Due in part to Eliezer's writing style (e.g. not many citations), and in part to Eliezer's scholarship preferences (e.g. his preference to figure out much of philosophy on his own), Eliezer's Sequences don't accurately reflect the close agreement between the content of The Sequences and work previously done in mainstream academia.
I predict several effects from this:
- Some readers will mistakenly think that common Less Wrong views are more parochial than they really are.
- Some readers will mistakenly think Eliezer's Sequences are more original than they really are.
- If readers want to know more about the topic of a given article, it will be more difficult for them to find the related works in academia than if those works had been cited in Eliezer's article.
I'd like to counteract these effects by connecting the Sequences to the professional literature. (Note: I sort of doubt it would have been a good idea for Eliezer to spend his time tracking down more references and so on, but I realized a few weeks ago that it wouldn't take me much effort to list some of those references.)
I don't mean to minimize the awesomeness of the Sequences. There is much original content in them (edit: probably most of their content is original), they are engagingly written, and they often have a more transformative effect on readers than the corresponding academic literature.
I'll break my list of references into sections based on how likely I think it is that a reader will have missed the agreement between Eliezer's articles and mainstream academic work.
(This is only a preliminary list of connections.)
Obviously connected to mainstream academic work
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Eliezer's posts on evolution mostly cover material you can find in any good evolutionary biology textbook, e.g. Freeman & Herron (2007).
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Likewise, much of the Quantum Physics sequence can be found in quantum physics textbooks, e.g. Sakurai & Napolitano (2010).
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An Intuitive Explanation of Bayes' Theorem, How Much Evidence Does it Take, Probability is in the Mind, Absence of Evidence Is Evidence of Absence, Conservation of Expected Evidence, Trust in Bayes: see any textbook on Bayesian probability theory, e.g. Jaynes (2003) or Friedman & Koller (2009).
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What's a Bias, again?, Hindsight Bias, Correspondence Bias; Positive Bias: Look into the Dark, Doublethink: Choosing to be Biased, Rationalization, Motivated Stopping and Motivated Continuation, We Change Our Minds Less Often Than We Think, Knowing About Biases Can Hurt People, Asch's Conformity Experiment, The Affect Heuristic, The Halo Effect, Anchoring and Adjustment, Priming and Contamination, Do We Believe Everything We're Told, Scope Insensitivity: see standard works in the heuristics & biases tradition, e.g. Kahneman et al. (1982), Gilovich et al. 2002, Kahneman 2011.
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According to Eliezer, The Simple Truth is Tarskian and Making Beliefs Pay Rent is Peircian.
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The notion of Belief in Belief comes from Dennett (2007).
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Fake Causality and Timeless Causality report on work summarized in Pearl (2000).
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Fake Selfishness argues that humans aren't purely selfish, a point argued more forcefully in Batson (2011).
Less obviously connected to mainstream academic work
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Eliezer's metaethics sequences includes dozens of lemmas previously discussed by philosophers (see Miller 2003 for an overview), and the resulting metaethical theory shares much in common with the metaethical theories of Jackson (1998) and Railton (2003), and must face some of the same critiques as those theories do (e.g. Sobel 1994).
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Eliezer's free will mini-sequence includes coverage of topics not usually mentioned when philosophers discuss free will (e.g. Judea Pearl's work on causality), but the conclusion is standard compatibilism.
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How an Algorithm Feels From Inside and Dissolving the Question suggest that many philosophical problems can be dissolved into inquiries into the cognitive mechanisms that produce them, as also discussed in, for example, Shafir (1998) and Talbot (2009).
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Thou Art Godshatter, Not for the Sake of Happiness Alone, and Fake Utility Functions make the point that value is complex, a topic explored in more detail in affective neuroscience (Kringelbach & Berridge 2009), neuroeconomics (Glimcher 2010; Dolan & Sharot 2011), and other fields.
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Newcomb's Problem and the Regret of Rationality repeats a common debate among philosophers. Thinking that CDT must be right even though it "loses" to EDT on Newcomb's Problem, one group says "What can we do, if irrationality is rewarded?" The other group says "If you're so smart, why aren't you rich? What kind of rationality complains about the reward for irrationality?" For example, see Lewis (1981).
I don't think Eliezer had encountered this mainstream work when he wrote his articles
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Eliezer's TDT decision algorithm (2009, 2010) had been previously discovered as a variant of CDT by Wolfgang Spohn (2003, 2005, 2012). Both TDT and Spohn-CDT (a) use Pearl's causal graphs to describe Newcomblike problems, then add nodes to those graphs to represent the deterministic decision process the agent goes through (Spohn calls them "intention nodes," Yudkowsky calls them "logical nodes"), (b) represent interventions at these nodes by severing (edit: or screening off) the causal connections upstream, and (c) propose to maximize expected utility by summing over possible values of the decision node (or "intention node" / "logical node"). (Beyond this, of course, there are major differences in the motivations behind and further development of Spohn-CDT and TDT.)
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Many of Eliezer's points about intelligence explosion and machine ethics had been made in earlier writings Eliezer did cite, e.g. Williamson (1947), Good (1965), and Vinge (1993). Others of Eliezer's points appear in earlier writings he did not cite but probably had read: e.g. Minsky (1984), Schmidhuber (1987), Bostrom (1997), Moravec (1999). Others of Eliezer's points appear in earlier writings he probably hadn't read: e.g. Cade (1966), Good (1970), Versenyi (1974), Lukasiewicz (1974), Lampson (1979), Clarke (1993, 1994), Sobel (1999), Allen et al. (2000). (For a brief history of these ideas, see here and here.)
