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Wei_Dai comments on What we're losing - Less Wrong Discussion
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Comments (77)
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.