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XiXiDu comments on Goals for which Less Wrong does (and doesn't) help - Less Wrong
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And that claim is what I have been inquiring about. How is an outsider going to tell if the people here are the best rationalists around? Your post just claimed this but did provide no evidence for outsiders to follow through on it. The only exceptional and novel thesis to be found on LW concerns decision theory which is not only buried but which one is not able to judge if it is actually valuable as long as one doesn't have a previous education. The only exceptional and novel belief (prediction) on here is that regarding the risks posed by AGI. As with the former, one is unable to judge any claims as long as one does not read the sequences (as it is claimed). But why would one do so in the first place? Outsiders are unable to judge the credence of this movement except by what their members say about it. This is my problem when I try to introduce people to Less Wrong. They don't see why it is special! They skim over some posts and there's nothing new there. You have to differentiate Less Wrong from other sources of epistemic rationality. What novel concepts are to be found here, what can you learn from Less Wrong that you might not already know or that you won't come across elsewhere?
Your post gives the impression that Less Wrong can provide great insights for personal self-improvement. That is indisputable, but those who it might help won't read it anyway or won't be able to understand it. I just doubt that people like you learn much from it. What have you learnt from Less Wrong, how did it improve your life? I have no formal education but what I've so far read of LW does not seem very impressive in the sense that there was nothing to disagree with me so that I could update my beliefs and improve my decisions. I haven't come across any post that gave me some feeling of great insight, most of it was either obvious or I figured it out myself before (much less formally of course). The most important idea associated with Less Wrong seems to be that concerning friendly AI. What's special about LW is the strong commitment here regarding that topic. That's why I'm constantly picking on it. And the best arguments for why Less Wrong hasn't helped to improve peoples perception about the topic of AI in some cases is that they are intellectual impotent. So if you are not arguing that they should give up, but rather learn more, then I ask how if not through LW, which obviously failed.
To give a summary. Everyone interested to consider reading the sequences won't be able to spot much that he/she doesn't already know or that seems unique. The people who Less Wrong would help the most do not have the necessary education to understand it. And the most important conclusion, that one should care about AGI safety, is insufficiently differentiated from the huge amount of writings concerned with marginal issues about rationality.
Let me put down a few of my own thoughts on the subject.
I think it's odd that LessWrong spends so much time pondering whether or not it should exist! Most blogs don't do that; most communities (online or otherwise) don't do that. And if a person did that, you'd consider her rather abnormal. I view such discussion as noise; or at least a sidebar to more interesting topics.
I disagree that LW can't be useful to anyone who'd understand it. I offer my own experience as an example: it was useful to me in several ways.
LW clinched my own break with religion (particularly the essay "Belief in Belief." )
Eliezer's explanation of quantum physics is very interesting, intuitive, and as far as I know isn't replicated in any textbook.
LW introduced me to futurist topics that I simply hadn't heard of, or realized that sensible people thought about (cryonics, the Singularity).
I met a few real-life friends through LW, for whom I have a lot of respect.
Finally, as far as instrumental rationality goes, LW took the place of two other, lower-quality internet forums in my free-time budget, so I spend more time out of my day trying to be thoughtful, rather than sleazy and goofy.
A couple of common topics on LW aren't all that interesting to me. Productivity/time management advice just strikes me as a bit of a guilt trip, which I can come up with by myself, thank you very much. I don't like models for how the mind works that aren't based in anything empirical -- I mistrust that sort of thing. (Not that professional researchers don't do the same thing!) I'm not a fan of the periodic gender wars and the oops-someone-mentioned-politics-and-we-all-went-crazy catastrophes. And I have a pet peeve with the local convention of using rather colorless language and speaking in very general terms and second-guessing themselves and each other all the time.
But apart from all that, it's a pretty damn good forum, and it does teach people new things.
Your recent post is a good example. A friendly math post! I gave up after reading "...within-cluster sum of squared differences..." :-)
Your points are really surprising. I do not interact with educated people in meatspace at all. I didn't think that someone who reached your level of education needed LW to break with religion. And I've always been the kind of person to take futuristic topics seriously by default, so that was no surprise at all to me. I guess that is why people here are irritated when I argue that science fiction authors talk about many topics discussed here for a long time. I don't see how the fictional exploration of concepts could lower the credence of the subjects.
