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Agreed. Don't link video/audio unless you post a summary of it in your own words.
That's a fair point, but I've never actually seen it mentioned explicitly. Maybe there should be a 'tips on writing posts' post.
David Deutsch: A new way to explain explanation
I'm sure this talk will be of interest, even if most of the ideas that he talks about will be familiar to readers here.
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In this talk David Deutsch discusses "the most important discovery in human history"; how humanity moved beyond a few hundred thousand years of complete ignorance about the universe. Deutsch attempts to be specific about what led to this change - he concludes that it is the insistence that an explanation be 'hard to vary'.
Whilst a 'hard to vary' explanation is functionally the same as a, more commonly known, Occam's Razor explanation (since fewer parameters necessarily make a fit harder to vary) the slightly different emphasis might be a useful pedagogical tool. A 'hard to vary' explanation will perhaps lead more naturally to questions about strong predictions and falsifiability than Occam's razor. It also seems harder to misunderstand. As we know, Occam's razor suffers because of the difference between actual complexity and linguistic complexity, so an explanation like "it's magic" can appear to be simple. Magic might appear simple, but it will never appear 'hard to vary', so students of rationality would have one less pitfall awaiting them.
Deutsch also touches on what constitutes understanding and knowledge and cautions us not to trust predictions that are purely of an extrapolated empirical nature as there is no true understanding contained there.
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If you haven't already read Deutsch's book "The Fabric of Reality" I'd highly recommend that as well.
I'm not sure the halved doubling time for quantum computers is right.
Maybe I'm not getting into the spirit of accepting the proposed counterfactuals - but is quantum computer performance doubling regularly at all? It seems more as though it is jammed up against decoherence problems already.
I guess that quantum computers halve the doubling time, as compared to a classical computer, because every extra qubit squares the available state space. This could give the factor two in the exponential of Moore's law.
Quantum computing performance currently isn't doubling but it isn't jammed either. Decoherence is no longer considered to be a fundamental limit, it's more a practical inconvenience. The change that brought this about was the invention of quantum error correcting codes.
However experimental physicists are still searching for the ideal practical implementation. You might compare the situation to that of the pre-silicon days of classical computing. Until this gets sorted I doubt there will be any Moore's law type growth.
In response to
Do Fandoms Need Awfulness?
Were this true it would also seem to fit with Robin's theories on art as signalling. If you pick something bad to defend then the signal is stronger.
If you want to signal loyalty, for example, it's not that good picking Shakespeare. Obviously everyone likes Shakespeare. If you pick an obscure anime cartoon then you can really signal your unreasonable devotion in the face of public pressure.
In a complete about turn though, a situation with empirical data might be sports fans. And I'm fairly certain that as performances get worse, generally speaking, the number of fans (at least that attend games) drops. This would seem to imply the opposite.
I mean the bulk of Eliezer's 300-odd OB/LW posts. To use an example I've used before, you'd be crazy to say that you think well of Argument screens off authority because you have empirically demonstrated that reading it makes you more rational. I find its argument persuasive. Obviously one must be wary of the many ways you can find something persuasive that are not related to merit, but to carry away from the study of cognitive bias the message that one should not be persuaded by any argument ever would be to give up on thinking altogether.
I agree that the quality of the argument is an important first screening process in accepting something into the rationality canon. In addition, by truly understanding the argument, it can allow us to generalise or apply it to novel situations. This is how we progress our knowledge.
But the most convincing argument means nothing if we apply it to reality and it doesn't map the territory. So I don't understand why I'd be crazy to think well of Argument screens off authority if reading it makes me demonstrably more rational? Could you point me towards the earlier comments you allude to?
- I think that for the most part, where rationality is easily assessed it is already well understood; it is in extending the art to hard-to-assess areas that the material here is most valuable.
- For all I know all of Eliezer's original work apart from his essays on rationality could be worthless.
Both of these things mean that we're assessing this material on a different basis than demonstrated efficacy.
Can you clarify?
Exactly which material are you referring to? What basis would you suggest that you're assessing it on?
