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
- Test your hypothesis on simple cases.
- Forming your own opinion is no more necessary than building your own furniture.
- The map is not the territory.
- Thoughts about useless things are not necessarily useless thoughts.
- One of the successes of the Enlightenment is the distinction between beliefs and preferences.
- One of the failures of the Enlightenment is the failure to distinguish whether this distinction is a belief or a preference.
- Not all entities comply with attempts to reason formally about them. For instance, a human who feels insulted may bite you.
Group Epistemology
- The best people enter fields that accurately measure their quality. Fields that measure quality poorly attract low quality.
- It is not unvirtuous to say that a set is nonempty without having any members of the set in mind.
- If one person makes multiple claims, this introduces a positive correlation between the claims.
- We seek a model of reality that is accurate even at the expense of flattery.
- It is no kindness to call someone a rationalist when they are not.
- Aumann-inspired agreement practices may be cargo cult Bayesianism.
- Godwin's Law is not really one of the rules of inference.
- Science before the mid-20th century was too small to look like a target.
- If scholars fail to notice the common sources of their inductive biases, bias will accumulate when they talk to each other.
- Some fields, e.g. behaviorism, address this problem by identifying sources of inductive bias and forbidding their use.
- Some fields avoid the accumulation of bias by uncritically accepting the biases of the founder. Adherents reason from there.
- If thinking about interesting things is addictive, then there's a pressure to ignore the existence of interesting things.
- Growth in a scientific field brings with it insularity, because internal progress measures scale faster than external measures.
Learning
- It's really worthwhile to set up a good study environment. Table, chair, quiet, no computers.
- In emergencies, it may be necessary for others to forcibly accelerate your learning.
- There's a difference between learning a skill and learning a skill while remaining human. You need to decide which you want.
- It is better to hold the sword loosely than tightly. This principle also applies to the mind.
- Skills are packaged into disciplines because of correlated supply and correlated demand.
- Have a high discount rate for learning and a low discount rate for knowing.
- "What would so-and-so do?" means "try using some of so-and-so's heuristics that you don't endorse in general."
- Train hard and improve your skills, or stop training and forget your skills. Training just enough to maintain your level is the worst idea.
- Gaining knowledge is almost always good, but one must be wary of learning skills.
Instrumental Rationality
- As soon as you notice a pattern in your work, automate it. I sped up my book-writing with code I should've written weeks ago.
- Your past and future decisions are part of your environment.
- Optimization by proxy is worse than optimization for your true goal, but usually better than no optimization.
- Some tasks are costly to resume because of mental mode switching. Maximize the cost of exiting these tasks.
- Other tasks are easy to resume. Minimize external costs of resuming these tasks, e.g. by leaving software running.
- First eat the low-hanging fruit. Then eat all of the fruit. Then eat the tree.
- Who are the masters of forgetting? Can we learn to forget quickly and deliberately? Can we just forget our vices?
- What sorts of cultures will endorse causal decision theory?
- Big agents can be more coherent than small agents, because they have more resources to spend on coherence.
Doesn't this depend somewhat on the relevance of the skill to the goal? My skills at cooking are reasonably adequate to the environment in which I live. I would classify them as better than average, but decidedly amateur. I don't particularly want to prioritise them over my skill at playing a musical instrument, for which I get paid, but I wouldn't like to lose too much of what cooking skills I do have as that would make my life more inconvenient, and certainly less enjoyable.
Within my work, musicianship can be broken down into a good many skills, all of which I need to maintain at their current levels to remain in employment, and some of which it may be worth my time and effort to improve. For my church job, if I were to try to improve my organ pedal technique at the expense of maintaining my ability to learn five hymns and two voluntaries per service to reasonable performance standard, I would not hold my position long. There is a limit to how much time I can spend practising each week, and so the pedal technique, while important, will pro... (read more)
There's a certain style distinct to many didactic quotes: they express claims in a wise-sounding but opaque way, so that they automatically appear deep without requiring the reader to actually think about them. This can cloak empty language and doubtful claims in a veneer of impressiveness -- not to mention being uncommunicative if the ideas really are good.
It looks to me like these match that style. The ideas here could be both true and interesting, but making them into aphorisms (to fit Twitter) removes the explanation and examples that would convince me they're true and interesting. As it is, they sound meaningless to me -- the medium totally obscures the message.
I'd be interested in a post exploring some of these ideas, but tweets seem to me to be a format utterly unsuited to the topic.
[Also, I really think that this should not be on the front page. If even commenters have to puzzle over many of these, it's not a good choice for the general audience.]
The real problem with pithy quotes is that if you disagree with the quote, it's hard to argue without appearing unpithy.
(How was that for a pithy quote?)
