Don't forget: Wikipedia happened.
And this is precisely why I haven't lost all hope for the future. (That, and we've got some really bright people working furiously on reducing x-risk.) On rare occasions, humanity impresses me. I could write sonnets about Wikipedia. And I hate when so-called educators try to imply Wikipedia is low status or somehow making us dumber. It's the kind of conclusion that the Gatekeepers of Knowledge wish was accurate. How can you possibly get access to that kind of information without paying your dues? It's just immoral.
I pose this question: if you had to pick just one essay to introduce someone to LW, which one would you pick and why? I'd like to spread access to the information in the sequences so that it can benefit others as it did me, but I'm at a loss as to where specifically to start. Just tossing a link to the list of sequences is.....overwhelming, to say the least. And I've been perusing them for so long that I can't remember what it's like to read with fresh eyes, and the essays that have the most impact on me now were incomprehensible to me a year ago, I think.
I seem to be alone in this, but I'd say Truly Part of You is far and away the best one-article summary of the site. Unfortunately, it's not listed as part of the sequences. For me, though, it's the one that gave me the "click" and made me appreciate rationality on a gut level.
Unfortunately, it's not listed as part of the sequences.
This seems to demonstrate that 'sequences' represents an element of lost purpose. The point of having the sequences compilation and the link to it is not so much to collect posts on a topic that is covered in multiple parts but to compile all the fundamental high quality posts, particularly the early OB ones by Eliezer. Or if not the original purpose of the wiki page then certainly the role that it now takes is not just to collect things that are multi-part.
If you edited that wiki page, perhaps adding an extra category for standalone posts then I would be surprised (and probably disgusted!) if anyone strongly objected. That post belongs there. Particularly since it is part of what was one big sequence. After all in the past the collation has been in the form of a graph based on 'follow up' links. And that post has two of them!
Three out of sixteen teachers I can think of that mentioned Wikipedia recommended using its references, the other thirteen forbade its use and condemned it as inaccurate. They're usually alright with other encyclopedias, just not the one that clearly cites and links to its sources.
It is hard to admit that finding out most factual information is an outright trivial task these days and that most of what they had initially believed to be critical for rigorous research at the highschool level is now strictly inferior to reading wikipedia.
If they can't stop students from using Wikipedia, pretty soon schools will be reduced from teaching how to gather facts, to teaching how to think!
I used to TA a class whose covert purpose was teaching students how to think. The class encouraged everyone to use resources like Wikipedia whenever they didn't know something, so that it could focus on things more interesting than merely gathering information. That class tried to get everyone to think about things, to use their existing knowledge to solve types of problems they'd never seen before, and to learn in a way that went way beyond memorizing facts and regurgitating them on the test. If the class covered probability, it would make students analyze card games or the lottery. If it reviewed trigonometry, students would have to derive some identities. In the labs, they had to write computer programs. And so on.
Many (most?) of the students were actively pissed off by this. Why were their questions to the professor answered with helpful links to Wikipedia or someone's lecture slides, or a web page? Why did the class refuse to tell them exactly what they'd need to commit to memory to get a good grade on the tests? It went against everything they'd come to expect from "education". And the computer programming was especially maddening; they couldn't just pattern-match t...
Many (most?) of the students were actively pissed off by this.
I think a class like this in isolation is bound to be off-pissing, no matter how useful it is. University courses have the extra problem of forcing you to be interested at a specific topic at a specific time. Students learn to grind through traditional courses even if they don't feel particularly interested in the topic at the time of taking the course. That course sounds like tossing undergrads into something like the environment grad students are in for the duration, and grad school has a reputation for causing massive procrastination. Free-form problems need more spontaneous enthusiasm to come up with good approaches to, and bringing that up for a semi-arbitrary topic on command is harder than having it for a topic you are already interested in.
It'd probably still be learnable, given a whole curriculum of courses like this instead of just the one.
If they can't stop students from using Wikipedia, pretty soon schools will be reduced from teaching how to gather facts, to teaching how to think!
But, but, then I'll lose a good part of my competitive advantage!
I think the reasoning was that an encyclopedia is a good starting point, but isn't a real source, because it's brief and compressed. But really I'm not sure why, in fact. Why couldn't you cite the encyclopedia for simple, verifiable historical facts? It's not as if Britannica is going to be less accurate than a "real book" with an author. I remember some kid asking about it, the teacher saying scornfully, "Well, encyclopedias aren't a real source," and then I decided "encyclopedia = BAD" and thought no more about it.
The anti-wikipedia bias has shifted from being a pretentious hold-over from the "I spent 8 years learning the names of the relevant sources in my field" to an outright cognitive bias held by the uneducated "Where'd you get that fact - wikipedia? - in that case, I'm allowed to ignore your argument. I get my facts from talk radio."
