­ily some­thing su­per salient in the me­dian LWer’s model of CFAR, and so I imag­ine the me­dian LWer think­ing that Anna’s com­ment means my con­tri­bu­tions weren’t in­tel­lec­tual or philo­soph­i­cal or rele­vant to on­go­ing ra­tio­nal­ity de­vel­op­ment, even though I think Anna-and-CFAR did in­deed view me as con­tribut­ing there, too (and thus the above is also say­ing some­thing like “it turned out Dun­can’s dis­ap­pear­ance didn’t scut­tle those threads of in­ves­ti­ga­tion”).

• Duncan_Sabien 22 Dec 2019 3:32 UTC

  6 points

  in reply to: Tenoke’s comment on: We run the Cen­ter for Ap­plied Ra­tion­al­ity, AMA

  In gen­eral, if you don’t un­der­stand what some­one is say­ing, it’s bet­ter to ask “what do you mean?” than to say “are you say­ing [un­re­lated thing that does not at all emerge from what they said]??” with dou­ble punc­tu­a­tion.

• Duncan_Sabien 21 Dec 2019 19:39 UTC

  5 points

  in reply to: Timothy Telleen-Lawton’s comment on: We run the Cen­ter for Ap­plied Ra­tion­al­ity, AMA

  They do. The dis­tinc­tion seems to me to be some­thing like en­dorse­ment of a “count­ing up” strat­egy/​per­spec­tive ver­sus en­dorse­ment of a “count­ing down” one, or rea­son­able dis­agree­ment about which parts of the dog food are ac­tu­ally benefi­cial to eat at what times ver­sus which ones are Good­hart­ing or the­ater or low pay­off or what have you.

• Duncan_Sabien 21 Dec 2019 19:23 UTC

  3 points

  in reply to: Tenoke’s comment on: We run the Cen­ter for Ap­plied Ra­tion­al­ity, AMA

  I’m not say­ing that, ei­ther.

  I re­quest that you stop jump­ing to wild con­clu­sions and putting words in peo­ple’s mouths, and fo­cus on what they are ac­tu­ally say­ing.

• Duncan_Sabien 21 Dec 2019 10:43 UTC

  6 points

  in reply to: Tenoke’s comment on: We run the Cen­ter for Ap­plied Ra­tion­al­ity, AMA

  That’s not the ques­tion that was asked, so … no.

  Edit: more helpfully, I found it valuable for think­ing about ra­tio­nal­ity and think­ing about CFAR from a strate­gic per­spec­tive—what it was, what it should be, what prob­lems it was up against, how it in­ter­faced with the rest of so­ciety.

• Duncan_Sabien 21 Dec 2019 10:33 UTC

  7 points

  in reply to: gilch’s comment on: We run the Cen­ter for Ap­plied Ra­tion­al­ity, AMA

  I’m read­ing the replies of cur­rent CFAR staff with great in­ter­est (I’m a former staff mem­ber who ended work in Oc­to­ber 2018), as my own ex­pe­rience within the org was “not re­ally; to some ex­tent yes, in a fluid and in­for­mal way, but I rarely see us sit­ting down with pen and pa­per to do ex­plicit goal fac­tor­ing or for­mal dou­ble crux, and there’s rea­son­able dis­agree­ment about whether that’s good, bad, or neu­tral.”

• Duncan_Sabien 21 Dec 2019 10:10 UTC

  25 points

  in reply to: Neel Nanda’s comment on: We run the Cen­ter for Ap­plied Ra­tion­al­ity, AMA

  His­tor­i­cally, CFAR had the fol­low­ing con­cerns (I haven’t worked there since Oct 2018, so their think­ing may have changed since then; if a cur­rent staff mem­ber gets around to an­swer­ing this ques­tion you should con­sider their an­swer to trump this one):

  • The hand­book ma­te­rial doesn’t ac­tu­ally “work” in the sense that it can change lives; the work­shop ex­pe­rience is cru­cial to what limited suc­cess CFAR *is* able to have, and there’s con­cern about falsely offer­ing hope

  • There is such a thing as idea in­oc­u­la­tion; the hand­book isn’t perfect and cer­tainly can’t ad­just it­self to ev­ery in­di­vi­d­ual per­son’s ex­pe­rience and cog­ni­tive style. If some­one gets a weaker, bro­ken, or un­canny-valley ver­sion of a ra­tio­nal­ity tech­nique out of a book, not only may it fail to help them in any way, but it will also make sub­se­quently learn­ing [a real and use­ful skill that’s nearby in con­cept space] cor­re­spond­ingly more difficult, both via con­scious dis­mis­sive­ness and un­con­scious round­ing-off.

  • To the ex­tent that cer­tain ideas or tech­niques only work in con­cert or as a gestalt, putting the doc­u­ment out on the broader in­ter­net where it will be chopped up and re­ar­ranged and quoted in chunks and riffed off of and likely mis­in­ter­preted, etc., might be worse than not putting it out at all.

  What links here?

  • CFAR: Progress Re­port & Fu­ture Plans by Adam Scholl (19 Dec 2019 6:19 UTC; 66 points)

• Duncan_Sabien 21 Dec 2019 10:04 UTC

  4 points

  in reply to: gilch’s comment on: We run the Cen­ter for Ap­plied Ra­tion­al­ity, AMA

  [Dis­claimer: have not been at CFAR since Oc­to­ber 2018; if some­one cur­rently from the org con­tra­dicts this, their state­ment will be more ac­cu­rate about pre­sent-day CFAR]

  No (CFAR’s mis­sion has always been nar­rower/​more tar­geted) and no (not in any sys­tem­atic, com­pe­tent fash­ion).

• Duncan_Sabien 21 Dec 2019 10:01 UTC

  9 points

  in reply to: Ben Pace’s comment on: We run the Cen­ter for Ap­plied Ra­tion­al­ity, AMA

  In case no one who cur­rently works at CFAR gets around to an­swer­ing this (I was there from Oct 2015 to Oct 2018 in a pretty in­fluen­tial role but that means I haven’t been around for about four­teen months):

  • Med­i­ta­tions on Moloch is top of the list by a fac­tor of per­haps four

  • Differ­ent Wor­lds as a run­ner up

  Lots of so­cial dy­namic stuff/​how groups work/​how in­di­vi­d­u­als move within groups:

  • So­cial Jus­tice and Words, Words, Words

  • I Can Tol­er­ate Any­thing Ex­cept The Outgroup

  • Guided By The Beauty Of Our Weapons

  • Yes, We Have No­ticed The Skulls

  • Book Re­view: Sur­fing Uncertainty

• Duncan_Sabien 21 Dec 2019 9:50 UTC

  7 points

  in reply to: riceissa’s comment on: We run the Cen­ter for Ap­plied Ra­tion­al­ity, AMA

  I’d be cu­ri­ous for an an­swer to this one too, ac­tu­ally.