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Logos01 comments on Rhetoric for the Good - Less Wrong
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There is a cost to simplicity in terms of precision. There's a lot to be said about finding ways to convey your ideas with "beautiful simplicity" -- in the way often attributed to Feynman -- but some ideas just cannot be reduced to such a level, and some of those ideas are important.
Case in point: the differences between what a frequentist means by "probablity" and what a Bayesian means by "probability". The existential significance of the lack of curvature to the universe. (Sure, I could say, "Why its a big deal that spacetime is flat" -- but that's conveying a different range of meanings than the other statement, which if I hadn't already 'primed' you to that same understanding might've lead you to another conclusion.)
Would you or anyone else care to list the ideas on LW that cannot be reduced to refrigerator magnet/bumper sticker/memorable stand-up comedy routine level?
MWI, Aumann's Agreement Theorem, Great Filter concerns for existential risk, anthropic arguments in general, Bayes's Theorem in the non-finite case. But even these are not in general high priority issues for rationality. I think it is fair to say that most of the important ideas can have bumpersticker size statements. But, the level of unpacking may be so large from the bumpersticker forms that they only reason the bumpersticker form seems to do anything useful is just illusion of transparency.
Think of it as an enticing slogan, then. Or a tagline. Something to lure the lure-able. People read 600-page books based on back-cover blurbs, and they do so on a whim, at an airport.
If you want the "back cover blurb" for a 600-page book, that's an entirely sensible request... but it seems weird to criticize a 600-page book on the grounds that it isn't as accessible as a back-cover blurb. Back-cover blurbs can exist in addition to the books; they needn't be instead of.
Right. I'm only criticizing the quality of the blurb. I'm not suggesting scientific papers adopt a different editorial standard... although I'd be completely psyched if they did.
EDIT: If LW could convince a million people only to remember that their brains frequently mess up and then try to cover their own tracks, that would be a gigantic victory.
Agreed.
What I challenge is the idea that most posts/comments here ought to make good cover blurbs.
If I need a cover blurb, it seems more productive to say "Hey, I need a cover blurb, any recommendations?" than to point to arbitrary contributions and say "This isn't a very good cover blurb."
My turn to agree. What can I say, I got emotional when it seemed to me like everyone chose to nitpick Luke's advice rather than heed it.
My question remains: can LW produce Blurb Ninjas?
Cool; glad we got that cleared up.
As for Blurb Ninjas... see comment elsewhere for my thoughts on how to encourage that.
Ok. If they are that large, say a one paragraph blurb, then I really don't think there's anything generally discussed here that could not if carefully phrased get the primary points across if someone is willing to read the paragraph and then actually think about it.
Then it's just a matter of getting them into the public consciousness somehow.
Off the top of my head, the first thing that comes to mind is: supergoals and how to assess them. Second: the process of figuring out how to parse a true utility function from a fake utility function.
Yes, but I do not need this information to get through an average day. Rationality is --or should be -- for regular people, and very few regular people need to worry about the curvature of the universe in an average day.
Requiring rationality to be restricted to an aversion to edge-cases limits its usefulness to the point of being almost entirely without value.
To relate this more directly: that flat-spacetime thing is very relevant to understanding how "something" can come from "nothing". Which touches on how we all got here -- a very important, existentially speaking, question. One that can have an impact on even the 'ordinary' person's 'average day'. After all; if it turns out there's no reason for anyone to believe in a God, then many of the things many people do or say on a daily basis become... extraneous at best.
Furthermore: one of the things that instrumental rationality as an approach needs to have in its "toolkit" is the ability to deeply examine thoughts, ideas, and events in advance and from those examinations create heuristics ("rules of thumb") that enable us to make better decisions. That requires the use of sometimes very 'technical' turns of phrase. It's simply unavoidable.
That gets all the more true when you're trying to convey a very precise thought about a very nuanced topic. The thing is, regardless of where one looks in life there are more levels of complexity than we normally pay attention to. But that doesn't make those levels of complexity irrelevant; it just means that we abstract that complexity away in our 'average' lives. Enter said heuristics.
Part of instrumental rationality as an approach, I believe, is the notion of at least occassionally breaking down into their constituent parts the various forms of complexity we usually ignore, in order to try to come up with better abstractions with which to ignore said complexity when it shouldn't be a focus of our attention. I've gotten in "trouble" here on lesswrong for making similar statements before, however -- (though to add nuance that was more about whether generalizations are appropriate in a given 'depth' of conversation.)
Do you honestly believe that an average person is ever going to do any of that, in the way you just described, without being raised from birth in a world precisely tailored to make it easier for them to do so?
... Defining a few terms:
"ever": within the projected remaining longevity of anyone currently alive.
"average person": A sufficient portion of people who are no more than 1 standard deviation away from the mode of any given manner of behavior as to be representative of the whole.
-- that being said: no, no I do not.
A different set of definitions:
"ever": throughout the remainder of history
"an average person": at least one person who is validly described as 'average' at the time it happens
-- Yes, yes I do.
Even explaining that took more nuance than you'd like, I suspect. Please note how radically different the two statements are, even though they both conform very closely to what you said. THIS is why nuance is sometimes indispensable.
Within our lifetimes, conversational speech will not resemble a legal document. Nor is the average person persuaded by legalese. In fact, they're turned off by it. Nuance is sometimes indispensable, but taking such a macroscopic view of nuance that "average" people from the year 2345 are included is stretching credulity, to say the least (not that I haven't been guilty of the same crime).
Not all conversations, no -- but if an average person is unprepared for legalese then he'd better always have a lawyer with him when he signs anything, ever. This has an unhappy context for our conversatoin: is there a rationality-equivalent of a lawyer?
Relevant
The Order of Silent Confessors, maybe?
Good question. Perhaps there's a market for that.
It is by my will alone that I set my mind in motion.
It is a really good idea, though. Has it been brought up before on LW? Like the boot camp, but longer, and more in depth, and accredited somehow?
So far.
I actually laughed out loud at this one.
Sure, but by the time universe curvature is a "trending topic," we'll probably have artificially enhanced brains anyway. Until that day comes...