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Eliezer_Yudkowsky comments on Rationality quotes: June 2010 - Less Wrong
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On a similar theme:
TV Tropes
I've asked this question before, but where the hell does the high-quality rationality on TV Tropes come from?
The quality on TVTropes comes from the same place as the quality on Wikipedia: obsessive nerds who want things to be right. Like Wikipedia, TVTropes has successfully set up a filter such that the good stuff tends to stick more than the bad.
Of course, it has the same problem with people wanting to add garbage as Wikipedia, as Desrtopa points out. But the overall slight bias to good seems sufficient to grow quite remarkably high quality.
I think that there may be something of a sampling bias going on here. The sort of structure analysis of storytelling we do attracts some particularly intelligent and rational people, but also quite a lot who are, charitably speaking, not. It's a constant struggle to keep the prominent pages full of the stuff that's actually worth reading, and to shove the rest under a sofa when we can't get rid of it entirely.
I think it's that the website is dedicated to identifying common structures that make stories entertaining, with an emphasis that they are fictional structures. It's the very use of the word "tropes" in the title. Thus the user base is a bunch of people who enjoy a lot of bad (and usually absurdly bad) t.v., yet also have fun analyzing what psychological manipulation they were supposed to have been subjected to.
Also, I know a few TVTropes addicts who are regular LW readers (from a forum on which Dresden Codak left a large impact), and wouldn't be surprised if they have contributed.
I am one such, but I'm not aware of any other Koala Wallopers who're regular editors of tvtropes.
This was a nice exercise in generating a host of just-so stories.
Yes, but many of these are testable. Thus for example, Oscar's hypothesis that "Things are only tropes if they happen more often in fiction that in reality, so to detect them you need an accurate map" is testable. You could take a random sample of people who edit TVtropes and test their map accuracy in completely separate areas (say things that can be often estimated with a Fermi calculation) and compare that to a general sample of people. Oscar's hypothesis suggests that the Tropers will do better.
RobinZ's point is difficult to test, but presumably if one examined in detail what pages have historically stuck around and which have been merged or deleted, one could get data that would test it.
I would also consider my thesis undermined were it demonstrated that the rate of rationally-insightful contributions to TV Tropes was significantly higher than for other notable Wikis (e.g. Wikiversity).
How would you measure the rate of rationally-insightful contributions? I'm also not sure which wikis would be useful to test this on. Some wikis (such as say the various Wikipedias) have prohibitions on original research. Other wikis have narrow goals that will mimimze the number of rational insights. Thus, I'd expect a very low insight rate on say Wikispecies since that is devoted to cataloging existing biological knowledge.
Good points. What I was attempting to measure was the relative measure* of rationalists on TV Tropes versus other nerd communities. The part of my thesis being tested is that no notable difference need be hypothesized to explain EY's perception of unusual rationality in the wiki.
(Was I mistaken to believe that EY thought TV Tropes was unusually rational compared to other nerdy Internet communities, as opposed to compared to other Internet communities, full stop? I agree that TV Tropes is nerdier than most of the Internet.)
* i.e. fraction of population weighted by intensity of participation.
I noticed that - I believe it is a classic case of (warning: TV Tropes) the Rhetorical Question Blunder.
(In my defense, I tried to make mine testable.)
Perhaps it's due to the fact that TV Tropes' mission is essentially to perform inference on the entire body of human fiction, and create generalised models (tropes or trope complexes) from that data. In many ways, it's science applied to things that are made up!
Rational Tropers. QED.
Was that a deliberate attempt at a mysterious answer? If so, I am amused.
It looked like a joke along the lines of:
Q (on discovering a pile of eggs in a strange place): Where did these eggs come from?
A: Chickens.
Or "Where do these stairs go?" ... "They go up."
Things are only tropes if they happen more often in fiction that in reality, so to detect them you need an accurate map.
ETA: And everyone is already in hole-picking mood. So any cognitive biases showing up will be jumped on.
ETA2: What does ETA stand for anyway?
ETA = Edited to add (not "estimated time of arrival", the more common usage)
I sometimes use ETC, edited to correct, but that hasn't caught on.
ETA: And here's the LessWrong acronym list -- we need to link it from the front page.
Where I live, ETC stands for Electronic Toll Collection and is posted at the entry ramp of toll-roads equipped appropriately.
What's wrong with just using "Edit: additional note goes here"
That's what I use, come to think of it.
Nothing's wrong with that, but ETA is shorter and faster to type.
Not necessarily; perhaps one is accustomed to typing words that start with at most one capital letter.
CEV needs to be added. I'm not doing it myself because I'm not sure what would be a good description of it to link to.
People who can see through the conventions of entertainment and who enjoy posting about those conventions for free are likely to be much more awake than usual.
Here's a variant on that. In fiction, everything is calculated to manipulate you or fulfill some simple recognizable pattern.
Troping is training in figuring out how the manipulation works and what the patterns are; this is a skill that carries over into everything else. (Doesn't matter if it's an author trying to manipulate you - or a bad argument.)
The way TV Tropes is set up, technologically and culturally, it seems relatively easy for a rational person to contribute an insight that persists - is there some systemic pattern that this effect cannot account for?