Maybe I'm just being habitually contrarian here for no good reason, but it seems to me that for a supposedly "rationalist" community, people here seem to be far too willing to accept claims of LessWrong exceptionality based on shockingly weak evidence. Group-serving bias is possibly the most basic of all human biases, and we cannot even overcome that little?
Claiming that your group is the best in the world, or among the best, is something nearly every single group in history did, and all had some anecdotal "evidence" for it. Priors are very strongly against this claim, even after including these anecdotes.
Yet, in spite of these priors, the group you consider yourself member of is somehow the true best group ever? Really? Where's hard evidence for this? I'm tempted to point to Eliezer outright making things up on costs of cryonics multiple times, and ignoring corrections from me and others, in case halo effect prevents you from seeing that he's not really extraordinarily less wrong.
Yet, in spite of these priors, the group you consider yourself member of is somehow the true best group ever?
You made up this 'true best group ever' idea yourself. "Best at a highly specific activity that is the primary focus of this group" is an entirely different claim.
I'm tempted to point to Eliezer outright making things up on costs of cryonics multiple times, and ignoring corrections from me and others, in case halo effect prevents you from seeing that he's not really extraordinarily less wrong.
Eliezer doesn't have all that much of a halo. People disagree with him and criticise him incessantly. Sometimes deserved, sometimes not. Most times I have seen Eliezer accused of having a halo effect have been when Eliezer disagrees with them on a particular subject and it happens to be the case that the majority of others here do too. Acknowledging that those who disagree with you may be doing so independently based on their own intellectual backgrounds is not nearly so psychologically rewarding as dismissing them as blind followers.
point to Eliezer outright making things up on costs of cryonics
Citation needed. Please do. I pay those costs out of pocket, they can be verified with my insurance agent if need be, and I should very much like to know what on Earth you think you are talking about.
I assume Taw is referring to this.
Eliezer reported what he (Eliezer) actually currently pays per year for term life insurance ($180) and his membership with the Cryonics Institute ($120). This is relevant for youngish people worried about the effect of cryonics on their near-term cash flow. Since he is buying term life insurance, when he renews it (probably after 20 years) he will have to pay higher premiums or have accumulated savings for the cost. The Cryonics Institute is also the cheapest service.
Taw said that this distracts from the total net present value of the stream of premium and membership costs, which has to be close to the net present value of just saving up to pay for the cryonics out of pocket (~$50,000 for CI in a distribution centered decades into the future) plus membership fees. Someone thinking about the tradeoff between cryonics and bequesting wealth to their kids or to charity would worry more about this number. Taw then says that Eliezer is "lying" for giving his current costs rather than this number.
However, that NPV is not the nominal amount of a payout decades into the future. A youngish person can get whole life insurance (where premiums do not...
I'm tempted to point to Eliezer outright making things up on costs of cryonics multiple times, and ignoring corrections from me and others.
Please do.
There is a big difference between something being 'the best group ever' and being 'an easier shortcut to rationality than digging through philosophical writings the old-fashioned way', which is how I interpreted this post. There is a community component to LessWrong that obviously isn't present in old books, but I don't think that's paramount for most people. For me, in the beginning, the Sequences were just a good way to read about interesting ideas in small, digestible chunks during my breaks at work. Now it's a bit more than that; LessWrong gives me a chance to post my ideas where they'll be criticized by people who don't have any social-etiquette reason not to tear apart my arguments. But there's a big difference between a group being the optimum, the best any group of its kind could be, which LessWrong obviously isn't...and between being the best out of all the options in a limited area, which is more what this post is claiming (I think).
To reply honestly to this, I think that LW is (close to) superlative in some dimensions. It's just that when people try to tell the community that there's a bunch of other more important dimensions that it sucks at, people get angry and shoot the messenger.
hmm... I very much enjoy reading LW, and I'd heartily recommend it to other people who are interested in the kind of subjects discussed here, but I think some humility is in order as well.
It's hard to put my finger on it, but esp. when it comes to philosophy, I think a lot of it can be summarized as philosophy through the eyes of a computer programmer -- not necessarily a bad point of view, but not the only one.
It's hard to put my finger on it, but esp. when it comes to philosophy, I think a lot of it can be summarized as philosophy through the eyes of a computer programmer -- not necessarily a bad point of view, but not the only one.
Just the only useful one. :)
random idea: disable the upvote button if a reader reached an article by browsing through the list of top posts. Do this to prevent an echo chamber effect, in which the articles that already have the most upvotes getting even more upvotes, while other upvote-worthy articles aren't even looked at.
LessWrong has a dual nature. On one hand, it's a place where anyone can post, and where almost any idea can get a hearing.
