Philosophy PhD student. Interested in ethics, metaethics, AI, EA, disagreement/erisology. Former username Ikaxas
Vaughn Papenhausen
Karma: 707
Based on this quote:
Engineers are pragmatists, like tinkers except that they can trade with an industrial base, and have access to more books. They basically don’t do anything from first principles, and don’t actually do whole-system maintenance.
it seems to me that “engineering culture” is something like “don’t worry about the rules, just do whatever works.” Think “bodging”. This contrasts with the rule of law culture, which is something like “in conflicts between doing what works and following the rules, always follow the rules.”
So based on your contrast between engineering culture and rule of law (ROL) culture, it seems to me that you’re claiming a connection between ROL culture and a tendency to emphasize first principles. While I don’t doubt your account of how this played out for you (i.e. that growing up in an ROL culture caused you to place lots of value on first principles), it seems to me that these two things are at least partially in tension. As a child, I always hated arbitrary rules. My general response to teachers’/parents’ appeals to authority was some variant of, “I’ll do what you tell me to do, if you can convince me.” I mention this not to say that I was in the right, but to point out that following the rules laid out by outside authorities often means ignoring one’s own internal rules, and following one’s internal rules means breaking/ignoring the rules laid out by outside authorities. That is, deriving results for oneself, from first principles, often means breaking the (external) rules, which is anathema to an ROL culture as I’m understanding it (if I’m misunderstanding ROL culture, or what you mean by first principles, please let me know).
I think you gesture at this at the beginning of your description of “Defensive Irony”:
So, what is an autonome to do?
One solution is to speak the truth despite social incentives to do otherwise. The problem with that approach is that social incentives are powerful.
However, I think this is much more common than you seem to be giving it credit for. I don’t think most people who are on the “Autonomous” end of the spectrum end up like Socrates, I think they end up like (my mental caricature of) Marx, trying to replace what they see as a hopelessly misguided system with one actually derived from first principles. I think your description of a Kantian who adapts their internal rule system to match the external rules is insightful, and probably correct in a lot of cases, but I don’t think that most autonomes who don’t end up like that try to hide their internal rule systems, but rather end up in a clash with the external culture.
The alternate (very likely) interpretation of my intuition is that I’m massively falling victim to availability heuristic and generalizing-from-one-example. But my main point isn’t necessarily about frequency, but rather this: if one is inclined to first-principles style thinking, that can lead to a clash with an ROL culture if one’s own first principles don’t match the first principles of the ROL culture itself. (Though I can see how an ROL culture could inculcate first-principles style thinking, and I can see how, if one’s first-principles style thinking is due to said ROL culture, the likelihood of a clash is greatly reduced because in all likelihood one’s own first principles simply are the principles of the ROL culture itself).
This seems like really good advice for papers in data-driven and/or technical fields (modulo the caveat pointed out by waveman, which also seems worth taking into consideration), that is, papers in fields like e.g. physics, the aforementioned electrical engineering, psychology, economics, perhaps math, etc. My experience as a final-year undergraduate reading philosophy papers, though, is that I do get a lot out of reading the abstract, and out of not skipping the middle of the paper (since there isn’t really an analogue to the “methods” section in philosophy papers). I’m not sure if this is unique to philosophy or if there are other fields that are also exceptions; would be interested to hear people’s thoughts from other disciplines.
Here’s a script elephantiskon and I came up with for clearing up confusion with word meanings (bullet 4 on the list):
“What does [being X/Xing] mean for you? I’m worried that I’m not understanding [you/your position] that well because I have a different understanding of what it means to [X/be X].”
Feel free to adapt based on what sounds natural for you, or post any modifications you think would be helpful.
We may post more such scripts later.
