Huh, you might want to get your virus-checker checked - it's just a link to a substack page
https://www.secretorum.life/p/life-on-the-grid-part-2
yes
Very interesting, and yes I think I'm getting at something like that here as well.
No I think it does - almost like free-range foraging vs. being spoon-fed information (wild animal vs. domesticated) - in the former you learn how to quickly discriminate between good/useful food and bad and develop a kind of intuition for how to efficiently find the good stuff whereas in the latter you do not.
then read it again but non-ironically
ughh you are right, missed opportunity
Fair enough, but as I said not all writing has to be aimed at maximum concision and clarity (and insisting that it should be is bad for our collective creativity). One may choose to write in a less direct manner in order to briefly present numerous tangentially related ideas (which readers may follow up on if they choose) or simply to provide a more varied and entertaining reading experience. Believe it or not, there are other goals that one can have in writing and reading besides maximally efficient communication/intake of information.
So there is really no purpose to every read something non-fiction besides efficient intake of information? Is that what we really believe?
I could not care less whether or not any reads this.
Efficient communication/intake of information is not the only reason that people write or read...
there is no main idea and I'm not trying to convince anyone of anything. It is nothing.
"probably wrong" thank you so much for this
Thank you for your review!
They do spend considerable time discussing that in the article
To be clear, I am not the author - this is an article that was submitted to the journal. If you want to read the article just reach out the email above (if you want to take a look without registering to be a gardener that is okay).
I'll just post a twitter thread here that I wrote in response to criticism. Maybe this will clarify my goals/intentions
I want “nerds” to realize that we are not above performative attention-seeking behavior, that we can really easily slip into a failure mode of “write a blog post that embraces some high-minded ideal that no one disagrees with and then propose some law/policy/program that will supposedly increase this thing and then pat yourself on the back and move on”. I wanted to expose my own emotions and insecurities around really caring about science/...
Being a little tongue-in-cheek with this one, but I think recent US history shows racial preferences are more malleable than we might think. Will there be a tipping point when everyone is either mixed or has a close relative that's mixed where it will seem a little more silly to argue about race? I don't know about Brazil and would be curious to hear more like Ben Pace.
Thanks! Yup, just finished and enjoyed DoE :)
A good reminder, I'll start getting worried when discussion of these heresies moves beyond niche internet message boards.
I don't think anything - this is a heresy not something I believe in (I would argue your question is evidence that this view is a modern heresy). "politicians were generally older".... the average age of senators is 57 for example.
I hope it goes without saying that this is a heresy and not something I actually believe. A recent article in the Journal of Controversial Ideas makes the case for animal-rights terrorism.
"There is widespread agreement that coercive force may be used to prevent people from seriously and wrongfully harming others. But what about when those others are non-human animals? Some militant animal rights activists endorse the use of violent coercion against those who would otherwise harm animals. In the philosophical literature on animal ethics, however, thei...
I hope it goes without saying that this is a heresy and not something I actually believe.
Oh, that was not transparent to me. After reading this sentence I interpret the post as "here are 20 thoughts you are not allowed to think", but previously I had more probability mass on "these are 20 ideas that I believe are true and that are heretical in nature".
Interesting. I guess in some ways yes because it's giving people access to another form of identity but it's also kind of orthogonal in that the identity is only used in virtual environment and it's pseudonymous. The argument in this heresy is that we being less attached to our names IRL would cause a shift of some kind in cognition/consciousness.
Yea that's fair, I didn't write this with LW in mind but I should have considered dropping/trimming introduction as it's not as necessary for this audience.... Interesting, I've heard similar thoughts to yours regarding music from quite a few people. This makes me think that the ubiquity of art in the modern world is affecting us more than we may realize. Curious what research exists on long-term effects of music/art consumption, although this would be hard to study I guess (which is why I'm suspicious that there is something we haven't yet appreciated).&n...
yes
Sure, I don't deny that there are some ideas which should be kept secret for at least some time so that you can better capitalize on them. But I think for most people this category of ideas is much smaller than they think and that it would serve them better in the long run to be less stingy with their ideas. This kind of gets to the crux of my thesis - if you have a scarcity mindset with ideas than they probably will be scarce for you. Maybe you will end up losing out on an opportunity or some concrete short-term benefit, but there are more intangible, long-term benefits to be had by being open with your ideas - the difficulty is that these benefits are inherently more nebulous/illegible and therefore easier to discount.
You are right about the use of impact as a metric, definitely not perfect, and I think both of those sources probably oversell how poor scientific evaluation is in general. Some of the problem is that people are not incentivized to really care that much and they don't specialize in grant/paper evaluation, the idea of having "professional reviewers" is interesting, but not sure how practically achievable it is.
I hadn't heard about the idea of depth first search but it is exactly what I am talking about and you explained it very well, thank you for sharing.
Thanks
"We often observe that the solutions found by genetic algorithms, or NNs, or cats, are strange, perverse, unexpected, and trigger a reaction of 'how did it come up with that?'; one reason is just that they are very thorough about exploring the possibility space"
Do you have any specific examples in mind here that you are willing to share? None are coming to mind off the top of my head and I'd love to have some examples for future reference.
I'm a little confused by what you are referring to here so if you are willing to spell it out I would appreciate it but no worries either way. Many very fascinating ideas in your other comment, I'll try to respond in a day or two.
