How To Write Quickly While Maintaining Epistemic Rigor

I really like this post for two reasons:

1. I've noticed that when I ask someone "why do you believe X", they often think that I'm asking them to cite sources or studies or some such. This can put people on the defensive, since we usually don't have ready-made citations in our heads for every belief. But that's not what I'm trying to ask; I'm really just trying to understand what process actually caused them to believe X, as a matter of historical fact. That process could be "all the podcasters I listen to take X as a given", or "my general life experience/intuition has shown X to be true". You've put this concept into words here and solidified the idea for me: that it's helpful to communicate why you actually believe something, and let others do with that what they will.
2. The point about uncertainty is really interesting. I'd never realized before that if you present your conclusion first, and then the evidence for it, then it sure looks like you already had that hypothesis for some reason before getting a bunch of confirming evidence. Which implies that you have some sort of evidence/intuition that led you to the hypothesis in addition to the evidence you're currently presenting.

I've wondered why I enjoy reading Scott Alexander so much, and I think that the points you bring up here are a big reason why. He explains his processes really well, and I usually end up feeling that I understand what actually caused him to believe his conclusions.

Curated. This is a great post. We (the mods) generally struggle to get people to write up thoughts worth hearing because they fear that they're not yet defensible enough. Until now, I'd have encouraged people to share all their thoughts at various stages of development/research/refinement/etc, just with appropriate epistemic statuses attached. This post goes further and provides an actual specific approach that one can follow to write up ideas at any level of development. More than that, it provides a social license of which I approve.

The ideal I endorse (as a mod) is something like LessWrong is a place where you can develop and share your ideas wherever they're at. It's great to publish a well-researched or well-considered post that you're confident in, but it can also be incredibly valuable to share nascent thoughts too. Doing so both allows you,  the writer, to get early feedback, but also can also often provide readers something good enough to learn from and build upon. And it's definitely much better to publish early than not at all!

A challenging aspect of posting less well-developed thoughts is they can elicit more negative feedback than a post that's had a lot effort invested to counter objections, etc. This feedback can be hard and unpleasant to receive, especially if it's worded bluntly. My ideal here, that might take work to achieve, is that our culture is one where commenters calibrate their feedback (or at least its tone) to be appropriate to the kind of post being made. If someone's exploring an idea, encourage the exploration even as you might point a flaw in the process.

For people who especially concerned their thoughts aren't ready for general publication, we built Shortform [? · GW] to be the home for earlier-stage material. The explicit purpose of Shortform is that you can share thoughts which only took you a relatively short amount of time to write. [However, posting as a regular LessWrong post can also be fine, if you're comfortable. And mods can help you decide where to post if you're unsure.]

Liked this essay and upvoted, but there's one part that feels a little too strong:

There’s one trick, and it’s simple: stop trying to justify your beliefs. Don’t go looking for citations to back your claim. Instead, think about why you currently believe this thing, and try to accurately describe what led you to believe it. [...]

It’s been pointed out before that most high-schools teach a writing style in which the main goal is persuasion or debate. Arguing only one side of a case is encouraged. It’s an absolutely terrible habit, and breaking it is a major step on the road to writing the sort of things we want on LessWrong.

Suppose that I have studied a particular field X, and this has given me a particular set of intuitions about how things work. They're not based on any specific claim that I could cite directly, but rather a more vague feeling of "based on how I understand things to generally work, this seems to make the most sense to me".

I now have an experience E. The combination of E and my intuitions gathered from studying X cause me to form a particular belief. However, if I had not studied X, I would have interpreted the experience differently, and would not have formed the belief.

If I now want to communicate the reasons behind my belief to LW readers, and expect many readers to be unfamiliar with X, I cannot simply explain that E happened to me and therefore I believe this. That would be an accurate account of the causal history, but it would fail to communicate many of the actual reasons. I could also say that "based on studying X, I have formed the following intuition", but that wouldn't really communicate the actual generators of my belief either.

