I have taken the survey.
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Karma: 1,852
Before and After
At the start of the decade I was 13, I’m now 23.
Philosophy
Before: I was a recovering conspiracy theorist. I’d figured out on my own that my beliefs should be able to predict the future, and started insisting they do. I wrote down things I expected to happen by a certain time in a giant list, and went back to record the outcome. I wanted to be a video game developer, but didn’t know how to start.
A 13 year old boy sits on a swingset in his backyard, listening to Owl City[0] and Lemon Demon[1] as frosty dew melts off green grass in the morning sun. He’s daydreaming about the end of the world and his impending death. There is no god and nobody is coming to save him.
After: The oldest copy of Harry Potter and The Methods Of Rationality I can find on my computer is dated January 1st of 2011 at 4:13AM. Now in 2019 I have read many books about phreakers, hackers, makers, computer wizards, rationalists, stats nerds, and the subjects that interest them. My enthusiastic anarchism has given way to a grim realpolitik that still values freedom but understands there are no easy solutions and everything runs on incentives. I call myself an extropian because ‘singularitan’ sounds too awkward.
A young man is washing the main board of an original Xbox with vinegar. His work bench has an overhead light, it’s the brightest thing in the room and everything else looks dim by comparison. The intent of the Xbox was that its data be confined to its aging hardware. He remembers taking Adderall that day, he has perfect focus as he washes away the corrosion left behind by the clock capacitor. During this task he reflects on the decay inherent in all things. The data in his brain is also confined to its aging hardware, and as it ages it corrodes. In his reflections he is no different from this Xbox, peering into his magnifying glass at an eroded trace on the board he sees the infinite void ahead of him. He imagines himself to be washing the body of an embryonic god.
Skills
Before: I was probably most skilled at playing Halo, and only so good at that. I found the idea of writing a 2-3 page essay an imposition. It was around this time that I first installed Linux, I could not program.
After: I am now probably most skilled at writing, but only so good at that. ;) I can write a 12 page lab report in a weekend. I’m skilled enough at programming to write a compiler.
Career & Lifestyle
Career is just starting, though I did make a point of trying to do Real Things during school. Lifestyle is more or less unchanged, a lot of time spent indoors on nerdy things.
Between
Oops and Duh
The curse of dimensionality makes it easy to get confused about peoples relative ability to each other. It is however a map/territory error to believe that your confusion means there is no sense in which some people are massively more competent than others. Duh.
People are only a little altruistic, and only value ‘purity’ in products a little for its own sake. Distributed systems will generally lose to centralized systems which are more convenient, because they more or less compete on the same metrics. If you want people to use them then, you need to work a lot harder. Oops.
The reason why you got diagnosed with ADD as a kid isn’t because it was a fad, it’s because you had every symptom including the emotional regulation issues[2] which are part of the disorder but not in the DSM. Incidentally, you have to fight so hard to do schoolwork because you have untreated ADD. Oops.
Instead of trying to write your own programs while you learn to program, you’d be better off trying to clone other programs that already exist. This frees you from having to do any of the design while you struggle with programming, gives you an objective measure of progress, ensures you are capable of doing useful work, and has other benefits as well. I wasted lots of time by not knowing this. Duh.
Habits
Probably the biggest habit I broke was playing video games. I rarely play video games these days, and go out of my way to avoid television and fiction stories as well. Life is too short to waste it on transient hallucinations, the real world is much more interesting.
I think the biggest habit I started was talking to people, a lot. With the Internet and smart phones you can basically always be in a conversation if you want to. I started making a point of always talking to people about my ideas, getting feedback, practicing persuasion, etc.
Experiences
I spent 7 of the last 10 years in school, and I hate school. Realistically then if I’m being honest with myself, this was not a fun decade for me. I probably had more bad experiences than good, but the good experiences were good enough to balance it out.
Maybe I’ll come back to this section later and edit in more, maybe I won’t. :)
Worth Noting
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I’m overall satisfied with this decade. I could have done more if I was playing perfectly, but I feel pretty good about where I am right now.
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My past self should really get their ADD treated before they spend 4 years of high school struggling against it. He should also stop focusing so much on program ‘correctness’ or whatever that he’s not even qualified to understand, and just focus on replicating the computer programs he interacts with. It’s okay to use a web framework. The reason they’re not intellectually satisfied with the web is that all the knowledge they want is on Google Scholar and buried in academic PDF’s and print books. I think my past self would probably be pretty skeptical of a lot of this, and then figure out it’s true as they’re not making progress fast enough.