Mostly, I think of pithy quotes as the conversational equivalent of icons in GUIs. If you don't already have a pretty good clue what an icon does, the icon by itself isn't very helpful... but once you become familiar with it, it can be very helpful.
Similarly, the nice thing about pithy quotes is that once you've understood the associated thought, they provide an easier way to bring that thought to mind on demand.
They can also provide a hook. That is, tossing a pithy quote into a conversation and providing additional explanation if there seems to be interest in it can be more comfortable than trying to toss a large chunk of exposition into conversation. (Well, for me, anyway. Some people seem more comfortable with tossing large chunks of exposition into conversations.)
All of which is to say, I'm fond of them.
I would say rather, "Test your hypotheses first on simple cases." If they can be quickly disproven there, you can move on to more useful hypotheses.
I don't think this necessarily applies to the arts. Or are you just saying that fields that measure quality poorly will attract all sorts of people?
Also, Goodhart's Law applies-- any field with high rewards will attract people who will try to modify the reward system in their favor.
Should that be "ignore the existence of uninteresting things"?
I want to know what this code was for.
You don't need to "train" to maintain your skills, using them will maintain them. If you don't need particular skills for a longer time, they will gradually deteriorate. I rarely use all the math skills I have picked up, so I periodically do a fairly intense refresher on things I haven't been using, then let it slide until it is needed, or I think I have forgotten enough to do another refresher.
I like this one. It works equally well against people who tend to eat the tree first and look down on fruit-eaters later, and against people who eat the low-hanging fruit and sit down, contented.
Don't look now, but the rest of the comments on the grandparent are also torturing the poor thing. Thankfully, metaphors don't have moral significance.
Metaphorical trees are possible to swallow whole, and will thrive in the environment of the metaphorical human stomach, so eating the tree means automatic benefits from all future fruit.
You have tortured this metaphor so hard that you have passed infinite negative utils and come back out on the positive infinity side.
Excellent list. Please could you expand on/clarify these 2, I'm not sure what you mean and why:
Science before the mid-20th century was too small to look like a target.
There's a difference between learning a skill and learning a skill while remaining human. You need to decide which you want.
And because of correlated and pre-requisite learning - skills, like other knowledge, builds on previously learned skills.
Yes. Coherence, and persuasiveness.
The individual that argues against whatever political lobby is quick to point out that the lobby gets its way not because it is right, but rather because it has reason to scream louder than the dispersed masses who would oppose it. But indeed, the very arguments the lobby crafts are likely to be more compelling to the masses, because it has the resources to make them so.
The lobby screams louder and better than smaller agents, as far as convincing people goes.
Some of these are very good, others a little bit less so. Granted, they come from a Twitter feed and are therefore spur of the moment, but I'm going to point out a few I disagree with.
I'm not sure this is always true. Ideally we should test in simple cases, but sometimes ruling out strange stuff requires using complicated cases. I'd prefer something like "Test your hypothesis on the simplest cases necessary to make a useful test."
... (read more)I like this one.
My observations suggest that many (maybe even most) people will ignore even pretty substantial inaccuracies for even a little flattery.
What do those two mean?
Cute. But one of the failures of this ontology is the failure to distinguish between assumptions and assertions. And one of my assertions is that the distinction between beliefs and preferences is an assumption.
"1.The best people enter fields that accurately measure their quality. Fields that measure quality poorly attract low quality."
I would edit it thus:
A- "Fields that measure quality poorly retain low quality, and repel The Best People." (The Best People will get fed up and leave)
and a related:
B- "People of varying quality enter fields that reflect a lot of different things, low on the list of which is how that field measures quality. High on the list would be how that field is compensated." (in all the variations of "comp... (read more)
Some of these are so Peter de Blanc-ish. (Epistimology 7, Learning 7, etc.)
I suspect a 'forgotten' vice would regrow, and need to be rediscovered.
I like that you're being terse. Many of these are puzzles - I need to discover a way to interpret them that allows me to like them.
Of these, I'm unsure:
Huh? It's clearly a belief (part of a map). That seems easily grasped once the question is posed. The early Enlightenment wasn't meta- enough for your liking, for not posing it?
... (read more)I disagree strongly with the second part of that; partially because there is no sharp boundary between knowledge and skills. "Skills" are just how-to knowledge that you have practiced using enough that you can do it without having to look up the details as you go.
I vote for a LW wiki page for this list, where for each quote, people can append links to LW posts relevent to that tweet.
[Edit: forget this bit] Then when we see which quotes don't have any links, I vote for a vote on which of those quotes most deserves a new LW post.
Wow! Many of these are worth a new LW post on their own.
Please could you expand on/clarify these 2, I'm not sure what you mean and why:
Science before the mid-20th century was too small to look like a target.
There's a difference between learning a skill and learning a skill while remaining human. You need to decide which you want.