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Fascinating.
Is there any problem that might occur from an agent failing to do enough investigation? (Possibly ever, possibly just before taking some action that ends up being important)
What are your thoughts about virtual courses? I can see something like PDFs being freely available to download and an IRC channel for communication between students/teachers.
Makes it harder to go to a bar and grab some beers but it saves you the whole financial trouble and various other troubles.
These sorts of media are pretty good for learning simple course content but quite hard for teaching habits of thought. It's kind of like how it's hard to learn breakdancing from a textbook: the textbook doesn't know how to breakdance, and you can't watch it breakdance.
In order to really get the new habits, you need to practice them with good feedback (and ideally, watch them in action) and it's hard to do this through virtual courses. Not entirely impossible, just very hard! The sequences, for instance, have changed peoples' mental habits.
The other challenge is that this sort of approach gives way slower feedback to the instructors who are trying to iterate rapidly on their explanations. I expect that as CFAR begins converging on "this is a really effective way to teach skill X" we'll start seeing more of their content posted online. But it might be several years before that seems more worthwhile than the workshops, given their benefits in social ties and in increased information value regarding how to teach things.
In response to
Use unique, non-obvious terms for nuanced concepts
While I'll agree that the System X naming scheme does extraordinarily well at avoiding muddying the underlying definition with colloquial, poetic, or aesthetic baggage, I'm fucking astonished to see someone advocating it in a community that tends to take its cues from computer science. My kin, it's like calling a new datatype Object1. You don't do that. It's the most generic, meaningless, unmemorable conceivable name. The only name more generic would be "Thing", and System isn't much better than Thing, essentially meaning "Group of connected things"(a set which contains almost every class of thing aside from, maybe, Subatomic Particle. For now. (right? I'm not a physicist. I feel like I might be wrong about that.)).
I think the best way forward is to establish norms that encourage the creation of totally new words, portmantues or well abreviated compound words. For instance, a friend of mine came up with a theory he called Complex Patternism. We'd both read the right kind of science fiction, so he didn't have any objections to changing the name to Compat. This saved a lot of typing over the next few months. If you knew the original phrase, you would recognize the contraction. If you didn't, you would have to ask for a definition- people wouldn't bring any of their own baggage about the words "complex" or "patternism" along. It's kind of like an acronym, only pronounceable, and when we realized precepts of Patternism wern't really necessary for the theory to work, the original etymology fell away, it was still a lot better than an acronym would have been. It had become a word with no baggage at all.
So yeah, I'm a big advocate of portmantues. Compose them of highly abbreviated, vague atoms and you can take them a long way from their original meaning if you ever need to.
Ah, true. Yeah, as much as I like S1 and S2, I think they might be pretty annoying if we used them for lots of things. Or... maybe not! I easily track the 5 Kegan levels, the 9 personality types in the enneagram, and various other numbered things and only occasionally, briefly, become confused. I think these benefit of low-overshadowing is pretty good.
I like compat.
In response to
Use unique, non-obvious terms for nuanced concepts
I've always hated jargon, and this piece did a good job of convincing me of its necessity. I plan to add a lot of jargon to an Anki deck, to avoid hand-waving at big concepts quite so much.
However, there are still some pretty big drawbacks in certain circumstances. A recent Slate Star Codex comment expressed it better than I ever have:
One cautionary note about “Use strong concept handles”: This leans very close to coining new terms, and that can cause problems.
Dr. K. Eric Drexler coined quite a few of them while arguing for the feasibility of atomically precise fabrication (aka nanotechnology): “exoergic”, “eutactic”, “machine phase”, and I think that contributed to his difficulties.
If a newly coined term spreads widely, great! Yes it will an aid to clarity of discussion. If it spreads throughout one group, but not widely, then it becomes an in-group marker. To the extent that it marks group boundaries, it then becomes yet another bone of contention. If it is only noticed and used within a very small group, then it becomes something like project-specific jargon – cryptic to anyone outside a very narrow group (even to the equivalent of adjacent departments), and can wind up impeding communications.
"I've always hated jargon, and this piece did a good job of convincing me of its necessity."
:)
Feels good to change a mind. I'm curious if there were any parts of the post in particular that connected for you.
I'm disappointed that the details listed about social changes are so vague.
I committed somewhere to have a post on this out on Tuesday, so I went with what I had ready at the time. Details will follow.
I would love to see some kind of Less Wrong council that meets regularly and discusses future directions. One problem at the moment is the lack of transparency about decisions - we generally don't know if an idea has even been considered or why they have been rejected.
What sort of medium do you think is best for this? A Slack chat? A regular thread here?
For almost everything, I'm happy with increased transparency. Whether we should move towards a more StackOverflow-like karma model where voting is an earned privilege is an example of something where an open discussion would be welcome, so everyone can get a sense of the pro and con arguments. But I can't guarantee transparency about all decisions, because there are some things that are much easier to discuss in private. For example, consider hg00's comment calling for the bans of VoiceOfRa (who was banned) and Lumifer (who isn't banned). It seems to me that the number of cases where a ban decision will be swayed by public discussion is nowhere near large enough to justify the costs of public discussions of ban decisions.
Regarding "Less Wrong council" and StackOverflow...
What about meta.lesswrong.com? :P a LW to talk about LW? Or are we already meta enough...
I don't think it's a good idea to do a formal memorization of something that's not based on any kind of scientific research.
Ehh, I've gotten a lot of value out of memorizing poems, and even definitions. I don't do many of the latter, but I've found that throwing a word in Anki usually causes me to have it available as a concept later, which is often helpful.
In response to
Rationality Quotes Thread January 2016
The career of truth is not a person's only vocation, but it may be the only one upon which the intervention into that person's life can be justified. Can any other basis – even if all parties agree to it – free itself of the partialities of convention?
— Robert Kegan, The Evolving Self
In response to
Why CFAR? The view from 2015
Couple of notes...
We created a metric for strategic usefulness
What is that metric?
But it seems to many of us that there is a kind of “deep epistemic rationality” that doesn’t change one’s goals, but does help one make actual contact with the deep caring that already exists within a person.
I think this is a dangerous path to take. If you stay on it, I suspect that soon enough you'll come to the conclusion that absence of appropriate "caring" is irrational and should be fixed. And from there it's only a short jump and a hop to declaring that just those people who share your value system are rational. That would be an... unfortunate position for you to find yourselves in.
We created a metric for strategic usefulness
What is that metric?
It wouldn't surprise me if they didn't want to publish it because some of the aspects of the measure might be gameable, allowing people to pretend to be super useful by guessing the teacher's password.
In response to
The value of ambiguous speech
I happen to be studying lojban at the moment, and I think the designers have defined linguistic ambiguity not as the opposite of specificity (one of the first lojban words I learned was "zo'e" /ZO.he/, which means something like "contains contextually sensitive information that makes this utterance true, the exact value of which is irrelevant or obvious"), but rather as a linguistic property whereby a semantic construct cannot be pinned down to communicating a specific value. The classic English language example is "time flies like a banana", in which any of the first three words can be the verb.
Whoa, it never occurred to me that time could be the verb there.
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Please continue to crosspost these!
Honestly, I'm not sure I will. The response on LW continues to be aversively critical, so I crosspost here relatively rarely. I really appreciate your comment though, in light of that.
If you want to stay on top of my posts, I recommend my newsletter or rss.
Although perhaps your saying "continue to crosspost" is less about you wanting to read my writing in particular and more you just generally wanting LW to have long-form content on it... in which case, well, we'll see.