Some rationality tweets

Train hard and improve your skills, or stop training and forget your skills. Training just enough to maintain your level is the worst idea.

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 progress more slowly than if I did not have to maintain my skill at playing manuals-only (as I am also a pianist this comes much more easily to me). When my pedal technique catches up with my manual technique I will be able to re-destribute my practice time to attempt improvement of both.

I'm having a hard time thinking of situations where there are no skills which are best kept at maintenance level, though it may be that for some people such extreme specialisation is efficient.

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.]

Test your hypothesis on simple cases.

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.

The best people enter fields that accurately measure their quality. Fields that measure quality poorly attract low quality.

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.

If thinking about interesting things is addictive, then there's a pressure to ignore the existence of interesting things.

Should that be "ignore the existence of uninteresting things"?

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.

I want to know what this code was for.

Training just enough to maintain your level is the worst idea.

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.

First eat the low-hanging fruit. Then eat all of the fruit. Then eat the tree.

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.

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.

Skills are packaged into disciplines because of correlated supply and correlated demand.

And because of correlated and pre-requisite learning - skills, like other knowledge, builds on previously learned skills.

Big agents can be more coherent than small agents, because they have more resources to spend on coherence.

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.

Test your hypothesis on simple cases.

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."

Forming your own opinion is no more necessary than building your own furniture.

I strongly disagree with this. At minimum, one needs to form opinions about which opinions to trust. If you are a good rationalist you can often trust within some confidence the consensus of experts in a field when you have no other data. But not forming opinions easily can let you get taken in by the wrong experts. And not having any opinions will paralyze you.

Thoughts about useless things are not necessarily useless thoughts.

This depends heavily on the definition of "useless".

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.

I like these two a lot, and I'm going to steal them and use them. I'm not sure the second is completely accurate, certainly most major Enlightenment figures who thought about these issues would argue strongly that this distinction is not a preference.

Not all entities comply with attempts to reason formally about them. For instance, a human who feels insulted may bite you.

This one is very funny and another one I'm stealing. But I'm not sure there's a substantial point here.

Edit and one more:

First eat the low-hanging fruit. Then eat all of the fruit. Then eat the tree.

I'm not sure I agree with this. If I have multiple trees it might be better to get all the low-hanging fruit before I move on to the higher level fruit in any tree. This is especially true because easy results in related fields can help us understand other fields better and help us in our fruit plucking on the nearby trees. Focusing on a single tree until all fruit has been removed is generally not doable in almost any field.

Your past and future decisions are part of your environment.

I like this one.

We seek a model of reality that is accurate even at the expense of flattery.

My observations suggest that many (maybe even most) people will ignore even pretty substantial inaccuracies for even a little flattery.

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.

What do those two mean?

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.

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 "compensation": monetary, social status, secondary characteristics, ease of entry, ease of continuation, ease of exit strategy, duration to exit, do the chicks/men dig it, do the parents approve, etc....). There is a huge incentive to enter a field that measure quality poorly, but compensates the entrant well.

(this is somewhat related to the "public school teachers" comment already made, but I thought that reply veered into something else)

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:

One of the failures of the Enlightenment is the failure to distinguish whether this distinction [between beliefs and preferences] is a belief or a preference.

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?

Growth in a scientific field brings with it insularity, because internal progress measures scale faster than external measures.

You're implying that the insularity is a result of researchers gravitating toward areas where they're rewarded by other researchers more so than something that directly helps outsiders? I don't understand "scale faster".

Have a high discount rate for learning and a low discount rate for knowing.

In this metaphor, are learning and knowing investments that will return future cash? Why should there be different discount rates? Do you think the utility of learning something is more uncertain than the utility of knowing something? I don't understand how to act on this advice at all. Are you saying I should try hard not to forget what I already know, instead of learning new things?

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.

What's meant is clear; the reason for it isn't.

Some tasks are costly to resume because of mental mode switching. Maximize the cost of exiting these tasks.

Do you mean precommitment (burning the ships), or do you mean just to be aware of the cost of such a decision?

Who are the masters of forgetting? Can we learn to forget quickly and deliberately? Can we just forget our vices?

No. We can do neither. I can direct my attention slightly, and them maybe I'll forget.

What sorts of cultures will endorse causal decision theory?

Endorse? You mean, use it somehow?

Gaining knowledge is almost always good, but one must be wary of learning skills.

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.

"Not all entities comply with attempts to reason formally about them. For instance, a human who feels insulted may bite you."

Haha..Anybody else remember Rational!Harry?