Also another potentially useful script to add to the list would be one for introducing an idea that you think has promise but you’re not totally sure you endorse (in the spirit of “brainstorming” but perhaps as a one-off)
I didn’t notice the opportunity to notice my confusion (I had a “huh, weird” but, but looking back, I think it was
fbzrguvat gb qb jvgu gur fnaqone. Gurer ner npghnyyl n pbhcyr bs guvatf gung, ybbxvat onpx, V’z trahvaryl hafher nobhg ertneqvat gur fnaqone fgbel: 1. Jung vf n “qrfreg fnaqone”? 2. Vs vg jrer na bprna fnaqone (nf V svefg ernq vg), vg jbhyq unir gb or cerggl ovt gb fhccbeg n sberfg gur fvmr bs prageny cnex (evtug? Arire orra, fb qba’g unir n tbbq frafr bs ubj ovt prageny cnex vf). In any case, thanks for writing this, it’s given me a lot to think about and hopefully implement.
Edit: typo
A couple of meta-notes about shortform content and the frontpage “comments” section:
It always felt weird to me to have the comments as their own section on the frontpage, but I could never quite figure out why. Well, I think I’ve figured it out: most comments are extremely context-dependent—without having read the post one usually can’t understand a top-level comment, and it’s even worse for comments that are in the middle of a long thread. So having them all aggregated together feels not particularly useful because the usual optimal reading order is to read the post, then read the comments on that post, so getting to the comments from the post is better than getting to them from a general comments-aggregator. I have found it more useful than I thought I would, however, for 1.) discovering posts I otherwise wouldn’t have because I’m intrigued by one of the comments and want to understand the context, and 2.) discovering new comments on posts I’ve already read but wouldn’t have thought to check back for new comments on (I think this is probably the best use-case).
Note that comments on dedicated shortform-content posts like this one don’t have this problem (or at least have it to a lesser degree) because they’re supposed to be standalone posts, rather than building on the assumptions and framework laid out in a top-level post.
So, a way I think this shortform-content format could be expanded is if we had a tagging system similar to the one that was recently implemented in the section for top-level posts, but in particular with a tag that filters for all comments on posts with “shortform” in the title (that is to say, it doesn’t show posts with “shortform” in the title, but rather it shows any comment that was made on a post with “shortform” in the title). That way, not only can anybody create one of these shortform feeds, but people can see these shortform posts without having to sort through all the regular comments, which differ from shortform posts in the way I outlined above.
This difference between “wanting” and “intending” seems to be a pretty natural explanation for akrasia. It often seems like we intend to do things but never get around to them, but now that I have this distinction it seems to me that, phenomenologically, what’s happening is rather that I want to do something but never intend it (or lose the intention very quickly).*
This suggests that one way to combat akrasia might be to pay very close attention to one’s intentions. I think the Complice platform tries to get you to do this with daily reviews and setting intentions for the next day (and with asking you “how are you going to make that happen” for things that you’ve assigned yourself several times but haven’t done), but the real trick isn’t just to write down what you think you want to do the next day, but to, while you’re doing that, get that phenomenological feeling of intending to do it.
This also reminds me a little of Nate Soares’ Replacing Guilt series. Speculation: you can’t intend to do something unless all parts of you are on board. Thus, in order to intend to do something that you’re having akrasia about, you have to convince whatever parts of you are resisting that it’s a good idea. On the other hand, you can do something without intending to, and not just in the sense of doing it accidentally: you can spend hours surfing the internet without ever really having the intention to do that. So not all parts of you need to be on board for you to do something, only for you to intend to do it. Possible counterpoint: say you do something using willpower; you (e.g.) force yourself to sit down and study for a test. Did you intend to do that? Clearly not all parts of you were on board or you wouldn’t have had to force yourself, but it seems like using that much willpower means you must have intended to do it. Or maybe not? Maybe this “intending” feeling implies not needing to use willpower, or at least not having internal conflict about doing the thing? I’m not sure.
Also, this explanation has implications for the original akrasia debate as begun by Plato in the Protagoras. It’s been a long time since I read it, but if I remember, Plato argues that what’s happening in seeming cases of akrasia (which he thought of as “doing something that you believe is a bad option”) is not that you believe x is a bad option and do x at the same time, but rather you believe on some level, while you’re doing x, that x is a good option, and later change your belief to believe it’s a bad option and forget that you believed it was a good option. On my theory, what’s happening is that you want to do not-x, but don’t intend to do not-x, hence the feeling of conflict, because while you’re doing x you want to do not-x.