Nevertheless, I never tried to argue that Less Wrong is useless. It's one of my favorite places in the metaverse.
People certainly ought not need to. By that I mean that people with the general cognitive capacity of humans have more than enough ability to evaluate religion as nonsense given even basic modern education. But even so it is damn hard to break free. Part of what makes the 'Belief in Belief' post particularly useful is that it is written in an attempt to understand what is really going on when people 'believe' things that don't make sense given what they know.
The social factors are also important. Religion is essentially about signalling tribal affiliation. It is dangerous to discard a tribal identity without already having found yourself a new tribe - even a compartmentalised online tribe used primarily for cognitive affiliation.
This is something I have to remind myself of when reading your comments. You are sincere. Not having known your online self at all some of your arguments and questions would seem far more rhetorical than you intended them. You actually do update on new information which is a big deal!
I didn't realize I was being unclear in that last post! Clearly it's one of those things that takes practice. (In my defense I really don't know where the median LW reader is at math; the level of that post was a wild guess.)
Glad you're not opposed to LessWrong as a place. I'm not certain myself whether it really fulfills its stated goal of helping people come to conclusions more rationally. (When decisions are actually hard, when empirical evidence is sparse and trial-and-error is impossible, I'm not sure it's possible to decide rationally at all! )
I think one thing it does is promote a norm of measured thinking, where we keep our emotions at a conversational level instead of letting them shout. I've definitely noticed that attitude spilling out into my everyday life, and I find myself checking "do I think that's really plausible or am I just saying it?"
No, that isn't it. It's just that the math was above my current level of education. It was all Chinese to me! That doesn't mean that I am against advanced math posts. I believe more technical posts would improve Less Wrong a lot. I loved the recent posts by cousin_it. Even though the key issues have been above my head they introduced me to so many new ideas. They gave me this feeling of discovering and learning something new and important. And the discussions they spawned have been of higher standard because nobody of lower education dared to say much. They also spawned awesome comments like this one. Your post is no different, just that I deferred reading it until I learnt the necessary math. Such posts actually give me incentive to learn more.
How to improve Less Wrong:
Example:
Someone like me has to look up each of the symbols. It would have been much easier this way: If P(Y|X) ≈ 1, then P(X∧Y) ≈ P(X).
Yeah, I'm trying hard not to write without thinking. Sometimes I still fail, especially when I'm tired.
"If" should not go to Conditional_(Programming), but "Logical Implication", though I don't see the need for a link. It really is just the standard meaning of "if", and if people don't know the meaning of "if", advanced rationality is probably a bit beyond what they can immediately use.
"1" as a link to percentage is odd as well. It's just the number one. Yes, people are often more used to it as 100% in the context of probability, but the link doesn't clarify that in any useful way.
The links for conditional probability and conjunction are great though. It's quite possible to not be familiar with those particular bits of notation.
I know, but you see what's the issue here. It actually has been a problem all my life. I'm really happy that there are now places like the Khan Academy and BetterExplained that actually explain such matters in a concise and straightforward way, not like school teachers who you never understand. Most of the time I only have to watch/read their explanation once to grasp it. Further they go into details you are never told about in school.
I guess I'm the kind of person who is unable to accept that 1+1=2 until someone explains the terms and operators. I only started with mathematics last year with a previous knowledge of basic arithmetic. Yet the first things I tried to figure out is what '+' actually means. That showed me that infix operators are functions and led me to the recursive and set theoretic definition of addition. Only at that point I have been satisfied. Which reminds me of a problem I had in German lessons back in elementary school. I always insisted to pronounce certain words the way I thought it was the most logical consistent to do, e.g. to pronounce 'st' not as 'sch'. Nobody ever told me that natural language evolved and that it is just an axiomatic definition, a cultural consensus to pronounce it in a certain way, not something you can infer from the general to the specific. So I kept pronouncing it the way I thought it was reasonable and ended up with bad grades. Such problems accumulated and I just stopped doing anything for school (also because I thought the other kids are all aliens). I'm only beginning to catch up for a few years now. English was the first thing I taught myself.
