I recently realized that I had greatly underestimated the inferential distance between most of my readers and myself. Thinking it over, I realize that the bulk of the difference comes from a difference in perspectives on how long it takes to learn substantive things.
People often tell me that they're bad at math. I sometimes respond by saying that they didn't spend enough time on it to know one way or the other. I averaged ~25+ hours a week thinking about math when I was 16 and 17, for a total of ~2,500+ hours. I needed to immerse myself in the math to become very good at it, in the same way that I would need to live in French speaking country to get very good at French. If my mathematical activity had been restricted exclusively to coursework, I never would have become a good mathematician.
Math grad students who want to learn algebraic geometry often spend spend two years going through Hartshorne's dense and obscure textbook. it's not uncommon for students to learn interesting applications only after having gone through it. I find this practice grotesque, and I don't endorse it. I bring it up only to explain where I'm coming from. With the Hartshorne ritual as a standard practice, it's felt to me like a very solid achievement to present substantive material that readers can understand after only ~10 hours of reading and reflecting deeply.
It was so salient to me that one can't hope to become intellectually sophisticated without engaging in such activity on a regular basis that it didn't occur to me that it might not be obvious everyone. I missed the fact that most of my readers aren't in the habit of spending ~10 hours carefully reading a dense article and grappling with the ideas therein, so that even though I felt like I was making things accessible, I was still in the wrong ballpark altogether.
Thinking it over, I'm bemused by the irony of the situation. Even as I was exasperated by some readers' apparent disinclination to read articles very carefully and think about them deeply, I was blind to the fact that I was failing because I hadn't put thousands of hours into learning how to communicate to a general audience. Seeing how large my blindspot was made me realize "Oh... just as I had no idea how much time I need to put into developing my communication abilities to reach my readers, some of my readers who appeared to me to be trolling probably just had no way of knowing of how much time it takes to learn really deep things."
The tens of thousands of hours that I put into developing intellectually didn't feel like a slog – it was fascinating. It was the same for all of the deepest thinkers who I know. If you haven't had this experience, and you're open to it, you're in for a wonderful treat.
Depending on your goal it makes sense to focus on different information while reading. If you read a mathematical proof, status is completely irrelevant. It's rational to completely ignore that layer.
If you read an article on a platform like this it's useful to understand what's driven the author. Jonah thinks that because he spend his 10,000 hours on training epistemic rationality people should pay more attention to his writing. Paying more attention to his writing means treating him as higher status. The status is not irrelevant for a reader because it influences how the reader spends his time.
To me it's not a big issue. I usually don't parse for status when reading LW posts. At the same time it's there. As far as I understand Jonah suggests that when people derivate from "mathematical style reasoning" that means they aren't reading carefully. That it's due to not having enough training in epistemic rationality.
I parse the post as saying: "Jonah's advanced skills in reasoning allowed him in a short amount of time to learn MLK style compassion." That would be evidence that suggests that Jonah is indeed having advanced skills in reasoning and thus deserving of a high status. High status that results in people spending more time reading and contemplating his posts.
I usually don't focus on the status layer when I read LW either.
In this case Jonah not only intends to make a claim about his emotional state. He also makes a claim that MLK is just a human, which indicates that MLK abilities aren't as impressive as people who hold him to be "more than a human" believe. Given that MLK is a political figure, that claim is even more problematic than it otherwise would be.
There's also the claim that his emotional state is desirable and that it's desirability means that other people should copy Jonah's technique that gave Jonah that emotional state.
Careful reading means picking up those 3 claims in addition to the claim about Jonah's emotional state. That's very different then mathematical style reasoning. In a mathematical proof you only have to focus on explicitly made claims. If you just focus on Jonah's emotional state and consider everything else insignificant I don't think you are engaging with the substance of his post.
Of course that doesn't means that it's always important to engage with every claim that's made. I usually don't parse LW posts for status or focus on those claims.
I'm trying to clarify the issue by introducing the distinction between different implicit claims, so that relevance for each of these claims can be considered on its own. A reader may be interested in multiple claims, so that if a detail is relevant for one of them, it becomes relevant for the reader. But when it's relevant for the reader, it may still be irrelevant for some of the claims. Talking about irrelevance for the reader collapses this distinction.
When Jonah is pointing to careful reading, that inc... (read more)