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Wei_Dai comments on What we're losing - Less Wrong Discussion
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I do not really get this reaction. So what if Eliezer has a tendency to over-censor? I was once banned completely from a mailing list but it didn't make me terribly upset or lose interest in the subject matter of the list. The Roko thing seems even less of a big deal. (I thought Roko ended up agreeing that it was a mistake to make the post. He could always post it elsewhere if he doesn't agree. It's not as if Eliezer has control over the whole Internet.)
I didn't think I had any particular advantage when I first started down this path either. I began with what I thought was just fun little puzzle in an otherwise well-developed area, which nobody else was trying to solve because they didn't notice it as a problem yet. So, I'm a bit weary about presenting "a list of really hard and important problems" and scaring people away. (Of course I may be scaring people away just through this discussion, but probably only a minority of LWers are listening to us.)
I guess another factor is that I have the expectation that if someone is really interested in this stuff (i.e., have a "burning need to know"), they would already have figured out which problems are not solved as opposed to which problems they just don't know the solution to, because they would have tried every available method to find existing solutions to these problems. It seems unlikely that they'd have enough motivation to make much progress if they didn't have at least that level of interest.
So I've been trying to figure out (without much success) how to instill this kind of interest in others, and again, I'm not sure presenting a list of important unsolved problems is the best way to do it.
I'm not sure either. It would perhaps be a useful reference but not a massive motivator in its own right.
What I know works best as a motivator for me is putting up sample problems - presenting the subject matter in 'sleeping hitchiker terrorist inna box' form. When seeing a concrete (albeit extremely counterfactual) problem I get nerd sniped. I am being entirely literal when I say that takes a massive amount of willpower for me to stop myself from working on it. To the extent that there is less perceived effort for tackling the problem for 15 hours straight than there is for putting it aside. And that can be the start of a self reinforcement cycle at times.
The above is in contrast to just seeing the unsolved problems listed. That format is approximately inspiration neutral.
By the way, is that decision theory list still active? I was subscribed but haven't seen anything appear of late.
That seems like a useful datum, thanks.
It's still active, but nobody has made a post for about a month.
Ahh, there we go. Cousin_it just woke it up!
Discussing things that are already known can help in understanding them better. Also, the "burning need to know" occasionally needs to be ignited, or directed. I don't study decision theory because I like studying decision theory in particular, even though it's true that I always had a tendency to obsessively study something.
But decision theory ought to be a natural attractor for anyone with intellectual interests (any intellectual question -> how am I supposed to answer questions like that? -> epistemology -> Bayesianism -> nature of probability -> decision theory). What's stopping people from getting to the end of this path? Or am I just a freak in my tendency to "go meta"?
The wealth of interesting stuff located well before the end.
Seconding Eliezer. Also, please do more of the kind of thinking you do :-)
Yes, you're a freak and nobody but you and a few other freaks can ever get any useful thinking done and didn't we sort of cover this territory already?
I'm confused. Should I stop thinking about how exactly I'm "freaky" and how to possibly reproduce that "freakiness" in others? Has the effort already reached diminishing returns, or was it doomed from the start? Or do you think I'm just looking for ego-stroking or something?
Going meta takes resources. Resources could instead be applied directly to the problem in front of you. If not solving the problem right in front of you causes long term hard to recover from problems it makes sense to apply your resources directly to the problem at hand.
So:
Seems rational when enough excess resources are available. To make more people follow this path you need:
Lesswrong.com and Lesswrong meetup groups teach life skills to increase the members resources. At the same time they gather people who know skills on the path with those who want to learn lowering the resource cost of following the path. Many other methods exist, I have just mentioned two. A road is being built it has just not reached where you are yet.
Perhaps you are ahead of the road marking the best routes, or clearing the ground, but not everyone have the resources to get so far without a well paved road.
Or morality! (Any action -> but is that the right thing to do? -> combinatorial explosion of extremely confusing open questions about cognitive science and decision theory and metaphysics and cosmology and ontology of agency and arghhhhhh.) It's like the universe itself is a Confundus Charm and nobody notices.
How much of decision theory requires good philosophical intuition? If you could convince everyone at MathOverflow to familiarize themselves with it and work on it for a few months, would you expect them to make huge amounts of progress? If so, I admit I am surprised there aren't more mathy folk sniping at decision theory just for meta's sake.