Evenflair

• Evenflair 25 May 2022 2:57 UTC

  3 points

  on: Game The­ory and Part­ner Abuse

  Strong downvoted. I agree with Dagon about the lack of depth regarding frames and narratives, and I also found the casual, jokey tone deeply inappropriate for the subject.

Find­ing Your Voice

• Evenflair 2 May 2022 19:14 UTC

  1 point

  in reply to: Said Achmiz’s comment on: Six Months of ROSE

  What do you think of the notion that a significant cause of many of the problems that plague the Bay Area rationalist communities is precisely the conflation of the community and the task/​project group?

  It seems plausible, but mostly I think I’m unqualified to have an opinion since I’ve neither researched nor interacted with that community. However… I’m very skeptical that craft/​community mixing is inherently bad. Could you elaborate more on why you think this is the case for the Bay Area, or link me to something that explains the reasoning a bit more?

• Evenflair 2 May 2022 16:32 UTC

  1 point

  in reply to: Said Achmiz’s comment on: Six Months of ROSE

  the most straightforward explanation for this is “different things work for different people, but it’s basically impossible to predict or control this” plus self-selection plus survivorship bias.

  This contains three claims.

  1. Different self-improvement strategies work for different people

  2. It’s infeasible to predict which strategy will work

  3. Cases of transformative rationality are selection and survivor bias

  #1 is something we’ve talked about internally and it seems mostly true to me. The fractal nature of the existing self-help landscape definitely support this, and it’s common to hear things like “I tried a bunch of things, none of them worked until I did X”. And then X is always different.

  #2 might be true? I agree that predicting it through S2 is unlikely to work, but I think approximating a solution with S1 isn’t impossible. On the other hand, the kinds of problems S1 tends to be good at involve short feedback loops, and self-improvement very much doesn’t. So this may ultimately prove to be intractable --

  -- but I don’t think that’s a dealbreaker. We don’t need to know exactly which solution will solve a person’s problem. It would be valuable just to have a list of the top N most common solutions, and then be able to tell people “yeah we don’t know which one will work but there’s an 80% chance one of them will, so just start at the top and work your way down”. As a Council, we’ve talked a lot about the broad categories most people’s problems fall into (we came up with social, learning, motivation, and resources) and we’ve been targeting most of our courses to teach skills in those areas. But that’s getting into the weeds.

  #3 seems straightforwardly true. But… I’m not sure that matters? Sure, you hear about the successes and not the failures, but the point is that success is possible. That selection and survivor biases play a role just means that we can’t tell people to read the sequences and expect that to be a panacea. And that’s not surprising! I bounced off the sequences a couple times before they got hold of me. Rationality’s marketing is awful, and the sequences themselves have a lot of issues.

  Can you say more about [Guild-as-community]?

  About a year ago, someone posted a link to the beta invitation in a rationalist discord I hang out in (the Bayesian Conspiracy). I clicked the link and thought the courses were interesting, and I figured I could give them a try, take what was useful, discard the rest, and move on once I got bored. In Sabien’s terms, I was playing the Black Knight.

  The Black Knight is a mercenary; it has goals of its own, and it’s only allied with you because your goals align with them. This does not mean that the Black Knight is dishonorable; the Black Knight is perfectly aware of the instrumental value of its reputation, and of the power of mutually beneficial coordination, and it is every bit as honest as the White or Red Knights.

  Shortly after joining, the Council put out a call for graphic designers and website developers. I ended up designing the second iteration of their logo and building the site. Again, that was because it benefited me—taking on those projects gave me much-needed practice, and it was an opportunity to make a bit of money while boosting my ingroup status. Alex ultimately offered me a seat on the Council as a result of my work, but I declined because I didn’t want the responsibility that came with it.

  It wasn’t until the courses started and I met my cohort that my mindset started changing. I love all my cohort mates but especially meeting Octavia (@Slimepriestess/​Hivewired) did a lot to make me see how valuable the Guild could be as a community. A few months later, I was thinking about getting back into World of Warcraft and I… kind of realized that the reason I wanted to play MMORPGs again was loneliness. With ~two years of rationality under my belt, ignoring the community-shaped hole in my heart wasn’t an option anymore. And I also realized that either I was going to fill it with a gaming guild, or I was going to fill it with the Guild.