On a meta-note, thanks for including the transcript.
Edit: I thought I had added the link to the wikipedia page about akrasia, but it disappeared, so edited to re-add.
And on the flip side of that, if past-you makes the rules so strict that they’re practically unfollowable for future-you, that also weakens the trust between the two of you, because future-you will perceive past-you as tyrannical and be less inclined to trust that the rule was actually a good idea in the first place (and therefore be less likely to follow the rules it percieves as not-so-good). So past-you has to earn the trust of future-you by making rules it expects future-you to be able to follow, and future-you has to earn the trust of past-you by following the rules past-you makes.
Jonathan Haidt’s writing is rife with these. One that has stuck in my mind is “Intuitions come first, strategic reasoning second.”
Self-Defeating Reasons
Epistemic Effort: Gave myself 15 minutes to write this, plus a 5 minute extension, plus 5 minutes beforehand to find the links.
There’s a phenomenon that I’ve noticed recently, and the only name I can come up with for it is “self-defeating reasons,” but I don’t think this captures it very well (or at least, it’s not catchy enough to be a good handle for this). This is just going to be a quick post listing 3 examples of this phenomenon, just to point at it. I may write a longer, more polished post about it later, but if I didn’t write this quickly it would not get written.
First example:
Kaj Sotala attempted a few days ago to explain some of the Fuzzy System 1 Stuff that has been getting attention recently. In the course of this explanation, in the section called “Understanding Suffering,” he pointed out that, roughly: 1. if you truly understand the nature of suffering, you cease to suffer. You still feel all of the things that normally bring you suffering, but they cease to be aversive. This is because once you understand suffering, you realize that it is not something that you need to avoid. 2. If you use 1. as your motivation to try to understand suffering, you will not be able to do so. This is because your motivation for trying to understand suffering is to avoid suffering, and the whole point was that suffering isn’t actually something that needs to be avoided. So, the way to avoid suffering is to realize that you don’t need to avoid it.
Edit: forgot to add this illustrative quote from Kaj’s post:
“You can’t defuse from the content of a belief, if your motivation for wanting to defuse from it is the belief itself. In trying to reject the belief that making a good impression is important, and trying to do this with the motive of making a good impression, you just reinforce the belief that this is important. If you want to actually defuse from the belief, your motive for doing so has to come from somewhere else than the belief itself.”
Second example:
The Moral Error Theory states that:
although our moral judgments aim at the truth, they systematically fail to secure it. The moral error theorist stands to morality as the atheist stands to religion. … The moral error theorist claims that when we say “Stealing is wrong” we are asserting that the act of stealing instantiates the property of wrongness, but in fact nothing instantiates this property (or there is no such property at all), and thus the utterance is untrue.
The Normative Error Theory is the same, except with respect to not only moral judgments, but also other normative judgements, where “normative judgements” is taken to include at least judgements about self-interested reasons for action and (crucially) reasons for belief, as well as moral reasons. Bart Streumer claims that we are literally unable to believe this broader error theory, for the following reasons. 1. This error theory implies that there is no reason to believe this error theory (there are no reasons at all, so a fortiori there are no reasons to believe this error theory), and anyone who understands it well enough to be in a position to believe it would have to know this. 2. We can’t believe something if we believe that there is no reason to believe it. 3. Therefore, we can’t believe this error theory. Again, our belief in it would be in a certain way self-defeating.
Third example (Spoilers for Scott Alexander’s novel Unsong):
Gur fgbevrf bs gur Pbzrg Xvat naq Ryvfun ora Nohlnu ner nyfb rknzcyrf bs guvf “frys-qrsrngvat ernfbaf” curabzraba. Gur Pbzrg Xvat pna’g tb vagb Uryy orpnhfr va beqre gb tb vagb Uryy ur jbhyq unir gb or rivy. Ohg ur pna’g whfg qb rivy npgf va beqre gb vapernfr uvf “rivy fpber” orpnhfr nal rivy npgf ur qvq jbhyq hygvzngryl or va gur freivpr bs gur tbbq (tbvat vagb Uryy va beqre gb qrfgebl vg), naq gurersber jbhyqa’g pbhag gb znxr uvz rivy. Fb ur pna’g npphzhyngr nal rivy gb trg vagb Uryy gb qrfgebl vg. Ntnva, uvf ernfba sbe tbvat vagb Uryy qrsrngrq uvf novyvgl gb npghnyyl trg vagb Uryy.