Hah! You must be one of those people who are only surrounded by educated folks. I don't know anyone in real-life who has any clue what a logical conjunction could be (been working as baker and doing roadworks). Something nasty maybe :-)
I find myself checking "I think that's really plausible. That can't be good. I wonder what I should be saying instead to be socially successful." ;)
It is easy for a math literate person to over-estimate how obvious certain jargon is to people. Like 'sum of squared differences' for example. Squared differences is just what is involved when you are calculating things like standard deviation. It's what you use when looking at, say, a group of people and deciding whether they all have about the same height or if some are really tall but others are really short. How different they are.
For those who have never had to manually calculate the standard deviation and similar statistics the term would just be meaningless. (Which makes your example a good demonstration of your point!)
Never mind that; just parse the damn phrase! All you need to know is what a "difference" is, and what "to square" means.
Why, I wonder, do people assume that words lose their individual meanings when combined, so that something like "squared differences" registers as "[unknown vocabulary item]" rather than "differences that have been squared"?
Because quite often sophisticated people will punish you socially if you don't take special care to pay homage to whatever extra meaning the combined phrase has taken on. Caution in such cases is a practical social move.
Good observation; I had been subliminally aware of it but nobody had ever pointed it out to me explicitly.
It's also very helpful to know things like why someone might go around squaring differences and then summing them, and what kinds of situations that makes sense in. That way you can tell when you make errors of interpretation. For example, "differences pertaining to the squared" is a plausible but less likely interpretation of "squared differences", but knowing that people commonly square differences and then sum them in order to calculate an L₂ norm, often because they are going to take the derivative of the result so as to solve for a local minimum, makes that a much less plausible interpretation.
And for a Bayesian to be rational in the colloquial sense, they must always remember to assign some substantial probability weight to "other". For example, you can't simply assume that words like "sum" and "differences" are being used with one of the meanings you're familiar with; you must remember that there's always the possibility that you're encountering a new sense of the word.
Really? I think I would have understood that sentence before the first time I tried to calculate a standard deviation manually. In general, there are many ways to arrive at an understanding of a concept. I'm very skeptical of statements of the form "you can't understand X without doing Y first."
I was being polite.
What do you mean? Are you saying that everyone with an average IQ is supposed to be able to understand what it means to minimize the within-cluster sum of squared differences, regardless of education? I don't know what a standard deviation is either. I am able to read Wikipedia, understand what to do and use it. I know what squared means and I know what differences means. I just expected the sentence to mean more than the sum of its parts. Also I do not call the ability to use tools comprehension. What I value is to know when to use a particular tool, how to use it effectively and how it works.
You could teach stone-age people to drive a car. It would still seem like magic to them. Yet if you cloned them and exposed them to the right circumstance they might actually understand the internal combustion engine once grown up. Same IQ. Same as the server WolframAlpha is running on do possess a certain potential. Yet what enables the potential are the five million lines of Mathematica.
I'd be really surprised if one was able to understand the sentence the first time with a self-taught 1-year educational background in mathematics. That doesn't mean that there are exceptions, I'm not a prodigy.
I think you're right. "Sum of squared differences" makes sense as a normal thing to do with data points only if you've learned that it's a measure of how spread apart they are, that it's equivalent to the variance, and that making the variance small is a good way to ensure that a cluster is "well clumped." There is a certain amount of intuition that's built up from experience.
I also want to stress the point that I'm a bit biased(?) when it comes to understanding concepts. Surely I could accept any mathematical method or algorithm at face value. After all I'm also able to use WolframAlpha. But I feel that doesn't count. At least I do not value such understanding. If you taught a prehistoric man to press some buttons he would be able to control a nuclear facility.
Many people are bothered by the counter-intuitive nature of probability. I have never been more confused by probability than by any other branch of mathematics. I believe that people regard probability as more difficult to understand because they learn about it much later than about other mathematical concepts. For me that is very different because it is all new to me. For me P(Y) ≥ P(X∧(X->Y)) is as (actually more) intuitive than a^2 + b^2 = c^2. The first makes sense in and of itself, the second needs context and proof (at least regarding my gut feeling). I just don't see how 2 + 2 = 4 is more obvious than Bayes' theorem. You just learnt to accept that 2 + 2 = 4 because 1.) you encounter the problem very often 2.) you can easily verify its solution 3.) you learn about it early on. But it is not self-evident.