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I’ll probably remember the 2010′s for: Anonymous, Wikileaks, Machine Learning, frivolous smartphone driven social media apps, memes, the Lain-ification of the Internet with the alt-right & Trump (etc), economic anxiety and rent seeking, the death of journalism.
[0]: This Is The Future by Owl City
[1]: Sundial by Lemon Demon
[2]: I grew up and no longer have emotional regulation issues.
I have this intuitive notion that:
I do think the relevant question is whether your comments are being perceived as demanding in a similar way. From what I can tell, the answer is yes, in a somewhat lesser magnitude, but still a quite high level, enough for many people to independently complain to me about your comments, and express explicit frustration towards me, and tell me that your comments are one of the major reasons they are not contributing to LessWrong.
I agree that you are not as bizarrely demanding as curi was, but you do usually demand quite a lot.
When people talk about “demanding” in this sense what they’re actually doing is a very low level reasoning mistake EY talks about in his post on Security Mindset:
AMBER: That sounds a little extreme.
CORAL: History shows that reality has not cared what you consider “extreme” in this regard, and that is why your Wi-Fi-enabled lightbulb is part of a Russian botnet.
AMBER: Look, I understand that you want to get all the fiddly tiny bits of the system exactly right. I like tidy neat things too. But let’s be reasonable; we can’t always get everything we want in life.
CORAL: You think you’re negotiating with me, but you’re really negotiating with Murphy’s Law. I’m afraid that Mr. Murphy has historically been quite unreasonable in his demands, and rather unforgiving of those who refuse to meet them. I’m not advocating a policy to you, just telling you what happens if you don’t follow that policy. Maybe you think it’s not particularly bad if your lightbulb is doing denial-of-service attacks on a mattress store in Estonia. But if you do want a system to be secure, you need to do certain things, and that part is more of a law of nature than a negotiable demand.
Where, there is a certain level of detail and effort that simply has to go into describing concepts if you want to do so clearly and reliably. There are inviolable, non-negotiable laws of communication. We may not be able to precisely define them but that doesn’t mean they don’t exist. We certainly know some of their theoretical aspects thanks to scholars like Shannon.
I think a lot of what Said does is insist that people put in that effort, that The Law be followed so to speak. Unfortunately there is no intrinsic punishment for not following the law besides being misunderstood (which isn’t really so costly to the speaker, and hard for them to detect in a blog format). That means they commit a map/territory error analogous to the Rust programmer who insists Rust makes things much harder than C does. There’s probably some truth to this, but a lot of the thing is just that Rust forces the programmer to write code at the level of difficulty it would have if C didn’t let you get away with things being broken.
I like the spirit of this post, but think I object to considering this ‘too smart for your own good’. That framing feels more like an identity-protecting maneuver than trying to get at reality. The reality is that you think you’re smarter than you are, and it causes you to trip over your untied shoelaces. You acknowledge this of course, but describing it accurately seems beyond your comfort zone. The closest you get is when you put ‘smart’ in scare quotes near the end of the essay.
Just be honest with yourself, it hurts at first but the improvement in perspective is massive.
I have taken the survey.
My Complaint: High Variance
Well, to put it delicately the questions have seemed high variance when it comes to quality.
That is the questions posed have been either quite good or stunningly mediocre with little in between.
3 examples of good questions
https://www.greaterwrong.com/posts/8EqTiMPbadFRqYHqp/how-old-is-smallpox
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/Xt22Pqut4c6SAdWo2/what-self-help-has-helped-you
3 examples of not as good questions
I’d prefer to be gentle when listing examples of not-so-good questions, but a few I think are unambiguously in this category are:
(No clarification given in post, whole premise is kind of odd)
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/TKHvBXHpMakRDqqvT/in-what-ways-are-holidays-good
(Bizarre, alien perspective. If I were a visitor and I saw this post I would assume the forum is an offshoot of Wrong Planet )
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/AAamNiev4YsC4jK2n/sunscreen-when-why-why-not
(I don’t quite understand what the warrant is for discussing this on LW. Yes it’s a decision, which involves risk, but lots of things in our lives are decisions involving risk. If those are the only criteria for discussion I don’t really see any reason why we should be discussing rationality-per-se as opposed to the thousands of little things like this we face throughout our life.)
