I’m currently working as a Research Scholar at the Future of Humanity Institute. I’ve previously co-created the application Guesstimate. Opinions are typically my own.
ozziegooen(Ozzie Gooen)
Karma: 1,888
Good point. One point against this would be that upon reflection, I expect that human immortality is not likely to be optimal in most ways we may imagine it. I expect that on most likely consequentialist framings, the resources that could be spent on continuing my own “individual self” would be more effectively used elsewhere. You might need a very liberal notion of “self” to consider what gets kept as “you.”
That said, this wouldn’t be a bad thing, it would be more of a series of obvious decisions and improvements.
I’ve been thinking about this recently, especially for global history and futurism. It seems like there should really be a word for it. A [top quora post](https://www.quora.com/What-does-the-phrase-It-was-the-best-of-times-It-was-the-worst-of-times-mean) on the topic recommends “Dialectical” but I’m hesitant.
Related, the classic line from A Tale of Two Cities:
“It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair …, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to Heaven, we were all going direct the other way …”
It’s probably too late to change the title of this, but I’d press back against that a bit.
To me, the “Philosophy of X” typically refers to an entire academic field of study. Philosophy of Physics, Philosophy of Science, Philosophy of Psychology, which is a distinct thing.
My guess is that this wasn’t your intention, but calling this “Philosophy of Therapy” could be read as you asserting that this post represents an overview or beginning of a similar field.
I could imagine the naming being fine on your blog, but LessWrong is quite big. If I were to point someone to the “Philosophy of Therapy”, I’d expect something different, and think they would too.
Thanks for this, I found it an interesting overview.
I would note that I found the title a bit confusing. I would have suggested a more descriptive name, maybe something like “Modalities of Psychological Disciplines” or something more to the point.
Consumer Reports itself is centralized, but it’s one of a cluster of various reviewing groups, none of which gets official state status.
That’s a good point, I think it’s fair here.
I was using “athletes” as a thought experiment. I do think it’s worth considering and having a bunch of clear objective metrics could be interesting and useful, especially if done gradually and with the right summary stats. However, the first steps for metrics of intellectuals would be subjective reviews and evaluations and similar.
Things will also get more interesting as we get better AI and similar to provide interesting stats that aren’t exactly “boring objective stats” but also not quite “well thought out reviews” either.
I’d suggest decentralized rating systems for this reason. Think movie reviewers and Consumer Reports.
Good points, thanks.
I think ranking systems can be very powerful (as would make sense for something I’m claiming to be important), and can be quite bad if done poorly (arguably, current uses of citations are quite poor). Being careful matters a lot.
I guess this wasn’t very obvious, but my recommendation is to use a collection of objective and subjective measurements, taking inspiration to how we evaluate college applicants, civil servants, computers, as well as athletes.
I’m all for judgement calls if the process could be systematized and done well.
Agreed there’s a limit. It’s hard. But, to be fair, so are challenges like qualifying students, government officials, engineers, doctors, lawyers, smart phones, movies, books.
Around “who rates the raters”, the thought is that:
First, the raters should rate themselves.
There should be a decentralized pool of raters, each of which rates each other.
There are also methods that raters could use to provide additional verification, but that’s for another post.
Expert Political Judgement discussed this. From what I remember they used a variety of “Experts”, many I believe were Academics. I believe these crossed over significantly with what we would think of as intellectuals.
I like the name “intellectual-sabermetrics”.
Luke Muehlhauser has been calling out people online for making bad predictions.
One common issue though is that many intellectuals are trained specifically not to communicate falsifiable predictions. They often try to word things in ways that seem confident, but are easy to argue against after the fact.
Fair point, thanks.
I considered it briefly but have been reading/chatting recently about problems with citation indices so left it out. That said, it does serve a function.
Thanks for the feedback!
That sounds similar to what I called “Option 3”; “You gradually change or improve the community while doing minor self censorship.”.
I think that doing this is highly challenging and very far from being trivial. Online you can often barely tell who your followers are for one. I think that one should try to do things like you mention, but don’t think it’s enough in most settings, for people with sizeable (thousands of people + ) audiences.
Open Communication in the Days of Malicious Online Actors
Thanks! Some very quick thoughts:
Intellectuals aren’t the ones playing the game, they’re the ones figuring out the rules of the game.