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A Technical Explanation of Technical Explanation retreads much ground from the field of Bayesian epistemology, surveyed for example in Niiniluoto (2004) and Howson & Urbach (2005).
And lo, people began tweeting:
Which is false. This pushes as far in the opposite wrong direction as the viewpoint it means to criticize.
Evolutionary biology, the non-epistemological part of the exposition of quantum mechanics, and of course heuristics and biases, are all not original. They don't look deceptively original either; they cite or attributed-quote the sources from which they're taken. I have yet to encounter anyone who thinks the Sequences are more original than they are.
When it comes to the part that isn't reporting on standard science, the parts that are mostly dealt with by modern "philosophers" rather than experimental scientists of one kind or another, the OP is vastly overstating how much of the Sequences are similar to the standard stuff out there. There is such a vast variety of philosophy that you can often find a conclusion similar to anything, to around the same degree that Leibniz's monadology anticipated timeless quantum mechanics, i.e., not very much. The motivations, the arguments by which things are pinned down, the exact form of the conclusions, and what is done with those conclusions, is most of the substance - finding a conclusion that happens to look vaguely similar does not mean that I was reporting someone else's academic work and failing to cite it, or reinventing work that had already been done. It is not understating any sort of "close agreement" with even those particular concluders, let alone the field as a whole within which those are small isolated voices. Hofstadter's superrationality is an acknowledged informal forerunner of TDT. But finding other people who think you ought to cooperate in the PD, but can't quite formalize why, is not the same as TDT being preinvented. (Also TDT doesn't artifically sever decision nodes from anything upstream; the idea is that observing your algorithm, but not its output, is supposed to screen off things upstream. This is "similar" to some attempts to rescue evidential decision theory by e.g. Eels, but not quite the same thing when it comes to important details like not two-boxing on Newcomb's Problem.) And claiming that in principle philosophical intuitions arise within the brain is not the same as performing any particular dissolution of a confused question, or even the general methodology of dissolution as practiced and described by Yudkowsky or Drescher (who actually does agree and demonstrate the method in detail within "Good and Real").
I'm also still not sure that Luke quite understands what the metaethics sequence is trying to say, but then I consider that sequence to have basically failed at exposition anyway. Unfortunately, there's nothing I can point Luke or anyone else at which says the same thing in more academic language.
Several of these citations are from after the originals were written! Why not (falsely) claim that academia is just agreeing with the Sequences, instead?
I don't understand what the purpose of this post was supposed to be - what positive consequence it was supposed to have. Lots of the Sequences are better exposition of existing ideas about evolutionary biology or cognitive biases or probability theory or whatever, which are appropriately quoted or cited within them? Yes, they are. People introducing Less Wrong should try to refer to those sources as much as possible when it comes to things like heuristics and biases, rather than talking like Eliezer Yudkowsky somehow invented the idea of scope insensitivity, so that they don't sound like phyg victims? Double yes. But writing something that predictably causes some readers to get the impression that ideas presented within the Sequences are just redoing the work of other academics, so that they predictably tweet,
...I do not think the creation of this misunderstanding benefits anyone. It is also a grave sin to make it sound like you're speaking for a standard academic position when you're not!
And I think Luke is being extremely charitable in his construal of what's "already" been done in academia. If some future anti-Luke is this charitable in construing how much of future work in epistemology and decision theory was "really" all done within the Sequences back in 2008, they will claim that everything was just invented by Eliezer Yudkowsky way back then - and they will be wrong - and I hope somebody argues with that anti-Luke too, and doesn't let any good feeling for ol E. Y. stand in their way, just like we shouldn't be prejudiced here by wanting to affiliate with academia or something.
I get what this is trying to do. There's a spirit in LW which really is a spirit that exists in many other places, you can get it from Feynman, Hofstadter, the better class of science fiction, Tooby and Cosmides, many beautiful papers that were truly written to explain things as simply as possible, the same place I got it. (Interesting side note: John Tooby is apparently an SF fan who grew up reading van Vogt and Null-A, so he got some of his spirit from the same sources I did! There really is an ancient and honorable tradition out there.) If someone encounters that spirit in LW for the first time, they'll think I invented it. Which I most certainly did not. If LW is your first introduction to these things, then you really aren't going to know how much of the spirit I learned from the anncient masters... because just reading a citation, or even a paragraph-long quote, isn't going to convey that at all. The only real way for people to learn better is to go out and read Language in Thought and Action or The Psychological Foundations of Culture. Doing this, I would guess, gave Luke an epiphany he's trying to share - there's a whole world out there, not just LW the way I first thought. But the OP doesn't do that. It doesn't get people to read the literature. Why should they? From what they can see, it's already been presented to them on LW, after all. So they won't actually read the literature and find out for themselves that it's not what they've already read.
There's literature out there which is written in the same spirit as LW, but with different content. Now that's an exciting message. It might even get people to read things.
Regardless of whether it's original, you're the one making rationality popular. Inspiring this many people to take more interest in rationality is a profoundly worthwhile accomplishment. The world needs teachers who can motivate them to think more clearly. I'm heartened to see your progress.