What I Would Like To See
Personally I think that it would help if you clarified the purpose and scope of the questions feature. What sort of questions should people be asking, what features make a good question, some examples of well posed questions, etc. Don’t skimp on this or chicken out. Good principles should exclude things, they should even exclude some things which would be net positive value to discuss! This is in the interest of keeping net negative gray areas from dominating to preserve positive edge cases.
That is to say, I want some concrete guidelines I can point to and say “Sorry but this question doesn’t seem appropriate for the site.” or “Right now this question isn’t the best it could be, some ways you could improve it to be more in line with our community policy is...”
I’d like to make a miniature announcement so there isn’t any confusion:
Most of the time when somebody writes in a suggestion for improving the questions I don’t reply to it, I just silently upvote the post and write down the question in a list of things to do for the next survey. But I am reading them, and I plan to go through and read them again before I wrap up the final survey analysis.
The CFAR branch of rationality is heavily inspired by General Semantics, with its focus on training your intuitive reactions, evaluation, the ways in which we’re biased by language, etc. Eliezer Yudkowsky mentions that he was influenced by The World of Null-A, a science fiction novel about a world where General Semantics has taken over as the dominant philosophy of society.
Question: Considering the similarity to what Alfred Korzybski was trying to do with General Semantics to the workshop and consulting model of CFAR, are you aware of a good analysis of how General Semantics failed? If so, has this informed your strategic approach with CFAR at all?
Thanks for inspiring GreaterWrong’s new ignore feature.
Does CFAR have a research agenda? If so, is it published anywhere?
Yet, somehow, it is you saying that there were people who left the rationality movement because of the Solstice ritual, which is the kind of hysterical reaction I tried to point at. (I can’t imagine myself leaving a movement just because a few of its members decided to meet and sing a song together.)
I don’t think it’s really “a few people singing songs together”. It’s more like...an overall shift in demographics, tone, and norms. If I had to put it succinctly, the old school LessWrong was for serious STEM nerds and hard science fiction dorks. It was super super deep into the whole Shock Level memeplex thing. Over time it’s become a much softer sort of fandom geek thing. Rationalist Tumblr and SlateStarCodex aren’t marginal colonies, they’re the center driving force behind what’s left of the original ‘LessWrong rationality movement’. Naturally, a lot of those old guard members find this abhorrent and have no plans to ever participate in it.
I don’t blame them.
Generally, when I ask the sort of questions Pat Modesto does it’s because I want to see proof that someone has really thought a course of action through. It’s not about status, I’m asking to see your hero license because I want a costly signal that you’re not full of shit. In your post you write the following in argument against:
stranger: Wrong. Your model of heroic status is that it ought to be a reward for heroic service to the tribe. You think that while of course we should discourage people from claiming this heroic status without having yet served the tribe, no one should find it intuitively objectionable to merely try to serve the tribe, as long as they’re careful to disclaim that they haven’t yet served it and don’t claim that they already deserve the relevant status boost.
Actually, this is in fact largely how it works as far as I know. However, helping costs resources. So any time I have to consider whether to help you I need to evaluate your chances of success. Without knowing very much about your personality, which is very different from your goals, I have no way of knowing whether you’re the type to bullshit yourself. That’s why having a variant of Pat Modesto in your head is useful. A cognitive frame that looks at yourself from the outside view and asks if there’s any reason we should expect your 10% sense of success to be better than anyone else’s. And in point of fact, with you writing HPMOR there absolutely was. If anything the problem is that you’re being too nice to Pat. He’s asking you to justify something tangled up with his identity, and unfortunately to cut your opponent it’s that identity you’ll need to slash through. Here is how I’d respond to Pat:
Hypothesis: Okay Patrick, I see what’s going on here. What you have to understand is that when I say I expect my fanfiction to be successful, a lot of the things you see as key metrics predicting my success are in fact precisely the reasons why my fanfiction has the potential to be the most reviewed Harry Potter fanfic of all time. It’s precisely because I haven’t had current top authors review my plot or consciously emulated what’s been most successful beforehand or looked at what Harry Potter fanfic readers like that I have any chance at all.
