The Best of LessWrong

Two laws of experiment design: First, you are not measuring what you think you are measuring. Second, if you measure enough different stuff, you might figure out what you're actually measuring.

These have many implications for how to design and interpret experiments.

A "sazen" is a word or phrase which accurately summarizes a given concept, while also being insufficient to generate that concept in its full richness and detail, or to unambiguously distinguish it from nearby concepts. It's a useful pointer to the already-initiated, but often useless or misleading to the uninitiated.

Being easy to argue with is a virtue, separate from being correct. When someone makes an epistemically illegible argument, it is very hard to even begin to rebut their arguments because you cannot pin down what their argument even is.

Kelly betting can be viewed as a way of respecting different possible versions of yourself with different beliefs, rather than just a mathematical optimization. This perspective provides some insight into why fractional Kelly betting (betting less aggressively) can make sense, and connects to ideas about bargaining between different parts of yourself. 

A key skill of many experts (that is often hard to teach) is keeping track of extra information in their head while working. For example a programmer tracking a fermi estimate of runtime or an experienced machine operator tracking the machine's internal state. John suggests asking experts "what are you tracking in your head?"

It's easy and locally reinforcing to follow gradients toward what one might call 'guessing the student's password', and much harder and much less locally reinforcing to reason/test/whatever one's way toward a real art of rationality. Anna Salamon reflects on how this got in the way of CFAR ("Center for Applied Rationality") making progress on their original goals.

So if you read Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality, and thought...

"You know, HPMOR is pretty good so far as it goes; but Harry is much too cautious and doesn't have nearly enough manic momentum, his rationality lectures aren't long enough, and all of his personal relationships are way way way too healthy."

...then have I got the story for you!