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gworley comments on Understanding Agency - Less Wrong
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Comments (32)
This comes off as purely bragging and applause lights. And several of the applause lights aren't relevant. (that chapter of HPMoR and the 12th virtue of rationality)
Additionally, I disagree with one of the premises, which is that CDT is meaningful and useful but can only be well-understood by people who have reached a certain level in its hierarchy. I feel competent to make this judgment, because by its own description, I uncomfortably sit in level 4 (and have a very poor model of what it means to be level 3; I suspect some unpleasant circumstances and mild neuroatypicality made me leapfrog 3). And the theory does not seem to have explanatory power,
Or in short: Scrap this post and come back when you can explain it better, and don't use excuses like 'this needs higher-order thinking' ; I'll believe you have an insight but you're not conveying it now, and those excuses are just excuses.
I should also reply more directly to your comments.
I think you are right to criticize my presentation. I'm by no means an expert writer, and despite the significant effort I put into producing this article I'm not satisfied myself with the quality of the explanations, so it hardly surprises me that others feel the same way. You can view my limitations as "just" excuses if you like, but I mostly look at them as tradeoffs: I can either publish this kind of confusing thing or spend months becoming a better writer. Unfortunately for my dear readers I've chosen to leave my writing confusing rather than devote more time now to writing better, and I suffer the consequences for it as much as they do.
I'm not sure that I'm seeking applause lights. That section only got included after Ethan pointed out to me that he saw a similarity between what I was talking about and what recalled from HPMOR and CFAR. Having those, I thought it appropriate to see if Eli had written something in the sequences that was relevant, but since he mostly seems to gloss over agency and takes it as given.
Your writing mistakes here make this worse than useless; they signal crackpottery and cultishness in such a way that not posting it would be superior to posting it in it's current form. Especially since if it's true, then by your own admission it's only comprehensible to people who don't need it, and only useful to people who can't comprehend it.
I think you think I have way more influence than I do and are probably overly concerned with the image of Less Wrong I present. I guess I have little to say to that because I don't much care at the moment: I'm more interested in exploring these ideas and bettering myself and hopefully others than I am in presenting a particular image of Less Wrong.
I think the main people this article is useful for are two groups: those on the margin just about the do enough level 4 thinking that this inspires them on, and those who will understand it and by so doing better appreciate the value of constructive development theory. My main purpose in writing is to reach this latter group, because I hope that by sharing with them the explanatory power of constructive development theory for making sense of things that they may be trying to help others with, they may advance in the study of how to make people stronger, a al CFAR.
No, you aren't affecting the image of LessWrong. You're affecting the image of yourself and Construtcive Development Theory, which I am now increasingly convinced is pure crackpottery.
Seriously, listen to yourself. You sound like a Scientologist, here.