Pat: What? I’ve been trying to be polite but this is nonsense, crazytalk, do you have any idea what a fucking crank you are?
Hypothesis: No see, it’s not that I’m mistaken about how much of a crank I am. It’s more that you’re mistaken about how much what your community has matters. The truth of things is that Harry Potter fanfiction is an inbred genre written by people who are heavily selection biased through founder effects to care about stuff which will never let them write the most popular possible Harry Potter fanfiction. In fact, I don’t even expect to write the most popular possible fanfiction, just the one which empirically happens to be the most popular (with 10% probability of course). The reason why it doesn’t matter what top Harry Potter fanfic authors think, or what the community thinks, is that my story is not primarily a work of Harry Potter fanfiction. It’s a story about rationality that incidentally takes place in the Harry Potter universe with Harry-But-Not-Harry as the protagonist. The Harry Potter fanfic community has put thousands and thousands of hours of work into creating the best fanfic. However, it doesn’t matter how many Erlangs of work you do if you do the work in the wrong direction, or inside a local maxima that will never let you make progress towards the global maxima. For that reason, I’m not particularly worried if my fanfiction is controversial in your community.
Pat: Okay, and what makes you so much better?
Hypothesis: It’s not necessarily a matter of ‘better’, so much as it is one of basic interest and demographics. I think what I’m writing has the potential to both more useful and more interesting to a wider audience than even the best Harry Potter fanfiction that currently exists. As a consequence, it may attract that math Olympiad to MIRI. The good news is that even if it doesn’t, it’s just a thing I’m doing in my off hours anyway. It’s more useful than watching TV and even the mistaken belief that I have a 10% shot at things will motivate me to keep typing. Speaking of which…
Pat: Right, sorry. Um, can I read it when it’s done?
Hypothesis: Of course.
My honest opinion is that if you can’t dispatch Pat in about five minutes intellectually and rhetorically you haven’t put enough points into either the plan or your general verbal combat abilities.
ps. Having read HPMOR in 2011 when I was 14, it’s amusing to think you haven’t met us youngsters yet. I know there’s at least a handful of us out there.
I think it’s a sort of Double Entendre? It’s also possible the author didn’t actually read Zvi’s post in the first place. This is implied by the following:
Slack is a nerd culture concept for people who subscribe to a particular attitude about things; it prioritizes clever laziness over straightforward exertion and optionality over firm commitment.
In the broader nerd culture, slack is a thing from the Church of the Subgenius, where it means something more like a kind of adversarial zero sum fight over who has to do all the work. In that context, the post title makes total sense.
For an example of this, see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chez_Geek
“How hard it is to obtain the truth is a key factor to consider when thinking about secrets. Easy truths are simply accepted conventions. Pretty much everybody knows them. On the other side of the spectrum are things that are impossible to figure out. These are mysteries, not secrets. Take superstring theory in physics, for instance. You can’t really design experiments to test it. The big criticism is that no one could ever actually figure it out. But is it just really hard? Or is it a fool’s errand? This distinction is important. Intermediate, difficult things are at least possible. Impossible things are not. Knowing the difference is the difference between pursuing lucrative ventures and guaranteed failure.”
Stretch goal: bake EA principles in from the start.
This would be a huge turnoff for many people, including myself.
Most people don’t learn jargon by reading the original source for a term or phrase, they learn it from other people. Therefore one of the best ways to stop your jargon from being misused is to coin it in such a way that the jargon is a compressed representation of the concept it refers to. Authors in this milieu tend to be really bad at this. You yourself wrote about the concept of a ‘demon thread’, which I would like to (playfully) nominate for worst jargon ever coined on LessWrong. Its communicated meaning without the original thread boils down to ‘bad thread’ or ‘unholy thread’, which means that preserving the meaning you wanted it to have is a multi-front uphill battle in snow.
Another awful example from the CFAR handbook is the concept of ‘turbocharging’, which is a very specific thing but the concept handle just means ‘fast electricity’ or ‘speedy movement’. Were it not for the context, I wouldn’t know it was about learning at all. Even when I do have that context, it isn’t clear what makes it ‘turbo’. If it were more commonly used it would be almost instantly diluted without constant reference back to the original source.
