All of Geoff_Anders's Comments + Replies

It was published this evening. Here is a link to the letter, and here is the announcement on Twitter.

Yes, here: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/XPwEptSSFRCnfHqFk/zoe-curzi-s-experience-with-leverage-research?commentId=3gMWA8PjoCnzsS7bB

Zoe - I don’t know if you want me to respond to you or not, and there’s a lot I need to consider, but I do want to say that I’m so, so sorry. However this turns out for me or Leverage, I think it was good that you wrote this essay and spoke out about your experience.

It’s going to take me a while to figure out everything that went wrong, and what I did wrong, because clearly something really bad happened to you, and it is in some way my fault. In terms of what went wrong on the project, one throughline I can see was arrogance, especially my arrogance, which... (read more)

Hi everyone. I wanted to post a note to say first, I find it distressing and am deeply sorry that anyone had such bad experiences. I did not want or intend this at all.

I know these events can be confusing or very taxing for all the people involved, and that includes me. They draw a lot of attention, both from those with deep interest in the matter, where there may be very high stakes, and from onlookers with lower context or less interest in the situation. To hopefully reduce some of the uncertainty and stress, I wanted to share how I will respond.

My curre... (read more)

Author of the post here. I edited the post by:

(1) adding an introduction — for context, and to make the example in Part I less abrupt

(2) editing the last section — the original version was centered on my conversations with Rationalists in 2011-2014; I changed it to be a more general discussion, so as to broaden the post's applicability and make the post more accessible

Good point. I think they are prima facie orthogonal. Empirically, though, my current take is that many deep psychological distortions affect attention in a way that makes trying to manage them primarily on short time scales extremely difficult compared to managing them on longer time scales.

Imagine, for instance, that you have underlying resignation that causes your S1 to put 5x the search power into generating plausible failure scenarios than plausible success scenarios. This might be really hard to detect on the 5 second level, especially if you don&apos... (read more)

I think I'm willing to concede that there is something of an empirical question about what works best for truth-seeking, as much as that feels like a dangerous statement to acknowledge. Though seemingly true, it feels like it's something that people who try to get you commit bad epistemic moves like to raise [1].

There's a tricky balance to maintain here. On one hand, we don't want to commit bad epistemic moves. On the other hand, failing to acknowledge the empirical basis of something when the evidence of its being empirical is presente... (read more)

I currently think we are in a world where a lot of discussion of near-guesses, mildly informed conjectures, probably-wrong speculation, and so forth is extremely helpful, at least in contexts where one is trying to discover new truths.

My primary solution to this has been (1) epistemic tagging, including coarse-grained/qualitative tags, plus (2) a study of what the different tags actually amount to empirically. So person X can say something and tag it as "probably wrong, just an idea", and you can know that when person X uses that tag, the idea is... (read more)

Hi everyone! For those who don’t know me, I’m Geoff Anders. I’ve been the leader of a community adjacent to the rationalist community for many years, a community centered around my research organization Leverage Research. I engaged mostly with the rationalist community in 2011-2014. I visited SingInst in March 2011, taught at the Rationality Boot Camp in June and July 2011, attended the July 2012 CFAR workshop, and then was a guest instructor at CFAR from 2012-2014.

For the past many years, I’ve been primarily focused on research... (read more)

Here are instructions for setting up the defaults the way some people have found helpful:

1. Open yEd.
2. Create a new document.
3. Click the white background; a small yellow square should appear on the canvas.
4. Click the small yellow square so as to select it.
5. Click and drag one of the corners of the yellow square to resize it. Make it the default size you'd like your text boxes to be. You will be able to change this later.
6. Make sure the yellow square is still selected.
7. Look at the menu in the lower right. It is called "Properties View". It will show you

For at least 2 years prior to January 2009, I procrastinated between 1-3 hours a day reading random internet news sites. After I created my first CT chart, I made the following prediction: "If I design a way to gain information about the world that does not involve reading internet news sites that also does not alter my way of achieving my other intrinsic goods, then I will stop spending time reading these internet news sites." The "does not alter my way of achieving my other intrinsic goods" was unpacked. It included: "does not al... (read more)

If I recall correctly, I was saying that I didn't know how to use CT to predict simple things of the form "Xs will always Y" or "Xs will Y at rate Z", where X and Y refer to simple observables like "human", "blush", etc. It would be great if I could do this, but unfortunately I can't.

Instead, what I can do is use the CT charting procedure to generate a CT chart for someone and then use CT to derive predictions from the chart. This yields predictions of the form "if a person with chart X does Y, Z will occur"... (read more)

Connection Theory is not the main thing that we do. It's one of seven main projects. I would estimate that about 15% of our current effort goes directly into CT right now. It's true that having a superior understanding of the human mind is an important part of our plan, and it's true that CT is the main theory we're currently looking at. So that is one reason people are focusing on it. But it's also one of the better-developed parts of our website right now. So that's probably another reason.

I can usually do any type of work. Sometimes it becomes harder for me to write detailed documents in the last couple hours of my day.

We've tried to fill in step 3 quite a bit. Check out the plan and also our backup plan. We're definitely open to suggestions for ways to improve, especially places where the connection between the steps is the most tenuous.

Unfortunately, I'm not familiar with Ayn Rand's ideas on psychology.

There are no Objectivist influences that I am aware of.

Short answer: Yes, CT is falsifiable. Here's how to see this. Take a look at the example CT chart. By following the procedures stated in the Theory and Practice document, you can produce and check a CT chart like the example chart. Once you've checked the chart, you can make predictions using CT and the CT chart. From the example chart, for instance, we can see that the person sometimes plays video games and tries to improve and sometimes plays video games while not trying to improve. From the chart and CT, we can predict: "If the person comes to beli... (read more)

Oops, I forgot to answer your question about how central Connection Theory is to what we're doing.

The answer is that CT is one part of what some of us believe is our best current answer to the question of how the human mind works. I say "one part" because CT does not cover emotions. In all contexts pertaining to emotions, everyone uses something other than CT. I say "some of us" because not everyone in Leverage uses CT. And I say "best current answer" because all of us are happy to throw CT away if we come up with something be... (read more)

Hi Luke,

I'm happy to talk about these things.

First, in answer to your third question, Leverage is methodologically pluralistic. Different members of Leverage have different views on scientific methodology and philosophical methodology. We have ongoing discussions about these things. My guess is that probably two or three of our more than twenty members share my views on scientific and philosophical methodology.

If there’s anything methodological we tend to agree on, it’s a process. Writing drafts, getting feedback, paying close attention to detail, being sy... (read more)

Fixed.

Hi everyone. Thanks for taking an interest. I'm especially interested in (a) errors committed in the study, (b) what sorts of follow-up studies would be the most useful, (c) how the written presentation of the study could be clarified.

On errors, Michaelos already found one - I forgot to delete some numbers from one of the tables. That error has been fixed and Michaelos has been credited. Can anyone see any other errors?

On follow-up studies, lessdazed has suggested some. I don't know if we need to see what happens when nothing is presented on AGI; I think ... (read more)

Thanks for pointing this out. There was in fact an error. I've fixed the error and updated the study. Some of the conclusions embedded in tables change; the final conclusions reported stay the same.

I've credited you on p.3 of the new version. If you want me to credit you by name, please let me know.

Thanks again!