What all of these examples have in common is that someone’s reason for doing something directly makes it the case that they can’t do it. Unless they can find a different reason to do the thing, they won’t be able to do it at all.
One of the best (and funniest) examples of common knowledge that I know of is the episode in Friends where (minor spoilers for Friends, rot13) . . . . . . . . . . . Enpury naq Cubror svaq bhg gung Zbavpn naq Punaqyre ner qngvat (juvpu gurl unqa’g gbyq nalbar rkprcg Wbrl lrg), ohg gura qrpvqr gb zrff jvgu gurz ol cergraqvat gurl qba’g xabj naq univat Cubror syveg jvgu Punaqyre. Punaqyre naq Zbavpn svther vg bhg naq qrpvqr gb zrff jvgu gurz ol univat Punaqyre gnxr gur onvg naq syveg onpx. Enpury naq Cubror gura svther bhg gung Punaqyre naq Zbavpn xabj, naq fgvyy xrrc hc gur cergrafr, gb gur cbvag gung Cubror naq Punaqyre tb ba n snhk qngr naq onfvpnyyl rnpu gel gb trg gur bgure gb nqzvg vg svefg.
Musings on Metaethical Uncertainty
How should we deal with metaethical uncertainty? By “metaethics” I mean the metaphysics and epistemology of ethics (and not, as is sometimes meant in this community, highly abstract/general first-order ethical issues).
One answer is this: insofar as some metaethical issue is relevant for first-order ethical issues, deal with it as you would any other normative uncertainty. And insofar as it is not relevant for first-order ethical issues, ignore it (discounting, of course, intrinsic curiosity and any value knowledge has for its own sake).
Some people think that normative ethical issues ought to be completely independent of metaethics: “The whole idea [of my metaethical naturalism] is to hold fixed ordinary normative ideas and try to answer some further explanatory questions” (Schroeder, Mark. “What Matters About Metaethics?” In P. Singer ed. Does Anything Really Matter?: Essays on Parfit on Objectivity. OUP, 2017. P. 218-19). Others (e.g. McPherson, Tristram. For Unity in Moral Theorizing. PhD Dissertation, Princeton, 2008.) believe that metaethical and normative ethical theorizing should inform each other. For the first group, my suggestion in the previous paragraph recommends that they ignore metaethics entirely (again, setting aside any intrinsic motivation to study it), while for the second my suggestion recommends pursuing exclusively those areas which are likely to influence conclusions in normative ethics.
In fact, one might also take this attitude to certain questions in normative ethics. There are some theories in normative ethics that are extensionally equivalent: they recommend the exact same actions in every conceivable case. For example, some varieties of consequentialism can mimic certain forms of deontology, with the only differences between the theories being the reasons they give for why certain actions are right or wrong, not which actions they recommend. According to this way of thinking, these theories are not worth deciding between.
We might suggest the following method for ethical and metaethical theorizing: start with some set of decisions you’re unsure about. If you are considering whether to investigate some ethical or metaethical issue, first ask yourself if it would make a difference to at least one of those decisions. If it wouldn’t, ignore it. This seems to have a certain similarity with verificationism: if something wouldn’t make a difference to at least some conceivable observation, then it’s “metaphysical” and not worth talking about. Given this, it may be vulnerable to some of the same critiques as positivism, though I’m not sure, since I’m not very familiar with those critiques and the replies to them.
Note that I haven’t argued for this position, and I’m not even entirely sure I endorse it (though I also suspect that it will seem almost laughably obvious to some). I just wanted to get it out there. I may write a top-level post later exploring these ideas with more rigor.
