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ChristianKl comments on Personal story about benefits of Rationality Dojo and shutting up and multiplying - Less Wrong Discussion

7 Post author: Gleb_Tsipursky 26 August 2015 04:38PM

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Comment author: ChristianKl 29 August 2015 07:38:23PM 0 points [-]

Without looking at outcomes of a decision-making process it's hard to know whether it's optimized.

Comment author: Gleb_Tsipursky 30 August 2015 03:26:10AM 0 points [-]

Which is why I said optimizing, not optimized :-) Externalizing the decison-making process and then evaluating it using numbers is a way of optimizing it, not necessarily meaning it is the perfect optimized decision-making process. I decided to share my story right now because I thought the benefits to others in the LW community of me sharing it right now would higher than me having lived in the house for a while and then sharing it. Besides, by the time I live in the house, post-factum justification would be playing a potentially confounding role.

Comment author: ChristianKl 01 September 2015 05:19:41PM 1 point [-]

Optimizing assumes that you know you are moving into the right direction.

Eliezer recently wrote on FB in the LW Group:

I hypothesize that the best result will come from making up numbers, multiplying them, and then tossing them out the window and going with what seems like the intuitively best choice afterward.

As far as I understand CFAR also doesn't advocate doing things that feel very wrong on an intuitive level. To the extend that you believe that shutting up and calculate is useful, you haven't provided an argument for why you believe it's an optimization.

Comment author: Gleb_Tsipursky 01 September 2015 08:34:29PM 0 points [-]

I'm confused by your presumption that I suggested doing things that feel very wrong on an intuitive level. Can you please highlight to me where I stated that? Thanks!

Comment author: ChristianKl 01 September 2015 08:59:30PM *  0 points [-]

I don't think you suggested that thing it felt wrong but I think "shut up" suggests letting the data speak for itself and ignoring how it feels like.

Comment author: Gleb_Tsipursky 01 September 2015 09:14:28PM 0 points [-]

I was using the metaphor Eliezer used here, so I think it might be a semantics issue. The point of using math was to deal with attention bias, as I highlighted above. After that, it's important to evaluate feelings, for sure.