This post marks the end of the first cycle of Hammertime. Click here for intro.
Hammertime will return on Monday 2/19.
I want to close off the first cycle with some thoughts, and designate a place for discussion about the future of this sequence.
Discussion Topics
1. Sequences: Yea or Nay?
I’ve always felt that sequences are a valuable way to organize deeper thoughts and drive home a few central messages from several perspectives. However, the current format and culture on LW seem to radically favor short, independent chunks. (There is also the obvious problem that Sequence construction is not working.)
I’ve been posting daily for a while now but when I shifted from individual posts to a sequence, average Karma immediately dropped by a factor of about 2. It’s possible that people don’t bother upvoting the same sequence, or that my writing quality dropped, but if this is real signal that many more people would read a sequence if they are marketed as individual thoughts (and WordPress stats suggest this as well), that might be reason for me to stop writing sequences in the future, or at least collect sequences together only after they’re complete.
Possible actionable for meta: make posts in a Sequence share karma and/or a single slot on frontpage.
2. Repeat or Explore?
My original intention was to review 10 topics over three cycles, building up in the difficulty of problems solved. I think I will definitely return to and expand on several of the techniques we’ve seen already, but also add more topics. If people have favorite techniques (and hopefully references) they’d like to see in Hammertime, post them here.
3. Monotonicity of Progress
A big goal of mine is to solve the “Rationalist Uncanny Valley,” where beginning rationalists get worse at life before they get better. I can’t believe that this has to be the case; it seems to be symptomatic of a larger failure to develop the proper curriculum. I would like progress on rationality to be monotone – is there a good reason this should be difficult? It’d be great if we could compile a central list of “uncanny valley” failure modes.
A bunch of helpful comments on this thread already, I'll collect my all my thoughts so far here, in no particular order:
I know people have done/thought about writing such a thing in the past, but I approached this sequence in a completely different way. It was my New Year's Resolution to write productively every day for a year, as this seemed like the single most easily achievable and powerful mind level up I could attain. I made a bunch of progress in January but felt my thoughts going all over the place. Hammertime was the product of me sitting down for half an hour and figuring out a simple outline for writing with some system and regularity. Because I was already writing every day, the actual writing part was completely cost-free to me, whereas it sounds like possibly the major roadblocks in previous attempts.
My reasons for writing this sequence were, in clear order of importance: (a) to practice writing, (b) to review CFAR techniques for my own benefit, (c) to entertain, and (d) to teach instrumental rationality. With regards to (c), I have a belief that once you have decided on a thought to write about, the primary focus of the writing process is to make it as entertaining to read as possible, and this should come before making it useful.
I strongly disagree with this statement. I've been reading LW for about five years and "knew" about most of these tools abstractly without ever getting anything practical out of it. You can check the comments to Hammers and Nails and extrapolate that even longtime LWers have each only practiced only 5% of all the techniques we have, and that 5% varies wildly from person to person. It's not clear if what I've written so far actually helps in this direction, but I think a properly written sequence will actually inject readers with the moral fire to do the thing that they've known about for years.
This is part of the reason (the other reason being laziness) that I've eschewed science and citations - I think most LWers can produce on demand the psychological science to back up most of my techniques and claims, and adding them is low value. Some of this work has been filled in in the comments.
On the uncanny valley, I think what you're referring to is something different and benign: unavoidable opportunity cost, not so much practicing rationality causally making you worse at life. To me the uncanny valley refers to about three phenomena (that have all happened to me):