See also: Paul Graham on How To Do Philosophy
Ikaxas’ Hammertime Final Exam
My submission: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/Rwo3S8cttKYPEvdvd/ikaxas-hammertime-final-exam Echoing the others, thanks for doing this, and I found this a worthwhile exercise.
Hi, thanks for the comment! Yep, I agree that people often bias towards not changing their minds, and that this means it’s probably better to focus on improving in that direction for the moment (I think Duncan’s pendulum analogy is spot-on). When I was thinking about this originally, I framed it more as “why do settled beliefs feel so appealing to one part of me when they’re so obviously a bad idea”, I.e. looking more for an explanation than a (partial) justification. I was originally going to frame it like that here too, but it felt like a bit of a just-so story so I didn’t want to speculate about whether it was the actual explanation (e.g. evolutionarily).
Let me see if I’ve got your argument right:
(1) It seems likely that the world is a simulation (simulation argument)
(2) If (1) is true, then it’s most likely that I am the only conscious being in existence (presumably due to computational efficiency constraints on the simulation, and where “in existence” means “within this simulation”)
(3) If I am the only conscious being in existence, then it would be unethical for me to waste resources improving the lives of anyone but myself, because they are not conscious anyway, and it is most ethical for me to maximize the good in my own life.
(4) Therefore, it’s likely that the most ethical thing for me to do is to maximize the good in my own life (ethical egoism).
Is this right?
I had never considered this argument before; it’s a really interesting argument, and I think it has a lot of promise. I especially had never really thought about premise (2) or its implications for premise (3), I think that is a really forceful point.
I’m not yet fully convinced though; let me see if I can explain why.
First, I don’t think premise (2) is true. The simulation argument, at least as I tend to hear it presented, is based on the premise that future humans would want to run “ancestor simulations” in order to see how different versions of history would play out. If this is the case, it seems like first-person simulations wouldn’t really do them much good; they’d have to simulate everyone in order to get the value they’d want out of the simulations. To be clear, by “first person simulation” I mean a simulation that renders only from the perspective of one person. It seems to me that, if you’re a physicalist about consciousness, if the simulation was rendering everywhere, then all the people in the simulation would have to be conscious, because consciousness just is the execution of certain computations, and it would be necessary to run those computations in order to get an accurate simulation. This also means that, even in a first-person simulation, the people you were interacting with would be conscious as long as they were within your frame of awareness (otherwise the simulation couldn’t be accurate), it’s just that they would blink out of existence once they left your frame of awareness.
Second, correct me if I’m wrong, but it seems to me that premise (3) is actually assuming Utilitarianism (or some other form of agent-neutral consequentialism) which simply reduces to egoism when there’s only one conscious agent in the world. So at bottom, the disagreement between yourself and effective altruists isn’t normative, it’s empirical (i.e. it’s not about your fundamental moral theory, but simply about which beings are conscious). This isn’t really a counterargument, more of an observation that you seem to have more in common with effective altruists than it may seem just on the basis that you call your position “ethical egoism.” If, counterfactually, there _were_ other conscious beings in the world, would you think that they also had moral worth?
Third, assuming that your answer to that question is “yes,” I think that it’s still often worth it to act altruistically, even on your theory, on the basis of expected utility maximization. Suppose you think that there’s only an extremely small chance that there are other conscious beings, say only .01%. Even so, if there are _enough_ lives at stake, even if you think they aren’t conscious it can be worth it to act as if they are, because it would be morally catastrophic if you did not and they turned out to be conscious after all. I think this turns out to be equivalent to valuing other lives (and others’ happiness, etc.) at X% the value of your own, where X is the probability you assign to their being conscious. So, if you assign a .01% chance that you’re wrong about this argument and other people are conscious after all, you should be willing to e.g. sacrifice your life to save 100 others. Or if you think it’s .001%, you should be willing to sacrifice your life to save 1000 others.
Anyway, I’m curious to hear your thoughts on all of this. Thanks for the thought-provoking article!
I’ll respond to your point about me-simulation in the comments of your other post, as you suggested.
