Some rationality tweets
Will Newsome has suggested that I repost my tweets to LessWrong. With some trepidation, and after going through my tweets and categorizing them, I picked the ones that seemed the most rationality-oriented. I held some in reserve to keep the post short; those could be posted later in a separate post or in the comments here. I'd be happy to expand on anything here that requires clarity. Epistemology 1. Test your hypothesis on simple cases. 2. Forming your own opinion is no more necessary than building your own furniture. 3. The map is not the territory. 4. Thoughts about useless things are not necessarily useless thoughts. 5. One of the successes of the Enlightenment is the distinction between beliefs and preferences. 6. One of the failures of the Enlightenment is the failure to distinguish whether this distinction is a belief or a preference. 7. Not all entities comply with attempts to reason formally about them. For instance, a human who feels insulted may bite you. Group Epistemology 1. The best people enter fields that accurately measure their quality. Fields that measure quality poorly attract low quality. 2. It is not unvirtuous to say that a set is nonempty without having any members of the set in mind. 3. If one person makes multiple claims, this introduces a positive correlation between the claims. 4. We seek a model of reality that is accurate even at the expense of flattery. 5. It is no kindness to call someone a rationalist when they are not. 6. Aumann-inspired agreement practices may be cargo cult Bayesianism. 7. Godwin's Law is not really one of the rules of inference. 8. Science before the mid-20th century was too small to look like a target. 9. If scholars fail to notice the common sources of their inductive biases, bias will accumulate when they talk to each other. 10. Some fields, e.g. behaviorism, address this problem by identifying sources of inductive bias and forbidding their use. 11. Some fields avoid the accumulat
I'm really excited about software similar to Anki, but with task-specialized user interfaces (vs. self-graded tasks) and better task-selection models (incorporating something like item response theory), ideally to be used for both training and credentialing.