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Konkvistador comments on This post is for sacrificing my credibility! - Less Wrong Discussion
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Anyone finding themselves in the awkward position of wondering if he is a child among adults who may or may not be using innuendo? And that you think you understand a few of them, but aren't sure you do? To summarize my current state, Will Newsome is hitting some of my "take him seriously" heuristics pretty hard. At their center lies that he is taken far more seriously than most average posters think he should be taken, by some pretty big names who have been with this Eliezer centred rationality project since its start and have accrued quite a reputation for excellent judgement. He has also been a visiting fellow at the SI, which means obvious crackpottery should have been filtered.
I have several theories on this which I have constructed over the past few months but don't feel comfortable sharing right here, because I've stumbled on several caches of dangerous thinking. I have to keep squishing some ugh fields and bolstering others when exploring these ideas. Yet I also just can't come up and ask the right people to check my reasoning on any of them, their time is valuable and I'm not in their social circles anyway. I find myself blinking in confusion unsure if I'm being played for a fool or not. There is this strange current of, well insight and reasonableness in his comment history and ideas. Yet there is plain craziness as well interwoven into strange cloth. So I am asking the aspiring rationalist. I am asking the crowd. I am asking the uninitiated in whatever fictional or real troubles he often alludes to. I am asking LessWrong.
What is your position on Will Newsome? I wish to emphasise I am NOT asking about his behaviour in this thread in particular.
I didn't meet Will until April 2011, but most people who have been around longer seem to share Carl's opinion. For myself, I also find many of Will's contributions obscurantist, and I agree with John Maxwell that they seem to want to signal interestingness, intelligence, and and contrarianism. Finally: Will offered good, substantive feedback on two of my papers.
In addition to already mentioned obscurantist tendencies, he awards himself intellectual credit for "going meta," even when this does not lead to actually smarter behavior or better results.
What did he actually do, though?
For half the time, with Anna, I was an intern, not a Fellow. During that time I did a lot of intern stuff like driving people around. Part of my job was to befriend people and make the atmosphere more cohesive. Sometimes I planned dinners and trips but I wasn't very good at that. I was very charismatic and increasingly smart, and most importantly I was cheap. I was less cheap as a Fellow in the Berkeley apartments and accomplished less. I wrote and helped people occassionally. There weren't clear expectations for Fellows. Also people like Eliezer, who had power, never asked for any signs of accomplishment. Eliezer is also very bad at reading. Nonetheless I think I should have accomplished more somehow, e.g. gotten experience writing papers from scratch.
I believe I almost always turned down credit for contributions to papers, but I didn't make too many substantive contributions; I did a fair bit of editing, which I'm good at.
You could get a decent idea by looking at what the average Visiting Fellow did, then remember that I often couldn't remember things I did -- cognitive quirk -- and that I tried to avoid credit when possible at least half the time.
You were good at that, as I recall. As was (especially) Alicorn. Also, at the time I thought it was just super-cool that SI had its mundane tasks done by such brilliant people.
:D
I wish you would write like this all the time.
Second
Thanks for the summary.
That's interesting. I also have something like that. It extends to not being able to remember names, and not being able to easily come up with specific examples. Is it like that for you?
Yes, also for Eliezer.
Do you know of any helpful strategies for dealing with this or get better?
For Eliezer & I it seems there's also the matter of not being able to find objects amongst other objects. Eliezer hasn't quite said he's bad at that but I surmised it from one of his most terrible posts, ha. For that issue, I've learned to just use explicit, conscious linear search. Still terrible, but not as terrible.
With episodic memory I suspect there are similar strategies for looking through mental objects, likely in temporal order. Potentially similarly with names. I can't think of anything that would work for specific examples in general though, which as you know is really quite a big problem during arguments and so on.
I mildly suspect the problem has somewhat to do with damage to or atrophy of the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex. But that's speculation, and there are a lot of selection effects on who shows up on LessWrong, so it might be a somewhat rare combination of stuff. Eliezer would know a lot more about the neurology and so on but he's probably not available for questioning and speculation on the matter.
For what it's worth I'm somewhat schizotypal/schizoaffective, and Eliezer also seems to lean that way.
It may or may not be relevant, but finding objects amongst other objects was one of the functions that was severely degraded by my stroke. As with most other damaged functions, I found that actually forcing myself to do it anyway (which usually required first learning a new way to frame the doing of it) led to very rapid improvement back to more-or-less baseline. The improvement plateaued out thereafter. (Unsurprisingly, but disappointingly. The experience of such rapid improvement is very heady stuff.)
If you don't mind sharing, what parts of the brain or other cognitive functions were most damaged by the stroke? I've pieced together some of the story but not much.