In response to
Go Forth and Create the Art!
If you don't attempt to do something while you develop your rationality then you're not constraining yourself to be scored on your beliefs effectiveness. And we know that this makes you less likely to signal and more likely to predict accurately.
In response to
Instrumental Rationality is a Chimera
I agree for the most part with Tom. Here's a quote from an article that I drafted last night but couldn't post due to my karma:
"I read comments fairly regularly that certainly imply that people are less successful or less fulfilled than they might be (I don't want to directly link to any but I'm sure you can find them on any thread where people start to talk about their personal situation). Where are the posts that give people rational ways to improve their lives? It's not that this is particularly difficult - there's a huge psychological literature on various topics (for instance happiness, attraction and influence) that I'm sure people here have the expertise to disseminate. And it would have obvious applications in making people more successful and fulfilled in their day to day lives.
It seems to me that the Less Wrong community concentrates on x-rationality, which is a larger and more intellectually stimulating challenge (and, cynically, better for signalling intellectual prowess) at the expense of simple instrumental rationality. It's as if we think that because we're thinking about black belt x-rationality, we're above applying blue belt instrumental rationality.
In my life I'm constantly learning new and more accurate models with which to understand the world that don't come near to determining whether to one or two box in pure complexity terms. They are useful more often, though.
This isn't to denigrate x-rationality. Obviously its important but it currently seems like there's no balance on LW between that and instrumental rationality. As a side benefit I'll bet good money that the best way to get people interested in rationality is to simply show them how successful you are when applying it - something that would be more possible with instrumental rationality than x-rationality."
I disagree with Tom over the terminology though. I quite like the terms x-rationality and instrumental rationality because they allow me to easily talk about two broad types of rational thought even though i would be hard pressed to draw a specific line between them.
Hm. Arguably I should only be worried about fast dilution rather than slow dilution. But I'm also worried that the community grows slower if it's inward-looking, and hope for faster growth if it's involved with the outside world.
Is it possible that having taught yourself you haven't so directly experienced that there's not necessarily a correlation between a persons understanding of a subject and their ability to teach it?
Entirely possible. But I'm not sure I have so much faith in the system you describe, either. The most powerful textbooks and papers from which I get my oomph are usually not by people who are solely teachers - though I haven't been on the lookout for exceptions, and I should be.
I think that you can legitimately worry about both for good reasons.
Fast growth is something to strive for but I think it will require that our best communicators are out there. Are you concerned that rationality teachers without secret lives won't be inspiring enough to convert people or that they'll get things wrong and head into death spirals?
From a personal perspective i don't have that much interest in being a rationality teacher. I want to use rationality as a tool to make the greatest success of my life. But I also find it fascinating and, in an ideal world, would stay in touch with a 'rational community' as both a guard against veering off into a solo death spiral and as a subject of intellectual interest. I'm sure that there must be other people like me that are more accomplished and could give inspiring lectures on how rationality helped them in their chosen profession. That would go some way to covering the inspiration angle.
As an aside i appreciate why you care about this; I'm always a bit suspicious of self help gurus who's only measurable success is in the self help theory they promote. I wonder whether I'm selecting for people who effectively sell advice rather than effectively use advice.
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Okay, I saw in the comments (both here and on the TED site) that Deutsch's point was that good explanations are "hard to vary", but I didn't understand what that means.
So I finally saw the talk (after skipping most of it to get to the explanation of explanation), and it turns out Deutsch just means "lacking unnecessary details" when he says "hard to vary". Which is just the standard point about the conjunction fallacy and how each detail makes your explanation less plausible.
Nothing new here, sorry :-/
I agree that there's nothing new to people who have been on Overcoming Bias and Less Wrong for a few years (hence the cautionary statement at the start of the post) but I do think it's important that we don't forget that there are new people arriving all the time.
Not everyone would consider "the conjunction fallacy and how each detail makes your explanation less plausible" a standard point. We shouldn't make this site inaccessible to those people. Credit where it's due - Deutsch does a nice job of presenting this in a way that most people can understand.