quanticle
Karma: 995
NewTop
I would also note that every instance of the word “punch” and “punching” can be replaced by “sanction” or “sanctioning” and the denotational content of the essay would be virtually unchanged. The use of the word “punch” does little but smuggle in the connotations associated with physical violence, in an essay that is ostensibly about sanctions of all sorts, both physical and non-physical.
Edit: I have gone ahead and created a version of the essay with “punch” replaced by “sanction”. I copied the essay into a new markdown document, fixed the formatting, and then ran
%s/punch/sanction/gin vim. I fixed one resulting spelling error, but other than that I left the document as-is.
I disagree that the spread of printing presses was not constrained by insight. Gutenberg’s innovation was not the invention of the printing press, but rather the invention of a cheap way of making letterforms for the type in the printing press. Prior to Gutenberg, type had to be laboriously carved out of wood, or sculpted out bronze or ceramic. This was very expensive, and the resulting type wore out quickly, making it uneconomical to use for large print runs.
Gutenberg’s innovation was to cast the letterforms out of lead, using a hand mold. This innovation allowed him to produce letterforms that were cheaper, more durable and more efficient, in terms of ink consumption, than woodblock or ceramic letterforms that the Chinese were using. It seems to me that this was the key innovation that allowed the printing press to take off, since without cheap, high quality type, the printing press isn’t actually more economical than hand copying. Indeed, Gutenberg’s method was so successful, it remained state of the art in printing until well into the 20th century, until it was displaced by photolithography.
Babbage and Lovelace had all the key ideas for the modern computer in the 1820’s, but it wasn’t until the 1890 census that somebody wanted to pay for such a thing.
I’m not sure that’s true. One of my friends, for a history of computing course in university, took a deep dive into Babbage’s designs for the difference and analytical engines, and concluded that they weren’t actually all that much like modern (Von Neumann) computing devices at all. The limiting factor on Babbage’s machines was not the fact that nobody wanted to pay for them, but that the necessary precision in manufacturing gears had not yet been achieved. The analytical engine, especially, required thousands of very small and precisely machined gears, and the manufacturing technology for them would not be invented until well into the 20th century.
The tabulators used in the 1890 census were a far cry from anything that Babbage designed. The Census tabulators were, more or less, very fancy sorting and counting machines. They could not do math or logical operations, but they could take a large amount of data, sort it by various fields and count how many records had the given field marked. They made no attempt at generality (unlike Babbage’s inventions and later computers), but instead sought to mechanize one or two algorithms for maximum efficiency.
You may have noticed all the annoying Grammarly adds bouncing around, which is a browser-based spelling/grammar/syntax checker. I wondered about how easily we could detect indications of known-bad-thinking with the same kind of analysis.
Before we go ahead and attempt to build something like Grammarly, but for logical reasoning, shouldn’t we verify that Grammarly actually improves one’s writing? I haven’t used Grammarly itself, but I did use a similar tool, called Hemingway, and I wasn’t terribly impressed with it.
It’s baby steps, but CERN has an open data portal, where you can download raw data from their LHC experiments for your own analysis. The portal also includes the software used to conduct the analysis, so you don’t have to write your own code to process terabytes of LHC collision data.
It’s also kind of theft. The owner had previously acquired something that was valuable due to regulation, so taking that regulation away is a confiscation of their private property (e.g. get your government hands off my Medicare).
I strongly disagree with this claim. I don’t think removing the regulation that allows house prices to rise is a form of theft. I think it’s the risk. Bay Area housing (like housing more generally in the US) is an investment, and just like all investments, it carries the risk of loss. Part of this risk is that the government might stop the explicit and implicit subsidies that prop up the value of this investment. Tying a significant portion of one’s net worth to one’s house earns about as much sympathy from me as tying a significant portion of one’s net worth to any other undiversified illiquid asset.
What’s wrong with (1) being a valid explanation? The geniuses of the 17th and 18th centuries, like Gauss and Newton, did work that today is expected of moderately bright high-schoolers. Decartes’ geometry can be understood by middle-schoolers. Even the science of the 19th century, like work of Maxwell and Rutherford is considered to be pretty much undergraduate level today.
Is it really that implausible to you that the low-hanging fruit is gone?
Another problem is the problem of goals. Athletes have a very clearly defined, concrete goal. Run fast. Jump high. Score points. Genius, on the other hand, seems to lie in being able to redefine goals, or at least modify goals to make them more attainable.
My intuition (and it really is nothing more than an intuition) is that we don’t (and shouldn’t) treat geniuses like athletes because genius and athletics are on opposite sides of the explore/exploit dichotomy. Genius is all about exploring a problem space, and finding new solutions (and maybe even new problems). Athletics is about executing a set of strategies with maximal efficiency to reach a goal by a known route, as quickly and with as little expenditure of energy as possible.
The dichotomy isn’t hard-and-fast. The best athletes will be able to come up with new tactics and use those to win games more efficiently. The best geniuses will be able to execute fairly competently and efficiently upon their ideas. But in terms of emphasis, I think genius is much more about exploration, with exploitation (or execution) being an afterthought. Athletics, on the other hand, is all about exploitation (or execution). While there may be some exploration, that exploration is necessarily constrained by the (fixed) rules of the game.