Not intentional - thanks!
And he disclosed his name because the New York Times published it - https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/13/technology/slate-star-codex-rationalists.html
I've also discussed the paper with him and he didn't seem to have an issue with it.
Ha I like the Einstein example! I think about the "bold leaps" thing a lot - we may be in kind of "epistemic hell" with respect to certain ideas/theories i.e. all small steps in that direction will seem completely false/irrational (the valley between us and the next peak is deep and wide). Maybe not perfect but I think the problem of inheritance as you describe in the Bakewell article fits as an example here. Heredity was much more complex than we thought and the problem was complicated by the fact that we had lots of wrong but vaguely reasonable ideas tha...
Thanks for catching the grammar mistake - fixed! These are interesting extensions of the basic idea of using more randomness in science, thanks for sharing. Your last point makes me think about the use of prediction markets to guess which studies will replicate, something that people have successfully done.
Your point is well taken, and we should definitely keep in mind that randomness can also create perverse incentives and can easily be overdone. However, I would argue that there is virtually no randomness in science now and ample evidence that we are bad at evaluating grants, papers, applicants and are generally overly conservative when we do evaluate (see Conservatism in Science for a review). In rare cases, I might advocate for pure randomness but, like you suggest, I think some kind of mixed strategy is probably the way to go in most cases. For example,...
One good question would be what kinds of randomness are useful. "Greatness cannot be planned", but there's still a lot of different plans going on. Obviously, there are countless ways to 'add randomness to science', differing in how much randomness (both in distribution and size of said distribution - do we want 'randomness' which looks more like normal noise or is heavy tails key?), what level the randomness is applied at (inside an experiment, the experiment, the scientist, theories of subject, the subject, individual labs or colleges, community, country...
Great post - similar to Adam Shai's comment, this reminds of a discussion in psychology about the over-application of the scientific paradigm. In a push to seem more legitimate/prestigious (physics envy) , psychology has pushed 3rd-person experimental science at the expense of more observational or philosophical approaches.
(When) should psychology be a science? - https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/jtsb.12316
You wouldn't have got this at all from what I wrote but, we are definitely not saying that it will be easy to integrate "blind spot" research into academia or that it will happen overnight. A significant portion of the paper is spent providing examples of amateur psychology work (from the past and the present, we reference some of the work on LW), discussing why it is difficult to integrate this knowledge into modern academia, how academia might benefit from doing so, and how we might actually accomplish this over the long run. Certainly we are under no il...
I just don't really see it as that problematic if a small percentage of scientists spend their time thinking about and working on the paranormal/supernatural because (1) scientists throughout history did this and we still made progress. Maybe it wasn't necessary that Newton believed in alchemy/theology but he did and belief in these things is certainly compatible with making huge leaps in knowledge like he did, (2) I'm not sure if believing in the possibility of ghosts is more ridiculous than the idea that space and time are the same thing and they can be ...
certainly the authoritarian link is highly speculative, but I think in general we underestimate how politics/culture/psychology influence what we care about and how we think in science. A more extreme version of the question is: how similar would we expect alien science to be to ours? Obviously it would be different if they were much more advanced, but assuming equal levels of progress, how would their very different minds (who knows how different) and culture lead them to think about science differently? In an extreme version, maybe they don't even see an...
So little actual knowledge that almost everyone was a "Renaissance man" (and so they literally all shared the same sources)”
Interesting thought - now everyone has to specialize, there are less people who have different combinations of know in a given discipline. Like i talked about with education, i think its worth thinking more about how our education systems homogenize our mental portfolio of people.
Re: tenure - its a good point and certainly we do have some diversity of scientific niches. Its an open question whether we have enough or not, i think...
One point of confusion that I think is running through your comments (and this is my fault for not being clear enough) is how I am conceiving of "mind". In my conception, a mind is the genetics and all of the environment/past experiences but also the current context of the mind. So for example, yes you would still have the same mind in one sense whether you were doing science in a university or were just an independent scientist, but in another sense no because the thoughts you are willing and able to think would be different because you are facing very different constraints/incentives. Hope this helps.
I actually would disagree with your last point. Certainly cultural/political diversity will matter more for psych/social sciences but I think it will have an effect on what kinds of topics people care about in the first place when it comes to harder sciences and math. I can imagine a culture which has a more philosophical bent to it leading to more people doing theoretical work and a culture which has a greater emphasis on engineering and practicality doing more applied work. I could also imagine a more authoritarian culture leading to people doing physics...
Hmm yea I see your point. I guess what I was saying is that there are certain thought patterns and styles of cognition which may be more likely to stumble on the kind of ideas or do the kind of work that can potentially lead to paradigm shifts. Whether or not we are less able to think in this way now is definitely an open question but I think one we should worry about.
Glad you liked it! I certainly think there is a lot of room for disagreement, I'll respond to a few of your comments
Yea that's the idea. Not saying that the scientific community in the past was better, but there were some ways in which it allowed for more diversity of thought than our current system. All else being equal (which it never is) a scientific community which is 100% people working at modern universities and competing for the same jobs/journals is worse than a community which has some niches where people can work with very different motivations and approaches
Orion's Arm sounds cool! Thanks for sharing, I'll check it out.
hmmm weird...