  So I decided to go all-in and stop holding back. I asked Alex if he still wanted me on the Council, he said yes, and here we are a couple months later. I’ve put a lot into the Guild at this point and I don’t regret it. There’s a part of me that really wants to take care of a community. Not like, acquire followers or “friends” or whatever, but to build a flourishing, healthy social web. And I’d also like to make it less insular, less walled-off, less fractured, more accessible. There’s a divide in the greater community between rationalists and postrationalists and I think that’s really sad and disappointing.

  I don’t know if ROSE can heal that rift and bring rationality to the masses, but… I’m not here for the grand Purpose. I’m here because I like what the Guild is doing right now and because I’m better off with it in my life than without. I’m here for every step of the journey.

  can you say how this interacts with the remote nature of your association?

  Being remote has a number of advantages:

  • Accessibility. Rationalists are widely dispersed, and by not being tied to a single city, it’s much easier for new people to join

  • Better dynamics. Most cults form in real life because when you’re irl, an organization can exert a LOT of pressure on you simply by taking over your physical space. As an online org, we don’t have to worry about that, at least not as much.

    • Of course, “better dynamics” is only one frame. What’s really going on here is that we have less power over our members, which means that, yes, we can’t do toxic cult stuff, but it also means we can’t push people as hard as they might want. Tradeoffs.

  • Smoother on-ramp. Joining an in-person community can be really intimidating. It’s a lot easier to pitch “hey, join our discord server” than it is to pitch “come to our meetup”.

    • Especially if you’ve heard of “rationalist meetups” and have a bunch of negative associations

  The big disadvantage everyone thinks of is something along the lines of “yeah but online relationships aren’t real”, which… can be true, but isn’t if you do them right. At least for me, it’s a lot easier for me to be genuine and honest in textual interactions. Moreover, online-only seems to be working fine for us. A few months ago we had an informal retrospective survey for our users and something that came up repeatedly was that people really liked their cohorts.

  Being remote also makes it a lot easier to interact with the Guild. Anyone can ping a Councilor and ask them questions directly. Anyone can, at any time, post someone in a cohort chat without having to wait for the next meetup. Since Discord is the communication medium instead of a supplement, it’s much more likely that people will be active and respond.

  I don’t have hard research on this, but my gut feeling from what I’ve read over the past few years is that full irl or full remote are both viable, but hybrid or transitional periods tend to have a lot of problems because the two paradigms are poorly integrated.

  But ultimately, we don’t have a choice. If the Guild had to be in-person, it’d never have gotten started (not enough people). Moreover, we still don’t have enough people to sustain even an informal meetup, let alone structured courses.

• Evenflair 2 May 2022 0:00 UTC

  2 points

  in reply to: Said Achmiz’s comment on: Six Months of ROSE

  Taking the outside view, it seems overwhelmingly probable that you won’t—right?

  Yes, this is straightforwardly correct. We’re not the first group to attempt something like this. Dragon Army and CFAR have both tried to improve people and neither met with much success (CFAR’s workshops seem decent, from my outsider perspective, but are very limited in scope). Many other educational institutions exist, most of which have failed even worse than ours. With that said --

  I believe rationality can be transformative because it was for me. My life has improved drastically since discovering the Sequences, and I effected most of the change while entirely alone. Cases like mine are somewhat uncommon even among rationalists, but this suggests to me that more is possible. We’re missing something.

  (Yes I know the above is inside view, but it’s a critical part of why I think the Guild has a chance of success.)

  Still, the vision of self-improvement isn’t what drives me to pour my time and energy into the Guild. I’m more here for the community aspect of “community based self improvement”. Community is a lot easier to do, and the outside view is far less pessimistic there. People start new communities all the time! I think we’re well on our way to success here through the cohort system, but we won’t really know for sure until we cross 150 members.

  The rest of the Council might want to weigh in; we each have our own reasons for joining the project and I know David and Alex are much more focused on the grand vision aspects.

• Evenflair 1 May 2022 21:58 UTC

  9 points

  in reply to: Said Achmiz’s comment on: Six Months of ROSE

  Not yet! Our members generally like the courses and have benefited from them in smaller ways, but our grand vision of producing impressive people remains unfulfilled.

  We’ve talked about this a fair bit internally. Measuring progress is hard, and that’s part of why we’re developing the Path system. True, it’s not a straightforward “rationality quotient” test, but it’s at least a semi-objective way to measure people’s self-improvement through how many positive changes they’ve made in their life.