For this reason, I think applying athletics tactics or even athletics metaphors to genius is misguided.
You have, I don’t doubt, heard the almost-stereotypical complaints about the tenured professor’s academic activity being devoted—if not entirely, then far too close to it—to such things as grant-writing, intradepartmental politicking, and other nonsense.
Yes, but the gentlemen scholars of the 18th century couldn’t devote all of their time to the pursuit of science either. They had estates to run, social obligations to fulfill, duels to fight, and, as you so well put it, “other nonsense.” Is the tenured professor today doing more or less “science” per week than a gentleman scholar of the 18th century? I don’t know, but I’m not sure that it’s self evident that Lord Kelvin and Charles Darwin were doing more science per week than a tenured professor today.
Secondly, even after taking into consideration the possibility that gentlemen scholars did much more science per week than today’s tenured professors, I still think it’s plausible that much more science, in total, is getting done today than it was in the 18th Century. We have to remember how few early scientists were, and how difficult it was for them to communicate. Even if a modern tenured professor spends 90% less time doing science than a gentleman scholar, it’s still plausible to me that the majority of scientific thought is taking place right now.
How does that follow? At one point jargon (words like “synergy”, “core competency”, “disruption”, etc.) all had distinct meanings. However, at this moment in time, those words have become overused and have lost their original meaning, to the point where no one is quite sure what they mean any more. How how does the latter negate the former?
If I say something like, “This merger will unlock synergies, allow us to focus on our core competencies, and render us less vulnerable to disruption due to paradigm shifts, going forward,” am I really saying that the proposed merger will cause our organizations to cooperate better, focus more on our comparative advantages, and render us less vulnerable to competitive surprises in the future? Or am I stringing together a bunch of applause lights in an attempt to get you to go along with whatever I say?
Business “jargon” and “buzzwords” are unfairly maligned by people who aren’t used to corporate culture. First of all, a lot of them originally referred to specific important concepts, and then got overused as generic applause lights — e.g. “disruptive innovation” is actually a really useful idea in its original meaning. But, second of all, it’s honestly just handy to have stock phrases if you need to keep talking fluently without awkward pauses.
That doesn’t seem like an unfair maligning of jargon and buzzwords. That seems like the completely fair maligning of jargon and buzzwords as phrases which once had distinct meanings but now don’t mean anything other than, “You should feel good about what I’m just about to say.”
Also, I wonder how much a reputation for individual brilliance can overcome an inability to speak fluently. Peter Thiel and Elon Musk have a public speaking style that is cringe-inducing to watch, because of their lack of fluency and the awkward pauses that result as they stop midsentence to gather their thoughts. However, that same awkwardness seems to cement their reputation as geniuses who worry more about results than polished marketing.
If a claim has some bad logic in it, but then you fix the logic and the claim makes sense, you should believe it
Yes, I agree with that. However, I think it’s very easy to change the conclusion in the process of changing the inferential steps or the premises. If arguments were presented mathematically, using formal logic, I would have no objection to steelmanning. It would be obvious if the conclusion of an argument had changed in the process of fixing logic errors. However, we discuss in English, not math, and as a result I’m wary of engaging with anything other than the text as it is written. I do not have confidence in my ability to change my interlocutor’s argument while preserving its conclusion.
In the mid-1900s, the norms of good citizenship were richer and more powerful than today.
Is that true? Certainly for discriminated minorities, it doesn’t appear to be true. I would find it very difficult to argue that “norms of good citizenship” were stronger in 1950 towards, say, a black person, or a homosexual, or a (suspected) Communist than they are today.
Only that a criticism that steelmans is, typically, more valuable than criticism that doesn’t.
I disagree. Steelmanning is nice, but I don’t think it necessarily adds value. I think there is real value in engaging the actual arguments that the person made, in the way that they made them. If LessWrong is going to train rationalists to argue for their points persuasively, I think it’s imperative that we engage with the actual evidence that is presented, and not the idealized version of the evidence that would have convinced us of the conclusions.
Edit: After thinking about it some more, I have realized that steelmanning poses a danger to the listener as well as to the speaker. Namely, given two arguments of equal strength, one which I am able to steelman, and one which I am not, it’s quite possible I will find the argument that I am able to steelman more convincing, even though it has no more evidence behind it than the argument that I am not able to steelman. It seems to me that steelmanning exaggerates our cognitive blindspots, rather than reducing them. Can you show me that steelmanning is not an epistemic hazard?
There is more than a single solution to this problem. Yes, one solution is to enforce First-Amendment style free-speech requirements on the oligopolistic giants that control the majority of the discourse that happens on the Internet. Another solution would be to address the fact that there are oligopolistic giants.
My solution to the above problem would be to force tech companies to abide by interoperability standards. The reason the dominant players are able to keep up their dominance is because they can successfully exploit Metcalfe’s Law once they grow beyond a certain point. You need to be on Facebook/Twitter/etc because everyone you know is on that social network, and it requires too much energy to build the common knowledge to force a switch to a better competitor.