This is something people have noticed and it influences their responses. Aggressive "not understanding" is often considered a sign of bad faith, for good reason.
What I noticed is that everyone seems to assume that my problem to understand the sentence "...within-cluster sum of squared differences..." was regarding "sum of squared differences" and not "within-cluster". I don't know the definition of the concept of a mathematical cluster. What might add to the confusion is that I'm not even sure about the meaning of the English word "cluster". After that I decided to postpone reading the post. I could take the effort to look everything up of course but thought it would be more effective to read it in future.
Your post simply served as an example of how difficult it can be to read Less Wrong without a lot of background knowledge.
Not really. I actually wrote a basic explanation of the whole sentence concept by concept but trimmed it down to the part that best illustrated dependence on mathematical background. Saying "within cluster is basically a phrase in English that refers to the same thing that's in the title of the post" wouldn't have helped convey the point. :P
It does, however, illustrate a different point. There is a trait related not just to intelligence but also to openness to information and flexible thinking that makes some people more suited than others to picking up and following new topics and ideas based on what they already know and filling in the blanks with their best inference. Confidence is part of it but part of it is social competition strategy embodied at the cognitive level.
There isn't an explicit mathematical concept of a cluster.
Here's what K-means does. Say, K is 3.
You try all the possible ways to partition your data points into three groups. You pick the partition that minimizes the sum of squared differences within each group.
Then you iterate the procedure.
No, approximately the opposite of that. Are you sure you didn't intend this to be a reply to Peter? It seems to be quite an odd reply to me in the context.
You said that you have been polite in what you previously wrote. I parsed that the way that you agree with Peter de Blanc but that you have chosen to communicate this fact in a way that makes it possible to arrive at the conclusion without stating it. In other words, I should have been able to understand the sentence.
I didn't reply to Peter de Blanc because I don't know him and he doesn't know me and so his statement that he would have understood Y without X doesn't give me much information regarding my own intelligence. But you have actually read a lot of my comments and addressed me directly in the discussion above.
Interestingly I'm having a discussion (see my previous comments) with Roko if one should tell people directly if they are dumb or try to communicate such a truth differently.
Note polite enough to lie but polite enough to leave off all the caveats and exceptions. Some here could, understand the sentence even with no education in mathematics. Even so, the essentials of what I said was sincere. Piecing together that kind of jargon from the scraps of information available in the context is a far harder task than just understanding the article itself.
Oh come on. You really think the fact that no one else is doing it means it is a bad idea?
And besides, Hacker News also has periodic controversies over the fact that some of its users read it instead of hacking. My guess is that any forum populated by ambitious people will have periodic controversies over whether it should be killed off/re-channeled/etc. And that's a good thing.
That is a good point. Although generally I'm a fan of conformity; it's often a sign that you're doing things right.
Sure, but that should be a very weak heuristic.
If you sample from the set of online communities you know of, you'll tend to see bigger and longer lasting ones more frequently than smaller and shorter-lasting ones. So by conforming with online communities you see, you're making your community larger and longer-lasting. That's not obviously a good thing.
My post didn't claim Less Wrong contains the best rationalists anywhere. It claimed that for many readers, Less Wrong is the best community of aspiring rationalists that they have easy access to. I wish you would be careful to be clear about exactly what is at issue and to avoid straw man attacks.
As to how to evaluate Less Wrongers’, or others’, rationality skills: It is hard to assess others’ rationality by evaluating their opinions on a small number of controversial issues. This difficulty stems partly from the difficulty of oneself determining the right answers (so as to know whether to raise or lower one’s estimate of others with those views). And it stems in part from the fact that a small number of yes/no or multiple-choice-style opinions will provide only limited evidence, especially given communities’ tendency to copy the opinions of others within the community.
One can more easily notice what processes LWers and others follow, and one can ask whether these processes are likely to promote true beliefs. For example, LWers tend to say they’re aiming for true beliefs, rather than priding themselves in their faith, optimism, etc. Also, folks here do an above-average job of actually appearing curious, of updating their claims in response to evidence, of actively seeking counter-evidence, of separating claims into separately testable/evaluable components, etc.
