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luminosity14y70

I find these posts very low value. Short sentences like these seem optimised for wit, rather than truth, usefulness or insight. While I suppose theoretically there's no reason why a brilliant and startling idea couldn't be communicated by a simple, short sentence, everything I've ever read on Less Wrong and found useful, interesting and new has been an idea that requires some explanation.

Several theories:

A shorter sentence can play with language tricks, whereby something sounds profound without being so. A longer explanation by virtue of its length cannot sustain itself on mere language trickery.
A more detailed explanation has time and space to fully, or at least partially, reveal and explore the implications of the idea, where a shorter sentence can sound wise but have no real implications.
The more startling and potentially groundbreaking an idea is, the more actual work needs to be done to set it up properly. For instance, by itself saying "Thou art physics." while it might sound wise, wouldn't lead to a proper understanding of how that dissolves the question of free will. That requires a rather extensive explanation.

See in context

14 Some rationalistic aphorisms

by Will_Newsome

24th Jan 2011

2 min read

14

I'm no steven0461/stevenkaas, but perhaps some of these are approaching something like insight. Truthiness, not truth.

(More context: I use Facebook to share short insights with people who have relatively high estimates of my general sanity. The following are things I posted on Facebook. The stevenkaas reference is referencing the awesomeness of stevenkaas's twitter feed, to which my blurbs just cannot compare.)

Two good words: polymathic and protagonistic.
Creepy is low status abnormality, weird is normal status abnormality, eccentric is high status abnormality.
It's unfortunate that scientific studies often treat data averaged from entire nations as the atoms of statistical analysis.
If you never have akrasia, you're spending too much time on trivial challenges.
The universe is a big deal. (hint acausal economy hint)
Animals look kinda like agents. Memes look kinda like agents. Humans don't look like much like agents because they don't fulfill the preferences of either their genes or their memes nearly as well as they could if they could just choose one.
People who always go meta will never become complacent in their epistemology, because beyond a certain level they'll always go, "Well, shit."
One of my goals lately has been to write a thousand words a day. I've noticed that the first three hundred are difficult but the last three thousand come naturally.
There seems to be a correlation between a person saying that correlation does not imply causation and that person not understanding much about either correlation or causation. Now, I don't mean to imply anything, but...
I wish people would just update on the expectation of being Dutch booked due to inconsistent preferences and give me money.
Some people have comparative advantage in having comparative advantage. This applies to cognitive styles as much as professions. Human mindspace has many niches.
The feeling of knowing that one knows more than others is addicting and almost always wrong.
On Friendliness: All things lie on the axis of provincialism and universality. Positive affect around any one level of universality is provincial thinking. Societal values have become more universal over time. We may thus intuit that reflective consistency suggests planning for the case where we should have been thinking universally all along, including in the sense that full provincialism and full universality seem arbitrary with respect to each other.
Debates about ontology are important because choice of ontology does in fact change your expected anticipations because having a certain ontology will lengthen and shorten certain inferential distances. Humans rely much on cached insights and single step inferences.
Intelligence is seeing implications.
"The world is perfect, including your desire to change it." (Found in a fortune cookie. My fortune cookies tend to be really meta.)
The balance of Yin and Yang is timelessly fulfilled by timeful striving.
Analyze verbs timelessly and nouns timefully. That way you look at the part of the conceptualization that isn't already explicit in its construction.
Moore's paradox is only a paradox if you assume that people are unified and coherent agents. They aren't.
Decompartmentalize your knowledge of Turing equivalence, take the principle of charity seriously, and lots more things will start making lots more sense. Added bonus: you can learn smart things from stupid people.

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[-]michaelkeenan14y140

If you like rationalist aphorisms, you might like Aaron Haspel's Twitter feed. Examples:

Once you start to view human interaction as a contest to signal mating fitness, it becomes hard to view it as anything else.

Nothing is art, but anything can be treated as art.

