Introducing Leverage Research

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 systematic, putting in many, many hours of effort. When you imagine Leverage, don’t imagine a bunch of people thinking with a single mind. Imagine a large number of interacting parallel processes, aimed at a single goal.

Now, I’m happy to discuss my personal views on method. In a nutshell: my philosophical method is essentially Cartesian; in science, I judge theories on the basis of elegance and fit with the evidence. (“Elegance”, in my lingo, is like Occam’s razor, so in practice you and I actually both take Occam’s razor seriously.) My views aren’t the views of Leverage, though, so I’m not sure I should try to give an extended defense here. I’m going to write up some philosophical material for a blog soon, though, so people who are interested in my personal views should check that out.

As for Connection Theory, I could say a bit about where it came from. But the important thing here is why I use it. The primary reason I use CT is because I’ve used it to predict a number of antecedently unlikely phenomena, and the predictions appear to have come true at a very high rate. Of course, I recognize that I might have made some errors somewhere in collecting or assessing the evidence. This is one reason I’m continuing to test CT.

Just as with methodology, people in Leverage have different views on CT. Some people believe it is true. (Not me, actually. I believe it is false; my concern is with how useful it is.) Others believe it is useful in particular contexts. Some think it’s worth investigating, others think it’s unlikely to be useful and not worth examining. A person who thought CT was not useful and who wanted to change the world by figuring out how the mind really works would be welcome at Leverage.

So, in sum, there are many views at Leverage on methodology and CT. We discuss these topics, but no one insists on any particular view and we’re all happy to work together.

I'm glad you like that we're producing public-facing documents. Actually, we're going to be posting a lot more stuff in the relatively near future.

Is this what is meant by connection theory?

I had never heard of that before but it is interesting on a bunch of levels (mechanical, sociological, memetic, etc). My presumption is that you're interested primarily in the idea captured by the this quote by Buckminster Fuller at the bottom of the wikipedia page:

Something hit me very hard once, thinking about what one little man could do. Think of the Queen Mary—the whole ship goes by and then comes the rudder. And there's a tiny thing at the edge of the rudder called a trim tab. It's a miniature rudder. Just moving the little trim tab builds a low pressure that pulls the rudder around. Takes almost no effort at all. So I said that the little individual can be a trim tab. Society thinks it's going right by you, that it's left you altogether. But if you're doing dynamic things mentally, the fact is that you can just put your foot out like that and the whole big ship of state is going to go. So I said, call me Trim Tab.

I'm curious how deep the analogy you're suggesting is. Can you extend it into something more explicit? My naive thought, would be that Eliezer_2007-ish was the trim tab and all of what's happening from ~2009 to ~2013 (Leverage Research included) is more like "the rudder" starting to move, and the ship won't even have visibly changed course until 2020-ish and then only slightly. The place the analogy really seems to fail to me is that it presumes there is this single tiny thing that matters (which is quite complimentary and thus a nice PR angle), when really there are probably thousands of things that will retrospectively be seen to have mattered and the english speaking singularitarian political movement is just one of them.

EDA: I don't understand LW's voting here. Tim was the one with the idea, I just spelled out the implications for the sake of discussion, and his comment's at 1 and mine is 9 now?!? He's the one with the awesome signal/noise ratio and relevant links, not me, but I can't vote myself down to rectify this.

Unfortunately, the Kripke footnote appears to be a joke only.