At the risk of repeating myself: it is these processes that I, and at least some others, have primarily learned from the sequences/OB/LW. This material has helped me learn to actually aim for accurate beliefs, and it has given me tools for doing so more effectively. (Yes, much of the material in the sequences is obvious in some sense; but reading the sequences moved it from “somewhat clear when I bothered to think about it” to actually a part of my habits for thinking.) I’m a bit frustrated here, but my feeling is that you are not yet using these habits consistently in your writing -- you don’t appear curious, and you are not carefully factoring issues into separable claims that can be individually evaluated. If you do, we might make more progress talking together!
My impression is that XiXiDu is curious and that what you're frustrated by has more to do with his difficulty expressing himself than with closed-mindedness on his part. Note that he compiled a highly upvoted list of references and resources for Less Wrong - I read this as evidence that he's interested in Less Wrong's mission and think that his comments should be read more charitably.
I'll try to recast what I think he's trying to say in clearer terms sometime over the next few days
I agree with you, actually. He does seem curious; I shouldn't have said otherwise. He just also seems drawn to the more primate-politics-prone topics within Less Wrong, and he seems further to often express himself in spaghetti-at-the-wall mixtures of true and untrue, and relevant and irrelevant statements that confuse the conversation.
Less Wrong is a community that many of us care about; and it is kind, when one is new to a community and is still learning to express oneself, to tread a little more softly than XiXiDu has been.
Arguably the primate-politics-prone topics are the most important ones; the tendency that you describe can be read as seriousness of purpose.
Agreed.
Not to mention more pragmatic socially in the general case. Unless you believe you have the capacity to be particularly dominant in a context and wish to introduce yourself near the top of a hierarchy. Some people try that here from time to time, particularly those who think they are impressive elsewhere. It is a higher risk move and best used when you know you will be able to go and open a new set, I mean community, if your dominant entry fails.
Confession: Having a few muddled ideas of signalling in mind when I joined LessWrong, I knew of this pattern (works really well at parties!) and decided that people here were too savvy, so I specifically focused on entering as low as possible in the hierarchy. I'm curious whether that was well-received because of various status reasons (made others feel higher-status) or because it was simply more polite and agreeable.
Though there are many brilliant people within academia, there is also shortsightedness and group-think within academia which could have led the academic establishment to ignore important issues concerning safety of advanced future technologies.
I've seen very little (if anything) in the way of careful rebuttals of SIAI's views from the academic establishment. As such, I don't think that there's strong evidence against SIAI's claims. At the same time, I have the impression that SIAI has not done enough to solicit feedback from the academic establishment.
John Baez will be posting an interview with Eliezer sometime soon. It should be informative to see the back and forth between the two of them.
Concerning the apparent group think on Less Wrong: something relevant that I've learned over the past few months is that some of the vocal SIAI supporters on LW express views that are quite unrepresentative of those of the SIAI staff. I initially misjudged SIAI on account of past unawareness of this point.
I believe that if you're going to express doubts and/or criticism about LW and/or SIAI you should take the time and energy to express these carefully and diplomatically. Expressing unclear or inflammatory doubts and/or criticism is conducive to being rejected out of hand. I agree with Anna's comment here.
Wow, that's cool! They read my mind :-)
Even Eliezer Yudkowsky doesn't believe he's the smartest person alive. He's the founder of the site and set its tone early, but that's not the same thing.
Finding people smarter than oneself is essential to making oneself more effective and stretching one's abilities and goals.
For an example I'm closely familiar with: I think one of Jimmy Wales' great personal achievements with Wikipedia, as an impressively smart fellow himself, is that he discovered an extremely efficient mechanism for gathering around him people who made him feel really dumb by comparison. He'd be first to admit that a lot of those he's gathered around him outshine him.
Getting smarter people than yourself to sign up for your goals is, I suspect, one marker of success in selecting a good goal.
I agree; the average quality of your comments and posts has been increasing with time and I commend you for this.
This statement carries the connotation that I'm very important. At present I don't think that there's solid evidence in this direction. In any case; no need to feel self-conscious about taking my time, I'm happy to make your acquaintance and engage with you.
I disagree strongly. Using myself as my only data-point (flawed, I know, but deeply relevant for me) the exact opposite is true. I had enough education to understand (nearly) everything (some of the more advanced math took extra study to follow). But I had never been exposed to such a large amount of concentrated sanity in writing. The greatest asset of LW wasn't that it provided education I didn't have, but rather that it provided sanity I'd never been exposed to. That made a huge difference.