On the other hand, LessWrong promotes the ideas of Eliezer Yudkowsky. This is inevitable, and fair, since it was originally based on Eliezer's posts. This is also intentional; no post makes it onto the home page unless Eliezer endorses it; and he has to my knowledge never endorsed a post that disagreed with or questioned things he has said in the past.
I'm not complaining. I applaud Eliezer for opening up top-level posting to everyone...
no post makes it onto the home page unless Eliezer endorses it; and he has to my knowledge never endorsed a post that disagreed with or questioned things he has said in the past.
Here's one example of a post that criticized Eliezer and others associated with SIAI but nevertheless got promoted to the home page: http://lesswrong.com/lw/2l8/existential_risk_and_public_relations/
I think there have been others, though I don't remember any specific ones off the top of my head.
There's more memetic homegeneity here than I would prefer for such a venture.
Sometimes there are right answers, and smart people will mostly aggree. I suspect your perception of "memetic homegeneity" results from your insistance on disagreeing with some obviously (at least obviously after the discussions we've had) right answers, e.g. persistance of values as an instrumental value.
In my own attempts to study philosophy, I've found classical monologue-based instruction almost invariably suffers in comparison to dialogues between multiple people genuinely trying to convince each other of their ideas. When the author cannot interact with and respond to their audience, it's easy to become complacent. Dialogue forces one to refine both one's ideas and the presentation of one's ideas, and makes it much easier to realistically compare a point of view to the most compelling alternatives.
I feel like the state of philosophical education woul...
But by commenting on it, you can lead others (like me) to get to read it for the first time. Even better! :)
Classical philosophers like Hume came up with some great ideas, too, especially considering that they had no access to modern scientific knowledge. But you don't have to spend thousands of hours reading through their bad ideas to find the few good ones, because their best ideas have become modern scientific knowledge.
The reason why people read those works is to figure out how those people arrived at their wrong conclusions, what has changed so that we today know better and what this tells us about possible shortcomings of contemporary ideas. Learning f...
I used to think that when I became a teacher, if I ever did, my class would be either about Darwin Dangerous Idea, or Godel Escher Bach.
Not that much for the content, but because philosophy students in Brazil just need to learn how to think. (For those who have read Feynman's QED, what was true of physics in his time is still true of philosophy now. We are massive producers of Teacher Password guessers)
But after having been through the sequences, it is really tough to decide.
Applause light is a phrase that is expected to invariably elicit a cheering response; it's something socially frowned upon to argue against. It is also characterized by lack of specificity and relevant arguments.
In contrast, Academian elaborates why he thinks LW is good. He provides arguments. Also, criticizing LW is not a taboo here, as the fairly upvoted such posts attest.
OP does preach to the choir and almost automatically activates the anti-cult and anti-groupthink reflexes so ingrained in the LW readership. Maybe it should be rather read by Academian's dumbstruck friends. But it isn't an applause light.
I totally agree with this post. When people ask me what is the best book I've ever read, or the most important book I've ever read, or what I think the best book ever written is, I say: "The Sequences, by Eliezer Yudkowsky." Even if The Sequences were Eliezer's only gift to humanity, that contribution alone would rank him pretty high on my list of most important people in history.
See, society works like a great sieve that remembers good ideas, and forgets some of the bad ones.
Somewhat dissenting view: For progress to be by accumulation and not by random walk, read great books.
Sorry, you'll have to excuse a bit of my ignorance here.
Classical philosophers like Hume came up with some great ideas, too, especially considering that they had no access to modern scientific knowledge. But you don't have to spend thousands of hours reading through their bad ideas to find the few good ones, because their best ideas have become modern scientific knowledge.
What are some of Hume's "bad" ideas? He's a philosopher I cherish quite a bit. I'd be interested to know what his "bad" ideas are. (Have you read Hume at all? Or...
While I agree that Less Wrong is a great venue for learning about rationality, I think we can improve the newbie experience here for those who are coming from the perspective of reading the gathered thoughts of the Very Special Person to the community blog setting of many people writing together. I am in particular concerned by this question as I am starting up a nonprofit devoted to spreading rationality among the broad masses, and hope to channel advanced students to Less Wrong. Do you have any thoughts on how to smooth the transition for newcomers?
Of course, you have to use your judgement to finish to search.
I'm having trouble parsing this sentence. Would you mind elaborating or supplying an alternative phrasing?
Top Posts section
Is it broken only for me? When I click on it, it shows me the last two posts (and nothing else). I didn't spot any setting in Preference that seemed to cause this.
When I recommend LessWrong to people, their gut reaction is usually "What? You think the best existing philosophical treatise on rationality is a blog?"
Well, yes, at the moment I do.
"But why is it not an ancient philosophical manuscript written by a single Very Special Person with no access to the massive knowledge the human race has accumulated over the last 100 years?"
Besides the obvious? Three reasons: idea selection, critical mass, and helpful standards for collaboration and debate.
