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cousin_it comments on A Proof of Occam's Razor - Less Wrong
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Not all LW participants need to know advanced math. Human rationality is a broad topic, and someone like Yvain or Alicorn can contribute a lot without engaging the math side of things. What I care about is the signal-to-noise ratio in math discussion threads. In other words, I'm okay with regular ignorance but hate vocal ignorance with a fiery passion.
I propose a simple heuristic: if you see others using unfamiliar math, look it up before commenting. If it relies on other concepts that you don't understand, look them up too, and so on. Yes, it might take you days of frantic digging. It sometimes takes me days full-time, even though I have a math degree. Time spent learning more math is always better invested than time spent in novice-level discussions.
That seems valid, but part of the trouble also seems to be people thinking they understand math that they don't after reading popularizations. I'm not sure how to deal with that other than just having those individuals read the actual math.
We need merely a norm to tell people to stop, not a magic way of explaining math faster than possible. Also, more realistic timeline for grokking (as opposed to parsing) deeper concepts is months, not days, and that's if you are smart enough in the first place.
Agreed. I have no idea either.
Well, if someone posts something wrong, call them out on it.
Empirically that doesn't seem to help much. See for example the comment thread in cousin_it's last top-level post.
Cousin_it and JoshuaZ, this sounds as though it could be a good topic (or group of topics) for a top-level post.
Do you mean a set of posts on telling when you don't know enough or a set of posts on the math people should know?
Either or both would be useful, but I was thinking about the latter.