Obviously you cannot form a good judgment as to whether a person is a good rationalist by determining whether his opinion on a difficult subject matches your opinion. And, even more obviously, you can't do so based on Anna's authority.
Instead, you need to interact with the person on an issue of intermediate difficulty and notice whether what he says clears cobwebs from your mind and shines light in dark corners. Or whether you come away from the conversation more confused and in the dark than before.
You may notice that I am implicitly defining rationalism in terms of how well a person communicates rather than how well they think. And even more than that, I am focusing on how well he communicates with you, rather than how well he communicates in general. If you wish, you can object, saying "That is not rationalism". Well, perhaps not. But it is the characteristic you should seek out in your interlocutors.
That shouldn't happen, because many posts are controversial and/or have little support, and some posts contradict each other.
I haven't been specific in what I said. There actually have been some posts that introduced me to new concepts and allowed me to feel more satisfied to believe certain things. Only because of LW I was able to compile this curriculum. Although there are many more insightful and novel comments in my opinion than there are posts. I don't want to appear arrogant here or downplay the value of Less Wrong. I actually believe it is one of the most important resources. I just haven't read enough of LW yet to notice any capital contradictions. That also means that there might be great insights I haven't come across yet. I also don't think that most ideas here need much support (the top-ranked post seems to be an outlier). But take a look at some popular posts, where do you disagree or what have they taught you that you didn't already come up with on your own? Take for example the Ugh fields. Someone like me who managed to abandon religion without any help on his own reads that post, agrees wholeheartedly and upvotes it. But has it helped me? No, I'm rather a person that naturally takes this attitude too serious, I consciously overthink things until I completely leave near-mode and operate in far-mode only. I thought your post on self-fulfilling correlations was awesome. But there was no novel insight for me in it either. I know lots of people who should read your post and would benefit from it a lot. But such people won't read it. People like me who visit a psychologist because they know they need help won't be surprised by the movie Contact when Jodie Foster admits it could have all been some illusion. People like me are naturally aware that they could be dreaming. Doubt and the possibility of self-delusion are fundamental premises. But the people who'd really have to go to a psychologist, or read Less Wrong, believe they are perfectly normal or don't need to be told anything.
What I'm trying to say is that if Less Wrong wants to change the world rather than being a place where hyper-rationalists can collectively pat their back, you need to think about how to reach the people who need to know about it. And you need feedback, you have to figure out why people like Ben Goertzel fail to share some conclusions being made here and update accordingly.
Were there ever any references identifying the Scary Idea as an official SIAI belief?
I think that - if they comment at all - they would come back with something like:
Does Eliezer believe that working on friendly AI and supporting friendly AI research is the most important and most rational way to positively influence the future of humanity? If he thinks so, then is it reasonable to suspect that his rationale for starting to write on matters of rationality was to plead his case for friendly AI research and convince other people that it is indeed the most effective way to help humankind? If not, what was his reason to start blogging on Overcoming Bias and Less Wrong? Why has he spent so much time helping people to become less wrong rather than working directly on friendly AI? How can you be less wrong and still doubt that you should support friendly AI research?
I still suspect that everything he does is a means to an end. I'm also the opinion that if one reads all of Less Wrong and is afterwards (in the case one wants to survive and benefit humanity) still unable to conclude that the best way to do so is by supporting the SIAI, then either one did not understand due to a lack of intelligence or Less Wrong failed to convey its most important message. Therefore you should listen to the people who have read Less Wrong and disagree. You should also try to reach the people who haven't read Less Wrong but should read it because they are in a position that makes it necessary for them to understand the issues in question.
Well, I tend to think that that working on and supporting machine intelligence research is probably the most important way to positively influence the future of civilisation. The issue of what we want the machines to do is a part of the project.
So, such beliefs don't seem particularly "far out" - to me.
FWIW, Yudkowsky describes his motivation in writing about rationality here:
http://lesswrong.com/lw/66/rationality_common_interest_of_many_causes/
...and is therefore evidence against your model (for what it's worth).
It could also be an instance of this.
Aren't these one and the same? I had "for what it's worth" in there to account for uncertainty and probable weakness of the effect.
Denotation and connotation.