Response to your Section II
I’m skeptical that your utility function is reducible to the perception of complexity. In Fake Utility Functions Eliezer writes:
Press [the one constructing the Amazingly Simple Utility Function] on some particular point, like the love a mother has for her children, and they reply “But if the superintelligence wants ‘complexity’, it will see how complicated the parent-child relationship is, and therefore encourage mothers to love their children.” Goodness, where do I start?
Begin with the motivated stopping: A superintelligence actually searching for ways to maximize complexity wouldn’t conveniently stop if it noticed that a parent-child relation was complex. It would ask if anything else was more complex. This is a fake justification; the one trying to argue the imaginary superintelligence into a policy selection, didn’t really arrive at that policy proposal by carrying out a pure search for ways to maximize complexity.
The whole argument is a fake morality. If what you really valued was complexity, then you would be justifying the parental-love drive by pointing to how it increases complexity. If you justify a complexity drive by alleging that it increases parental love, it means that what you really value is the parental love. It’s like giving a prosocial argument in favor of selfishness.
In “You Don’t Get to Know What You’re Fighting For,” Nate Soares writes:
There are facts about what you care about, but you don’t get to know them all. Not by default. Not yet. Humans don’t have that sort of introspective capabilities yet. They don’t have that sort of philosophical sophistication yet. But they do have a massive and well-documented incentive to convince themselves that they care about simple things — which is why it’s a bit suspicious when people go around claiming they know their true preferences.
From here, it looks very unlikely to me that anyone has the ability to pin down exactly what they really care about. Why? Because of where human values came from. Remember that one time that Time tried to build a mind that wanted to eat healthy, and accidentally built a mind that enjoys salt and fat? I jest, of course, and it’s dangerous to anthropomorphize natural selection, but the point stands: our values come from a complex and intricate process tied closely to innumerable coincidences of history.
Thou art Godshatter, whose utility function has a thousand terms, each of which is in itself indispensible. While the utility function of human beings is complex, that doesn’t imply that it reduces to “complexity is valuable.”
I don’t claim that what I’ve just said should convince you that your utility function isn’t “maximize the amount of complexity I perceive”; I’m not in your head, for all I know it could be. All I intend it to convey is my reasons for being skeptical.
Let me ask you this: Why do you value complexity? And how do you know?
Response to your section III
Regarding why it’s still worth it to act altruistically: I just want to clarify that the part of my comment that you quoted:
“[...] even in a first-person simulation, the people you were interacting with would be conscious as long as they were within your frame of awareness (otherwise the simulation couldn’t be accurate), it’s just that they would blink out of existence once they left your frame of awareness.”
wasn’t supposed to have anything to do with my argument that it’s still worth it to act altruistically.
Suppose that premise (2) above is true, i.e. you really are the only conscious being in the me-simulation, and even the people in your frame of awareness aren’t conscious, even while they’re there. Even if that’s the case, your credence that it’s the case shouldn’t be 100%; you should have at least some miniscule doubt. Suppose that you assign a .01 credence to the possibility that premise (2) is false (i.e. a 1% credence); that is, you think there’s a 99% chance it’s true and a 1% chance it’s false. In that case, suppose you could perform some action that, if premise (2) were false, would produce 1,000,0000 utils for some people who aren’t you. Then the expected utility of that action, even if you think premise (2) has a 99% chance of being right, is 10,000 utils. So if you don’t have any other actions available that produce more than 10,000 utils, you should do that action. And the conclusion is the same even if the numbers are different.
A further argument
A further argument also occurred to me for why it might still be worth it to act altruistically after I posted my original comment, namely the following: if there are enough me-simulations that you are likely to be in one of them, then it’s also likely that you appear in at least some other me-simulations as a “shadow-person,” to use Bostrom’s term. And since you are simply an instantiation of an algorithm, and the algorithm of you-in-the-me-simulation is similar to the algorithm of you-as-a-shadow-person, due to Functional Decision Theory and Timeless Decision Theory considerations your actions in the me-simulation will affect the actions of you-as-a-shadow-person. And you-as-a-shadow-person’s actions will affect the conscious person who is in the other me-simulation, which means that you-in-the-me-simulation’s actions will, acausally, have effects on other conscious beings, so you should want to act in such a way that the outputs of your near-copies in other me-simulations will have positive effects on the conscious inhabitants of those other me-simulations. If this argument isn’t clear, let me know and I can try to rephrase it. It’s also not my True Rejection, so I don’t place too much weight on it.