Even the most disinterested truth-seeker is angling for a world of greater rewards for disinterested truth-seekers.

Polytheism is pre-scientific: monotheism is anti-scientific.

Whatever you do for the sake of the children is probably wrong.

Whatever you do for someone's own good is probably mischief.

Better that X guilty men go free than one innocent man be convicted. Solve for X.

Tact consists mostly in disguising the fact that some people are better than others.

Adaptive is not optimal.

You are what you fear to appear to be.

The chief problems in moral philosophy are akrasia and imperfect information. It has mostly pretended that they do not exist.

Whatever you have done, you are the sort of person who would do that.

Misspellers learn from speech, mispronouncers from books.

We all have the strength to refuse what we are not offered.

The people are flattered more obsequiously than the monarch ever was.

The incorruptible politician merely prefers power to money.

Katja Grace pointed out something interesting about aphorisms:

Why do aphorisms and cynicism go together?

A good single sentence saying can’t require background evidencing or further explanation. It must be instantly recognizable as true. It also needs to be news to the listener. Most single sentences that people can immediately verify as true they already believe. What’s left? One big answer is things that people don’t believe or think about much for lack of wanting to, despite evidence. Drawing attention to these is called cynicism.

[-]luminosity14y70

Several theories:

A shorter sentence can play with language tricks, whereby something sounds profound without being so. A longer explanation by virtue of its length cannot sustain itself on mere language trickery.
A more detailed explanation has time and space to fully, or at least partially, reveal and explore the implications of the idea, where a shorter sentence can sound wise but have no real implications.
The more startling and potentially groundbreaking an idea is, the more actual work needs to be done to set it up properly. For instance, by itself saying "Thou art physics." while it might sound wise, wouldn't lead to a proper understanding of how that dissolves the question of free will. That requires a rather extensive explanation.

[-]TheOtherDave14y40

"I wish people would just update on the expectation of being Dutch booked due to inconsistent preferences and give me money."

This sounds like something Steven Wright would say in an alternate universe where I would prefer to be living.

[-]Nornagest14y10

The feeling of knowing that one knows more than others is addicting and almost always wrong.

Oddly, the same seems to be true of feeling that one knows less than others.

[-]Emile14y10

Why "Facebook"? Where do these (admittedly neat) aphorisms come from? From stevenkaas's twitter? His (non-public?) facebook? A bit more context would make this post more understandable.

[-]Will_Newsome14y10

I put more details in the post: "(More context: I use Facebook to share short insights with people who have relatively high estimates of my general sanity. The following are things I posted on Facebook. The stevenkaas reference is referencing the awesomeness of stevenkaas's twitter feed, to which my blurbs just cannot compare.)"

[-]RHollerith14y30

That explains why the choice of title "Facebook aphorisms" is convenient for you, but notice that almost no one else is helped

[-]Emile14y00

OK, thanks, now I understand - I originally really thought these were from stevenkaas facebook or something. Seeing the title "Facebook aphorisms" made me expect to see some neat aphorisms you had gleaned from Facebook.

(Also, I didn't know about stevenkaas' twitter - I usually don't read anything on twitter)

[-][anonymous]14y00

One of my goals lately has been to write a thousand words a day. I've noticed that the first three hundred are difficult but the last three thousand come naturally.

300+3000=1000?

[-]NancyLebovitz14y00

What is a timeless analysis of a verb?

[-]Will_Newsome14y-10

This is easiest for me to describe with visual thinking, so it might not makes sense to some people. I think of "attraction" (as in dynamical processes) as a verb. (I realize it's gramatically a noun, but ontologically it's a verb.) When I naively picture attraction it's some stable convergent feature that patterns can't help but be drawn to, even if accidentally; it's teleological, or it's causal, but I don't picture both of them at the same time because my mind runs snapshots of the process going forward or backward, but not both simultaneously. A timeless view would be looking at the forward-causal and the backward-teleological chains as a distribution over space instead of sequential or superimposed time slices, so it doesn't just look like a pattern is emerging over time going towards the future, or just a teleological chain reaching backwards from the future, but both intertwining. It's way easier to see the complementary structure if I envision the process as a block and not a dynamical process. I'm not sure how to make it more clear, and I'm not sure if it's really useful, but I've been playing around with ontology construction a lot and it just felt like a neat trick to me.