This doesn’t seem true to me. There’s relatively little systematic literature from intellectuals trying to understand what structural things make for quality intellectual standards. The majority of it seems to be arguing and discussing specific orthogonal opinions. It’s true that they “are the ones” to figure out the rules of the game, but this is a small minority of them, and for these people, it’s often a side endeavor.
In a way, this problem is just scaling up the old reputation/prestige system.
Definitely. I think the process of “evaluation standardization and openness” is a repeated one across industries and sectors. There’s a lot of value to be had in understanding the wisdom of existing informal evaluation systems and scaling them into formal ones.
Maybe some kind of social app inspired by liquid democracy/quadratic voting might work?
I imagine the space of options here is quite vast. This option seems like a neat choice. Perhaps several distinct efforts could be tried.
What metrics do you have in mind?
I have some rough ideas, want to brainstorm on this a bit more before writing more.
There’s a funny thing about new signaling mechanisms.
If they disagree with old ones, then at least some people who did well in the old ones will complain (loudly).
If they perfectly agree with old ones, then they provide no evaluative value.
In general, introducing new signaling mechanisms is challenging, very much for this reason.
If they can last though, then eventually those in power will be ones who did well on them, so these people will champion them vs. future endeavors. So they can have lasting lock-in. It’s more of a reason to work hard to get them right.
“Fundamentally not possible” Thanks for providing such a clear and intense position.
I think this is either misunderstanding what I’m saying, or is giving up on the issue incredibly quickly.
Sports are a particularly good examples of pre-labeled rules, but I don’t think that means that more tricky things are impossible to measure. (See How to Measure Anything). Even in sports, the typical metrics don’t correlate perfectly with player value; it’s taken a fair bit of investigation to attempt to piece this together. It would have been really easy early on to dismiss the initial recording of metrics; “These metrics are flawed, it’s useless to try.” It took sabermetrics several decades to get to where it is today.
There are many, many more fuzzy endeavors that are challenging to evaluate, but where we have developed substantial systems to a better job than “just let people intuit things.”
The Chinese Imperial Examinations were considered a substantial success for meritocracy and quality in government.
Colleges have extensive processes of SAT/ACT scores, high school transcripts, and essays. This seems much better than “a few interviews”
When I played an instrument in school, I went to an evaluator each year who ranked me on a set of measures. The ranking determined which regional bands I would get to be in. (see NYSSMA)
Modern Western law is mostly statutory. One could have easily said, “Things are complicated! If we write up formal procedures, that would get in the way of the unique circumstances.”
Most professional associations have actual tests to complete. If you want to be a lawyer you need to pass the Bar. If you want to be a doctor, get ready to face the US Licensing Examinations.
the main point of being an intellectual is to question accepted concepts and develop new ones. So you’re saying that one main thing intellectuals do is question category systems and suggest new ones? This is almost never what I see intellectuals do. I often see them fighting for some side or another, presenting some arguments, finding lots of data and anecdotes. Intellectualism is a massive field.
If it is the case that intellectuals are so good at doing this, then I suggest they start with figuring out concepts on which to evaluate themselves on, and continue to improve those.
Can we hold intellectuals to similar public standards as athletes?
Like that example a lot, thanks for the comment.
Perhaps one could say that a complete translation of an English work would include a full description of English culture. This is kind of similar to complexity and Turing machines. Any program could be described in any programming language, by first fully describing the programming language in question.
One point I’d bring up is to understand Harry Potter not as a necessary and complete work, but rather as the best method J.K.Rowling had of fulfilling her intentions using limited time and resources. It’s possible she didn’t care about “Sherbet Lemon”, but all she cared about was to raise some experience in the reader, as a way to optimize a greater pleasure. Perhaps a translator would realize this, and find some superior detail, both for people with other languages, and even for future English works.
On the more intense end, it could be later identified that setting the plot around Magical Wizards is inferior to doing so in space stations, and many of the details are revised accordingly, but in ways that would maximize the benefits of the material.
Thanks for your take on this. I think our intuitions here differ a fair bit.
I find it difficult to reason about what human brains will do once they are uploaded or whatever and dramatically altered. Many of the things we’re used to now may change dramatically. It may be fair to consider that many kinds of “uploaded and modified humans” will become as different to modern humans as we are to simple algorithms or insects.
It could also be that some people will choose to “live forever”, but many others will be choose to be replaced.