The aneurysm itself was at the edge of my thalamus. The resulting swelling caused damage kind of all over the place.
The functional damage at first was pretty severe, but I don't remember specifics; I mostly don't remember that week at all and much of what I do remember I'm fairly certain didn't actually happen. I spent it in an ICU. I come back to a coherent narrative about a week later; at that point, the bulk of the functional damage was general pain and fatigue, right-side hemiplegia (my right arm and leg were not quite paralyzed, but I lost control over them), mild aphasia which most often manifested as anomia (difficulty retrieving words) and occasionally in other ways (I remember losing the ability to conjugate sentences for a few hours; that was freaky), and (most significantly) a loss of short-term memory with all the associated knock-on effects to various kinds of cognitive processing.
There was also a lot of concern at various points that there may have been damage to my emotional centers. I never noticed any such effect, but, well, I wasn't necessarily the most reliable witness. Most memorably, this led to one doctor asking me if I my emotional state was at all unusual. I didn't reply "What the fuck kind of a stupid question is that, I just had a fucking stroke, of course my emotional state is fucking unusual you inbred moron!!!" although I really wanted to. I instead replied "I'm pretty sure my unusual emotional states are situational, not organic." Ultimately they started believing me.
You want answers?
To defend the repute of the visiting fellows program, please note that his crackpot score has skyrocketed since that time and he would almost certainly not have been accepted had he applied then as he is today.
Also, I think his crackpot score skyrocketed mostly after he left - so if it was something we did, it was a delayed effect.
Also worth noting is that I was made a Fellow sort of off the cuff without any real input from anyone in the organization. Anna's absence led to much disorganization in the program. And yes, when I first volunteered I was more or less a typical LWer, with one strange thing being my high school drop out status.
Will is pretty weird and I don't believe the way he thinks is, ya' know, normative. But I still find his writing to be extremely valuable relative to most Less Wrong commenters because for the most part Less Wrong commenters come in three different flavors: vanilla (what I would say if I weren't as smart or 3-4 years less educated), chocolate (what I would say now) and strawberry (what I would say if I were smarter or 3-4 years more educated). Will is lobster ice cream with rainbow jimmies. I will never think like him and I wouldn't want to. But I'm glad there is someone extending hypotheses as far as they will go and never looking back. I find novel explorations of hypothesis space to be both useful and interesting. He is pursuing a train of thought I don't have a lot of time for and no reason to prioritize. But I'm still looking forward to finding out where it ends up.
Will is like a musician on a hallucinogen. You wouldn't want to have his brain and you probably don't trust his judgment. But before he burns out at 27 he's gonna produce some really interesting ideas, some of which will simply be absurd but a few of which might have real staying power and influence a generation.
I frequently find Will's contributions obscurantist.
In general, I find obscurantism at best tedious, and more often actively upsetting, so I mostly ignore it when I encounter it. Occasionally I engage with it, in a spirit of personal social training.
That said, I accept that one reader's obscurantism is another reader's appropriate level of indirection. If it's valuable to other people, great... the cost to me is low.
At this point the complaining about it by various frustrated people has cost me more than the behavior itself, by about an order of magnitude.
The same word came to mind, and it's common to his history of interactions, so seeing it here means I ascribe it to him rather than the logic of whatever underlying purpose he may have on this occasion.
My sensation about Will Newsome is that of a celebrity I haven't heard of. Most of the comments that I notice authored by Will Newsome appear to be about Will Newsome, but I don't understand their content beyond that. They seem to attract a lot of attention.
I would be interested in reading some of these ideas, if you could point some out.
I get the impression that he's often more concerned with signaling interestingness, intelligence, and contrarianism than figuring out what's true.
Note: I also get that impression from Michael Vassar. But I have lots of respect for the current Singularity Institute director.
I don't get that impression from Michael Vassar, possibly because I've talked with him in person. Asking repeatedly for examples makes it fairly possible to find out what he means.
I have no such hope with Will Newsome.
I've talked with Michael Vassar in person, and also found him much more comprehensible than by brief cryptic textual snippet. Have you talked with Will Newsome in person? I haven't, but every time I engage him personally in comments, etc., his vagueness resolves into something a lot more coherent (even if it's not something I necessarily agree with).
Writes the most consistently fun posts out of anybody here.
Maybe it's a deliberate puzzle set up as an intelligence test for recruiting purposes.
I think that Will (his Will-like stuff, not the "respectable" comments) is 60% worth taking seriously. But hell, I take Philip K. Dick 85% seriously, so what do I know. (That is, I'm not a sane person myself, never claimed to be, so you'd be wise to discount the crazy shit I might say on these topics even if you find it interesting.)