Stupid Questions Open Thread Round 4

lukeprog

This is for anyone in the LessWrong community who has made at least some effort to read the sequences and follow along, but is still confused on some point, and is perhaps feeling a bit embarrassed. Here, newbies and not-so-newbies are free to ask very basic but still relevant questions with the understanding that the answers are probably somewhere in the sequences. Similarly, LessWrong tends to presume a rather high threshold for understanding science and technology. Relevant questions in those areas are welcome as well. Anyone who chooses to respond should respectfully guide the questioner to a helpful resource, and questioners should be appropriately grateful. Good faith should be presumed on both sides, unless and until it is shown to be absent. If a questioner is not sure whether a question is relevant, ask it, and also ask if it's relevant.

Ask away!

Previously: round 1, round 2, round 3

From the original thread:

This is for anyone in the LessWrong community who has made at least some effort to read the sequences and follow along, but is still confused on some point, and is perhaps feeling a bit embarrassed. Here, newbies and not-so-newbies are free to ask very basic but still relevant questions with the understanding that the answers are probably somewhere in the sequences. Similarly, LessWrong tends to presume a rather high threshold for understanding science and technology. Relevant questions in those areas are welcome as well. Anyone who chooses to respond should respectfully guide the questioner to a helpful resource, and questioners should be appropriately grateful. Good faith should be presumed on both sides, unless and until it is shown to be absent. If a questioner is not sure whether a question is relevant, ask it, and also ask if it's relevant.

Ask away!

I used to be very skeptical of Eliezer's ideas about improving rationality when he was posting the Sequences, but one result that's hard to deny is that all of a sudden there is a community of people who I can discuss my decision theory ideas with, whereas before that I seemingly couldn't get them across to anyone except maybe one or two people, even though I had my own highly active mailing list.

I'd say that being able to achieve this kind of subtle collective improvement in philosophical ability is already quite impressive, even if the effect is not very dramatic in any given individual. (Of course ultimately the improvement has to be graded against what's needed to solve FAI and not against my expectations, and it seems to still fall far short of that.)

It's indeed nice to have a community that discusses decision-theoretic ideas, but a simpler explanation is that Eliezer's writings attracted many smart folks and also happened to make these ideas salient, not that Eliezer's writings improved people's philosophical ability.

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Stupid Questions Open Thread Round 4

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Stupid Questions Open Thread Round 4

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