For a non-LessWrong example, consider the academic social justice concept of ‘privilege’, which has (or had) a particular meaning that was useful to have a word for. However mainstream political commentary has diluted this phrase almost to the point of uselessness, making it a synonym for ‘inequality’.
It’d be interesting to do a study of say, 20-50 jargon terms and see how much level of dilution corresponds to degree-of-self-containment. In any case I suspect that trying to make jargon more self contained in its meaning would reduce misuse. “Costly Signaling” is harder to misinterpret than “Signaling”, for example.
Please do this. This alone would be enough to get me to use and link LW 2.0, at least to read stuff on it.
UPDATE (Fri Sep 15 14:56:28 PDT 2017): I’ll put my money where my mouth is. If the LW 2.0 team uploads at least 15 pieces of content authored by EY of a length at least one paragraph each from Facebook, I’ll donate 20 dollars to the project.
Preferably in a way where I can individually link them, but just dumping them on a public web page would also be acceptable in strict terms of this pledge.
I was about to write up some insight porn about it, and then was like “you know, Raemon, you should probably actually think about about this for real, since it seems like Pet Psychology Theories are one of the easier ways to get stuck in dumb cognitive traps.”
Thank you. I’m really really sick of seeing this kind of content on LW, and this moment of self reflection on your part is admirable. Have a strong upvote.
I looked up what kills Candida, found that I should use a shampoo containing ketoconazole, kept Googling, found a paper stating that 2% ketocanozole shampoo is an order of magnitude more effective than 1%, learned that only 1% ketocanozole shampoo was sold in the US, and ordered imported 2% Nizoral from Thailand via Amazon. Shortly thereafter, dandruff was no longer a significant issue for me and I could wear dark shirts without constantly checking my right shoulder for white specks. If my dermatologist knew anything about dandruff commonly being caused by a fungus, he never said a word.
So I don’t want to seem like I’m missing the point here, because I do understand that it’s about the high variance of medical care, however:
I had this same issue, and did not have to import my shampoo from Thailand. I went to the doctor complaining about incredible itching and dandruff, the doctor ran her hand through my hair and diagnosed a severe fungal infection. They then wrote a magic order for 2% Nizoral and I picked it up at the pharmacy. Saying it’s “not sold in the US” makes it sound like there’s some sort of total ban on the thing, as opposed to it being prescription only. And while I get that if you don’t have a doctor to help you then prescription-only may as well be “totally banned”, they’re still not the same thing from the perspective of someone who might one day catch horrible hair fungus.
The basic point I’m trying to make is that the system isn’t quite as broken as I feel like you’re portraying it here. If for some reason you disbelieve me, I have the prescription and the shampoo bottle.
Some thoughts.
I feel like Said is either expressing himself poorly here, or being unreasonable. After all, the logical conclusion of this would be that people can DDoS an author by spamming them with bad faith requests for clarification.
However I do think there is a law in this vein, something more subtle, more nuanced, a lot harder to define. And its statement is something like:
In order for a space to have good epistemics, here defined as something like “keep out woo, charlatans, cranks, etc”, that space must have certain norms around discourse. These norms can be formulated many different ways, but at their core they insist that authors have an obligation to respond to questions which have standing and warrant.
Standing means that:
The speaker can be reasonably assumed not to be bad faith
Is an abstract “member of the community”
It is generally agreed on by the audience that this persons input is in some way valuable
There are multiple ways to establish standing. The most obvious is to be well respected, so that when you say something people have the prior that it is important. Another way to establish standing is to write your comment or question excellently, as a costly signal that this is not low-effort critique or Paul Graham’s infamous “middlebrow dismissal”.
Warrant means that:
There are either commonly assumed or clearly articulated reasons for asking this question. We are not privileging the hypothesis without justification.
These reasons are more or less accepted by the audience.
Questions & comments lacking either standing or warrant can be dismissed, in fact the author does not even have to respond to them. In practice the determination of standing and warrant is made by the author, unless something seems worthy enough that their ignoring it is conspicuous.
I think you would be hard pressed to argue to me in seriousness that academics do not claim to have norms that peoples beliefs are open to challenge from anyone who has standing and warrant. I would argue that the historical LessWrong absolutely had implicit norms of this type. Moreover, EY himself has written about insufficient obligation to respond as a major bug in how we do intellectual communication.