I think the advice to primarily post to your personal blog is very good; this won’t completely tank visibility of your posts, since many people read the “community” feed, but the frontpage has a particular purpose that your posts maybe aren’t fulfilling right now (though they might in the future once you’ve had more practice writing, and writing for this community in particular).
However, I wouldn’t completely discourage you from writing about topics that the Sequences have covered before reading about those topics in the Sequences. (Sorry, I know that last sentence had a ton of negations in it, translation: if you want to write about a topic, but haven’t read the relevant portions of the Sequences yet, I’d say still do it). There are several reasons for this:
1. If you have a view on something before reading Eliezer’s thoughts on it, this can help you integrate Eliezer’s views into your own, without doing so blindly. It’s easier to learn something if you already have some related beliefs for it to latch onto (e.g., it’s easier to learn about Japanese history if you already know something about, say, anime, because there will be certain things from anime that you’ll be able to use as hooks for the new historical knowledge to latch onto).
2. If you write about something before seeing Eliezer’s thoughts, you may have a fresh take that turns out to be correct (though more often you will write something, look at Eliezer’s thoughts, and see that you fell into a trap that Eliezer already warned about. But that’s okay I think, you still learned from it).
That is to say, you can write _unencumbered_ by Eliezer’s work to some extent. It’s easier to do an Original Seeing if you haven’t already read Eliezer’s thoughts on some topic. It’s good to dare to be wrong.
However, if you do this, I would advise you to either
1. keep those writings private, or
2. frame them as “I’m writing this before reading Eliezer’s work on the topic, in preparation for reading said work” and perhaps write a follow-up post after reading Eliezer’s relevant work. Even Eliezer did this while writing the sequences, e.g. with Gary Drescher’s work; it’s a well-respected technique in this community to write up your (preliminary) thoughts on some topic _before_ reading the relevant literature (though with the expectation that you’ll probably update after reading said literature).
But yeah, do definitely read the Sequences sooner rather than later, and expect that what you write after reading them will be more relevant to this community than what you write before reading them.
I also want to echo ESRogs’s kudos for getting feedback rather than giving up.
Also, as a datapoint, I also found the Effective Egoism post somewhat off-putting at first. A lot of stuff in that post could have used a lot more unpacking, and some of the phrasings felt clumsy or in other ways “off” (especially the “It will be the last” at the beginning). That, combined with the topic, fits with my model of the types of things this community tends to downvote. But thanks for engaging so well with my comment, and I’m glad it seems to have helped others understand the post better as well.
Anyway, good luck with your future writing, for this site and elsewhere!
First: thank you for writing this post, emphatically agree that these are issues that need to be discussed systematically.
Second: I think lots of people in the LW community are already aware of him, but I want to point at Jonathan Haidt as someone who is doing good work on these kinds of problems (would welcome disagreement on this point, as I think I’m a bit too confident in it for my own good).
Third: A problem suggested by Haidt’s work to add to this list, in the context of a society/nation-scale group (epistemic status: somewhat half-baked):
To optimize for cohesion (at least in a population containing authoritarians, likely unavoidable at a nation scale), a community should emphasize similarities among group members; to optimize for truth-seeking, a community should be viewpoint diverse (couldn’t find one link that summed up the whole argument on short notice, but I think this comes close). It seems to me that norms that foster truth-seeking are in tension with norms that foster cohesion, to the extent that the former requires diversity while the latter requires sameness. Perhaps this doesn’t apply as much to smaller, more intentional communities (in particular because such communities can be selected for people who value diversity, and against people who are threatened by/uncomfortable with it), but on a nation scale I think it does apply. Would welcome criticism on this as well, the idea is somewhat half-formed and I have not given up hope that there is a way to reconcile these two goals in a satisfactory way. I plan to write at least one longer-form, top-level post on this topic at some point.