  Another difficulty we’ve faced is that we’re fully online and don’t demand that much time from our members—only three hours a week, split evenly among class meeting, assignment work, and a cohort meeting. Very early on we had to decide whether or not to be aggressive about demanding time investment from our members. We decided to keep the intensity fairly low. A boot camp style system might work better, but it comes with the risk of cult dynamics—Leverage Research, anyone?

  I strong upvoted you. Thank you for the direct, honest question.

Six Months of ROSE

• Evenflair 21 Apr 2022 14:55 UTC

  1 point

  in reply to: Donald Hobson’s comment on: Axis ori­ented programming

  Gordon’s argument implicitly agreed with mtaran that the post wasn’t frontpage material. I think it does meet the requirements in Ruby’s personal vs frontpage post but I’m also sympathetic to the idea that weird programming isn’t really topical for LW.

  On the other hand, I don’t use the frontpage and have no skin in this game.

• Evenflair 21 Apr 2022 4:01 UTC

  1 point

  in reply to: G Gordon Worley III’s comment on: Axis ori­ented programming

  Note that this post was frontpaged.

• Evenflair 16 Apr 2022 23:24 UTC

  1 point

  in reply to: habryka’s comment on: In­tro­duc­ing Mnosis

  Thanks for the catch! I let Matt know and he should fix it soon.

In­tro­duc­ing Mnosis

• Evenflair 7 Apr 2022 4:07 UTC

  21 points

  on: What are ra­tio­nal­ists worst at?

  Coordination.

• Evenflair 3 Apr 2022 4:18 UTC

  3 points

  in reply to: TLW’s comment on: What words should be shorter in the ra­tio­nal dic­tio­nary?

  Three of seven, three days in the last week. (I think)

Ret­ro­spec­tive: Prac­ti­cal So­cial Networking

Prac­ti­cal De­ci­sion-Mak­ing Course: A Retrospective

• Evenflair 22 Jan 2022 4:16 UTC

  5 points

  on: The Liar and The Scold

  This is really good! I didn’t notice the fiction tag at first and thought it was real until the VR stuff. I especially liked how sharp the ending was, like the narrator is so casual about it.

• Evenflair 13 Dec 2021 5:24 UTC

  5 points

  on: Is “gears-level” just a syn­onym for “mechanis­tic”?

  Isn’t mechanistic specifically about physical properties? Could you say that an explanation of a social phenomenon is “mechanistic”, even though it makes zero references to physical reality?

• Evenflair 28 Nov 2021 22:48 UTC

  2 points

  on: The Archety­pal Ra­tional and Post-Rational

  There’s often a complication in defining post-rationality where someone says “post-rationality involves X” and then the other person says “X is compatible with rationality too” and then the cycle repeats.

  Thanks for writing this post. My first couple encounters with postrationality were exactly along these lines (where I played the part of saying “but X is part of rationality”).

  Unfortunately, I’m still confused. Both descriptions (of postrationality and archetypical rationality) line up about equally well with my conception of rationality, and yet the postrationalists I’ve met seem very insistent that there’s a big difference. The only major differences I see are spirituality and philosophy. Maybe I’m just confused about what people think of as rationality? Or maybe philosophy/​spiritualism are the big, important differences, and they only seem minor to me because I don’t see either as valuable?

  Still, it seems like I’m missing something.

• Evenflair 26 Nov 2021 5:30 UTC

  2 points

  in reply to: Jon Garcia’s comment on: Why do you need the story?

  I don’t have anything to add, but this phenomenon was discussed in greater detail in Explain/​Worship/​Ignore. https://​​www.lesswrong.com/​​posts/​​yxvi9RitzZDpqn6Yh/​​explain-worship-ignore

• Evenflair 23 Nov 2021 5:16 UTC

  3 points

  on: The Bat and Ball Prob­lem Revisited

  The first time I saw the bat and ball question, it was like there were two parts of my S1. The first one said “the answer is 0.1” and the second one said “this is a math problem, I’m invoking s2″. S2 sees the math problem and searches for a formula, at which point she comes up with the algebraic solution. Then s2 pops open a notepad and executes it even though 0.1 seems plausible.

  No real thought went into any step of this. I suspect the split reaction in the first bit was due to my extensive practice at doing math problems. After enough failures, I learned to stop using intuition to do math and “invoke s2” became an automatic response.