ETA: It's also cognitively cheaper for me to visualize things as spatial configurations without any change over time, but I have to sacrifice the number of details I can put into the visualization in order to capture the overall structure.

Unrelatedly, if you reverse everything I said you can do the same thing with nouns.

[-]Ultima14y30

I don't know about everybody else, but I'm totally confused.

I mean, if it's visual, why don't you just make us a picture or a video, instead of just relying on words (which aren't very good for this purpose)?

[-]Sniffnoy14y10

I realize it's gramatically a noun, but ontologically it's a verb.

This is nonsense. The notion "verb" only makes sense gramatically. There is no such thing as "ontologically a verb" or "ontologically a noun", etc. Not every language even uses these same categories or splits them the same way.

[-]Ultima14y20

Instead of jumping to such a reckless conclusion, why don't you just ask him what he means by "ontologically a verb"?

[-]erratio14y00

Esperanto has ontological word classes. They're surprisingly elegant, too.

Having said that, I agree on your main point - natural languages just don't do that.

[-]Sniffnoy14y00

Please explain. Currently I find this very unlikely given that the idea doesn't seem to make much sense in the first place, and the fact that Esperanto is a naturally-evolved mess due to Zamenhof's original description being vastly underspecified.

[-]Will_Newsome14y00

Also a few nights ago I had the odd sensation of visualizing the set of common American candy bars as a superimposed image. Not the union of the candy bars, but being able to see all of them at the same time despite them being in the same visual space... there is no analogue of this in actual sight, so I'm not sure why my visual cortex would be able to do that. I can't do it (at least not nearly as well or convincingly) right now. I really wanted to buy a Snickers bar. Anyway this allowed me to look at a lot of things spatially while retaining a lot of detail, but it wasn't a dynamical process that I was visualizing, but a set of objects. This superimposed visualization thing seems pretty cool though; perhaps I can train it to see dynamical processes spatially represented in a small space with lots of details for each spatial representation of a time slice?

[-]mutterc14y40

Or perhaps your diet is too strict.

[-]Ultima14y00

Something like this?

(Where each of the shaded rectangles is one of the candy bars.)

And, as to whether there's an analogue of this in actual sight, of course there's not (if I know what you mean), but that doesn't mean that it's an uncommon thing. Just look out into your room (or wherever you are), and imagine that something (such as a dog or something) is there. What's the difference between the actual scene and the imagined scene? Well, the actual one is much more vivid, and the imagined is much less vivid. It's not that you're only seeing the real situation, and not seeing the imagined one; it's simply that the real one is much more forceful to your mind than the imagined. The imagined one is "superimposed" over the other one; you can see both.

So is that how the candy bars were stacked on top of each other on your visual field?

[-]Manfred14y-20

I think of "attraction" (as in dynamical processes) as a verb. (I realize it's gramatically a noun, but ontologically it's a verb.)

For a simple English trick to get verbs that are unequivocally verbs, start your thought with "to." So "to kick." "To open." "To attract." Thinking of a noun as a noun is not as good an example :D

[-]Alicorn14y20

To arms!

To hell and back!

To my dear friend and her new husband, on this happy day!

[-]Manfred14y00

Yes, yes, not every thought that starts with "to" contains a verb, and not every verb is a thought that starts with "to." It's merely a useful way to think of verbs if they're eluding me.

[-]Will_Newsome14y-10

Also, the current motto of the planned Visiting Fellows program curriculum is "You have to have faith or this magic won't work." Unfortunately this only makes sense if you already have an ontology for things like magic and faith.

[-]LucasSloan14y00

Cognitive black boxes?

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