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ciphergoth comments on Eliezer's Sequences and Mainstream Academia - Less Wrong
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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.
I hadn't expected you to disagree with that tweet, so I'm clearly getting something wrong. I wrote that in the hope that it would encourage people to read the Sequences, not put them off - I think people imagine it as this million-word work of revelation, but a very large part of what it is is a work of popular science - turning people on to good existing ideas in psychology and philosophy and biology and physics and suchlike. There is a great deal that is original and valuable in there, but I don't think of it as the majority of the material.
I get your point, but to lots of people the wording of that tweet would have the connotation ‘EY is a plagiarist’, not ‘EY is not a crackpot’.
Yes, this.
Thinking about it further though, this makes something of a nonsense of the original tweet, since it's hard to think what would count as "mostly original" by this standard. You might as well describe eg The Better Angels of Our Nature as "mostly not original" since it contains no original research but presents a synthesis of the research of others, building up to a common theme.
The problem I have is that if I say something that sounds positive about the Sequences, that's going to turn my friends off, since they already know I think well of them. By saying something that on first reading sounds negative, I might get their interest, but that only works if they go on to follow the link.
For example, they may be turned off if you came out and said "The sequences really aren't the parochial ramblings of an intellectual outcast, they are totally in accord with mainstream scientific thinking". But "mostly not original" conveys much of the same message by making a concession to the orthodoxy.
I do not understand this. What planet are your friends from? If you're tweeting to your friends, and they already know what you think of the Sequences, why are you tweeting about them to them?
They are from Earth. Because it would be great for me and for the world if more of my friends took an interest in this sort of thing, and if they have misconceptions that stand in the way of that I'd like to clear up those misconceptions.
I understand the goal; but not the action taken to achieve it. Negging the Sequences will get them to take more of an interest?
The word "original" has positive connotations. And therefore the words "unoriginal" or "not original" have negative connotations.
So, yeah, I don't think you'd encourage anyone to read anything by calling it "not original".
Except on Wikipedia (where it's usually an euphemism for ‘crackpottish’). ;-)
(As someone on a Wikipedia talk page once said -- quoting from memory, “if we aren't allowed to [do X] the allowed band between original research and plagiarism becomes dangerously narrow”.)
Right, but I had hoped that the result would be that someone would follow the link in the tweet, after which they find out some things that may cause them to feel more positively.
I don't know anything about the friends ciphergoth is attempting to reach, but I observe that in religion, "original" would be the greater turn-off. In religion, every innovation is heretical, because it is an innovation. To be accepted it must be presented as "not original", either because it is exactly in accordance with official doctrine, or because it is a return to the true religion that the official doctrine has departed from. It is rare for a religion to successfully introduce a new prophet with the power to sweep away the old, and even then ("I am not come to destroy, but to fulfil") the pretence is maintained that no such thing has happened.
Someone who doesn't want to read science-y stuff because they have that kind of mindset is not going to suddenly become curious when someone tells them it's based on science-y stuff from less than 30 years ago.
I like to think of it temporally; that religion is much like rationalists facing the wrong direction. Both occasionally look over their shoulders to confirm their beliefs (although with theists it's more like throwing a homunculus into the distant past and using that for eyes), while most of the time the things we really care about and find exciting are in front of us. Original vs unoriginal with respect to modern thought is of no practical interest to someone with the "every innovation is heretical" mindset unless it is completely within their usual line of sight - heretical is code for "I don't want to keep looking over my shoulder", not "I hate the original on principle". So unless you put that "original" encouragement thousands of years ago where they can see it, where it's a matter of one in front and one behind, the distinction between which is the greater turn-off is not going to matter, or bait anyone into turning around - there is nothing in their usually observed world to relate it to.