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Will_Newsome comments on Why We Can't Take Expected Value Estimates Literally (Even When They're Unbiased) - Less Wrong
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Comments (249)
I think the problem here is that your posting style, to be frank, often obscures your point.
In most cases, posts that consist of a to-the-point answer followed by longer explanations use the initial statement to make a concise case. For instance, in this post, my first sentence sums up what I think about the situation and the rest explains that thought in more detail so as to convey a more nuanced impression.
By contrast, when Eliezer asked "What's the output here that the money is paying for," your first sentence was "Money would pay for marginal output, e.g. in the form of increased collaboration, I think, since the best Friendliness-cognizant x-rationalists would likely already be working on similar things." This does not really answer his question, and while you clarify this with your later points, the overall message is garbled.
The fact that your true answer is buried in the middle of a paragraph does not really help things much. Though I can see what you are trying to say, I can't in good and honest conscience describe it as clear. Had you answered, on the other hand, "Money would pay for the technical analysis necessary to determine as well as possible the feasibility and difficulty of FAI..." as your first sentence, I think your post would have been more clear and more likely to be understood.
I acknowledge this. But it seems to me that the larger problem is that Eliezer simply doesn't know how to read what people actually say. Less Wrong mostly doesn't either, and humans in general certainly don't. This is a very serious problem with LW-style rationality (and with humanity). There are extremely talented rationalists who do not have this problem; it is an artifact of Eliezer's psychology and not of the art of rationality.
It's hardly fair to blame the reader when you've got "sentences" like this:
That was the second version of the sentence, the first one had much clearer syntax and even italicized the answer to Eliezer's subsequent question. It looks the way it does because Eliezer apparently couldn't extract meaning out of my original sentence despite it clearly answering his question, so I tried to expand on the relevant points with bracketed concrete examples. Here's the original:
(emphasis in original)
Which starts with the word 'if' and fails to have a 'then'.
If you took out 'If I had' and replaced it with 'I would create', then maybe it would be more in line with what you're trying to say?
Certainly true, but that only means that we need to spend more effort on being as clear as possible.
If that's indeed the case (I haven't noticed this flaw myself), I suggest that you write articles (or perhaps commission/petition others to have them written) describing this flaw and how to correct it. Eliminating such a flaw or providing means of averting it would greatly aid LW and the community in general.
Unfortunately that is not currently possible for many reasons, including some large ones I can't talk about and that I can't talk about why I can't talk about. I can't see any way that it would become possible in the next few years either. I find this stressful; it's why I make token attempts to communicate in extremely abstract or indirect ways with Less Wrong, despite the apparent fruitlessness. But there's really nothing for it.
Unrelated public announcement: People who go back and downvote every comment someone's made, please, stop doing that. It's a clever way to pull information cascades in your direction but it is clearly an abuse of the content filtering system and highly dishonorable. If you truly must use such tactics, downvoting a few of your enemy's top level posts is much less evil; your enemy loses the karma and takes the hint without your severely biasing the public perception of your enemy's standard discourse. Please.
(I just lost 150 karma points in a few minutes and that'll probably continue for awhile. This happens a lot.)
I'm sorry to hear that you're up against something so difficult, and I hope you find a way out.
Thank you... I think I just need to be more meta. Meta never fails.
I'm not a big fan of the appeal to secret reasons, so I think I'm going to have pull out of this discussion. I will note, however, that you personally seem to be involved in more misunderstandings than the average LW poster, so while it's certainly possible that your secret reasons are true and valid and Eliezer just sucks at reading or whatever, you may want to clarify certain elements of your own communication as well.
I unfortunately predict that "going more meta" will not be strongly received here.
Why can't you talk about why you can't talk about them?
Are we still talking about improving general reading comprehension? What could possibly be dangerous about that?