Idea selection.
Ancient people came up with some amazing ideas, like how to make fire, tools, and languages. Those ideas have stuck around, and become integrated in our daily lives to the point where they barely seem like knowledge anymore. The great thing is that we don't have to read ancient cave writings to be reminded that fire can keep us warm; we simply haven't forgotten. That's why more people agree that fire can heat your home than on how the universe began.
Classical philosophers like Hume came up with some great ideas, too, especially considering that they had no access to modern scientific knowledge. But you don't have to spend thousands of hours reading through their flawed or now-uninteresting writings to find their few truly inspiring ideas, because their best ideas have become modern scientific knowledge. You don't need to read Hume to know about empiricism, because we simply haven't forgotten it... that's what science is now. You don't have to read Kant to think abstractly about Time; thinking about "timelines" is practically built into our language nowadays.
See, society works like a great sieve that remembers good ideas, and forgets some of the bad ones. Plenty of bad ideas stick around because they're viral (self-propagating for reasons other than helpfulness/verifiability), so you can't always trust an idea just because it's old. But that's how any sieve works: it narrows your search. It keeps the stuff you want, and throws away some of the bad stuff so you don't have to look at it.
LessWrong itself is an update patch for philosophy to fix compatibility issues with science and render it more useful. That it would exist now rather than much earlier is no coincidence: right now, it's the gold at the bottom of the pan, because it's taking the idea filtering process to a whole new level. Here's a rough timeline of how LessWrong happened:
Critical mass.
To get off the ground, a critical mass of very good ideas was needed: the LessWrong Sequences. Eliezer Yudkowsky spent several years posting a lot of extremely sane writing on OvercomingBias.com, and then founded LessWrong.com, attracting the attention of other people who were annoyed at the lower density of good ideas in older literature.
Part of what made them successful is that the sequences are written in a widely learned, widely applicable language: the language of basic science and mathematics. A lot of the serious effort in classical philosophy was spent trying to develop precise and appropriate terminology in which to communicate, and so joining the conversation always required a serious exclusive study of the accumulated lingo and concepts. But nowadays we can study rationality by transfer of learning from tried-and-true technical disciplines like probability theory, computer science, biology, and even physics. So the Sequences were written.
Then, using an explicit upvote system, LessWrong and its readers began accelerating the historically slow process of idea selection: if you wanted to be sure to see something inspiring, you just had to click "TOP" to see a list of top voted posts.1
Collaboration and debate.
Finally, with a firm foundation taking hold, there is now a context, a language, and a community that will understand your good ideas. Reading LessWrong makes it vastly easier to collaborate effectively on resolving abstract practical issues2. And if you disagree with LessWrong, reading LessWrong will help you communicate your disagreement better. There was a time when you couldn't have a productive abstract conversation with someone unless you spent a few days establishing a context with that person; now you have LessWrong sequences to do that for you.
The sequences also refer to plenty of historical mistakes made by old-school philosophers, so you don't necessarily have to spend thousands of hours reading very old books to learn what not to do. This leaves you with more time to develop basic or advanced skills in math and science3, which, aside from the obvious career benefits, gets you closer to understanding subjects like cognitive and neuropsychology, probability and statistics, information and coding theory, formal logic, complexity theory, decision theory, quantum physics, relativity... Any philosophical discussion predating these subjects is simply out of the loop. A lot of their mistakes aren't even about the things we need to be analysing now.
So yes, if you want good ideas about rationality, and particularly its applications to understanding the nature of reality and life, you can restrict a lot of your attention to what people are talking about right now, and you'll be at a comparatively low risk of missing out on something important. Of course, you have to use your judgement to finish to search. Luckily, LessWrong tries to teach that, too. It's really a very good deal. Plus, if you upvote your favorite posts, you start contributing right away by helping the idea selection process.
Don't forget: Wikipedia happened. It didn't sell out. It didn't fall to vandals. Encyclopedic knowledge is now free, accessible, collaborative, and even addictive. Now, LessWrong is happening to rationality.
1 In my experience, the Top Posts section works like an anti-sieve: pretty much everything on there is clever, but in any one reader's opinion there is probably a lot of great material that didn't make it to the top.
2 I sometimes describe the LessWrong dialogue as about "abstract practicality", because to most people the word "philosophy" communicates a sense of explicit uselessness, which LessWrong defies. The discussions here are all aimed at resolving real-life decisions of some kind or another, be it whether to start meditating or whether to freeze yourself when you die.
3 I compiled this abridged list of sequence posts for people who already have a strong background in math and science, to accomodate a faster exposure to the LessWrong "introductory" material.
4 This post is about how LessWrong happened as a blog. For recent general discussion of LessWrong's good and bad effects, consider When you need Less Wrong and Self-Improvement or Shiny Distraction?