However, the reason it’s so costly to switch is because there is no way for a competitor to be compatible with Facebook while offering additional features of their own. I can’t build a successor social network which automatically posts content to Facebook while offering additional features that Facebook does not. If there were an open standard that all major social networks had to adopt, then it would be much easier for alternative social networks to start up, allowing us to have both well-kept gardens and relative freedom of speech. “Well-kept gardens” and “free speech” are only in apparent conflict because market forces have limited us to three or four gardens. If we allowed many more gardens, then we wouldn’t have the conflict.
What’s interesting is that when I say it that way, I realize that it sounds like a recipe for disaster. But also note that essentially no other organization on Earth has been formed in any other way.
I’m not so sure about that. Perhaps you meant “no other [freestanding] organization on Earth has been formed [by people without access to massive amounts of resources] any other way”.
To elaborate on the distinction, I can point to organizations like NASA, or the Manhattan Project. They were created, from the beginning, as large groups, with pre-planned bureaucratic structures and formal lines of authority. While there was a certain level of organic growth, it’s not like these things started in a garage and grew outward from there. Similarly, in private industry, when IBM embarked on its OS/360 project, or Microsoft embarked on Windows Vista, these were not small efforts started by a group of insurgents. Rather, they were responses to concrete opportunities/threats (a new mainframe, Netscape) that were identified by the leadership of the parent organization, who then mobilized the appropriate resources.
I think this matters beyond mere pedantry. You’ve identified one way to spread rationalism—bottom up, by establishing a small group of rationalists, who then spread their doctrine outwards. I’m saying there’s another way: identify leaders, convince them that rationality is a good thing to focus on, and then have them mobilize the appropriate resources to spread rationality. If you could convince Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos, Warren Buffett and Carlos Slim that they should fund rationality with the full force of their collective fortune, then that would potentially do more in a year to spread rationalism than a small organization organically growing for a decade.
Of course, “go big or go home” has its own failure modes, but it’s not actually self-evident that it’s more risky than starting small and spreading outwards. Moreover, the really successful small groups employed a hybrid strategy. They started out as a small group, until the could amass enough resources and prestige to convince influential decision-makers that their cause was worth supporting. The canonical (pun fully intended) example is the Catholic Church, of course. It started as a small, often persecuted group of followers of a particular religious prophet, indistinguishable from the other Jewish spin-offs. However, through steady proselytizing, it grew and converted the aristocracy of the Roman empire. At that point, from the the conversion of Constantine onwards, it became the state religion, and spread rapidly wherever the Roman empire held sway.
no, I was thinking of facebook.
Facebook isn’t any better than Twitter on any of the metrics I care about.
basically what I want is “endless comment thread” type deal
That is the reason I use Facebook as little as possible, and I would stop interacting with LessWrong entirely if it moved to this format.
Facebook adopts its format not because it benefits the reader, but because it benefits them. The endless comment thread format maximizes “user engagement”. It maximizes stimulation. It intentionally minimizes rational thinking, because, in a sense, rationality is the opposite of virality.
Moreover, why should there be discussion? If a post is authoritative, well researched and obviously correct, then the only thing to do is upvote it and move on. A lengthy discussion thread is a sign that either the post is either unclear, incorrect, or has mindkilled its readers.
Edit after feedback:
I want to draw a distinction between the worthiness of an article and the length/number of comments that article generates. Facebook, Twitter, for-profit-blogs, all elide this distinction. For them, an article that generates a lot of pageviews and a lot of comments demonstrates high user engagement, and therefore, is a good article. This is true, even if the article’s content is inflammatory, and lowers the rationality waterline.
LessWrong is not a for-profit blog. LessWrong’s goal should not be to maximize user-engagement via the production of long comment threads. In my opinion, if there are a bunch of long-form articles for which the only reasonable response is, “Yep, that’s all true. Good article!” that’s a win condition.
One other issue, which I’m not sure you’ve touched on, is the fact that variables in the real world are rarely completely independent. That is to say, increasing a variable, say V(1) may in fact lower other variables V(2)...V(N), including one of the 5 “important” variables that are highly weighted. For example, if I value both a clean environment and maximizing my civilization’s energy production, I have to balance the fact that maximizing energy production might involve strip-mining a forest or two, lowering the amount of clean environment available to the people.
Secondly, how does this model deal with adversarial agents? One of the reasons that Goodhart’s Law is so pervasive in the real world is that the systems it applies to often have an adversarial component. That is to say, there are agents who notice that you are pouring energy into V. In the past, all of this energy would have gone straight into U, but now that agents realize that there is a surplus of energy, they divert some of it to their own ends, reducing or even eliminating the total surplus that goes into U.
Finally, how well does this model deal with the fact that human values might change over time? If the set of 100 things the humans care about changes over time, how does that affect the expectation calculation?
This already exists, by the way. There’s a clothing chain called Bonobos, which has stores, but you don’t really buy anything from their stores. The stores are more like showrooms. You go in, pick out some clothes that you like, and the staff there take your measurements and then place an order for you on the store’s website. Just as you described with your shoe-store example, they’re literally just an API for the store’s website.
I have added a note to the top of the essay making it clear that it’s referring to this post.