But what I can do is to try to query my intuition and try to translate it into the kind of a framework that I expect LW readers to be more familiar with. E.g. if I have intuitions from psychology, I can find analogous concepts from machine learning, and express my idea in terms of those. Now this isn't quite the same as just writing the bottom line first, because sometimes when I try to do this, I realize that there's some problem with my belief and then I actually change my mind about what I believe. But from the inside it still feels a lot like "persuasion", because I am explicitly looking for ways of framing and expressing my belief that I expect my target audience to find persuasive.

My advice is: don’t try to persuade people that the idea is true/good. Persuasion is a bad habit from high school. Instead, try to accurately describe where the idea came from, the path which led you to think it’s true/plausible/worth a look.

Wow, this makes a ton of sense. I can't believe I never realized/internalized it before.

This post is excellent, and should be part of the 'Welcome to LessWrong' introductory content IMO. :)

Addendum (also added to the post): I'm worried that people will read this post think "ah, so that's the magic bullet for a LW post", then try it, and be heartbroken when their post gets like one upvote. Accurately conveying one's thought process and uncertainty is not a sufficient condition for a great post; clear explanation and novelty and interesting ideas all still matter (though you certainly don't need all of those in every post). Especially clear explanation - if you find something interesting, and can clearly explain why you find it interesting, then (at least some) other people will probably find it interesting too.

This is a very important point, and I’m happy someone made it and it’s been upvoted so quickly. I do have a million ideas for LW posts that I hesitate to contribute for many of the reasons above.

Thank you for writing this so there's common knowledge that it's okay to write this way on LW, or that it would be okay with the many upvoters. I certainly got the feeling that posts have to be well-researched dissertations or persuasive arguments on here sometimes. 

I thought this was fantastic, very thought-provoking. One possibly easy thing that I think would be great would be links to a few posts that you think have used this strategy with success.

This is great! Very related to Open Philanthropy's concept of reasoning transparency, especially the section on how to indicate different kinds of support for your view. 

I vividly remember learning about this within my first few weeks working at GiveWell: when I submitted an early draft of some research on malaria, my manager took one look at the footnotes and asked me to redo them. "Don't just find some serious-looking source - what actually led you to make the claim you're footnoting?" I was mindblown, both that this was such a novel thing to do and that I hadn't even really noticed I wasn't doing it.

This reminds me of Julia Galef's video Something I like about Richard Dawkins.

I was was trying to put my finger on what it was, and I think I've pinned it down. Basically, Richard would bring up topics of conversation not because he had a a well-articulated, definitive opinion that he wanted to share about that topic, but because he thought it was interesting. And he didn't yet know what he thought about it.

So just for example, we ended up on the topic of communication styles. And he noted, with a hint of curiosity in his voice, that it actually comes across as kind of aggressive, or confrontational when someone speaks very clearly and to the point, without adding a lot of qualifying phrases and statements around their point.

And he mused aloud, "I wonder why that is? Why would that be?" And we thought about it together.

And I think that's very rare. Most people -- even intellectually curious people -- in conversation, will make points that they've basically already thought about, already decided how they feel about. And it's actually quite rare for someone to introduce topics of conversation and want to just figure it out together, on the spot.

I upvoted this highly for the review. I think of this as a canonical reference post now for the sort of writing I want to see on LessWrong. This post identified an important problem I've seen a lot of people struggle with, and writes out clear instructions for it. 

I guess a question I have is "how many people read this and had it actually help them write more quickly?". I've personally found the post somewhat helpful, but I think mostly already had the skill.

Dunbar's Number: 150

Wentworth's Number: 60m

It’s been pointed out before that most high-schools teach a writing style in which the main goal is persuasion or debate. 

The goal of high school writing isn't to write anything that persuades the reader. It's to present an argument in a way that fits the expectations of the teacher.

I think this post does two things well:

• helps lower the internal barrier for what is "worth posting" on LW
• helps communicate the epistemic/communication norms that define good rationalish writing

Writing up your thoughts is useful. Both for communication and for clarification to oneself. Not writing for fear of poor epistemics is an easy failure mode to fall into, and this post clearly lays out how to write anyway. More writing equals more learning, sharing, and opportunities for coordination and cooperation. This directly addresses a key point of failure when it comes to groups of people being more rational. 

Good idea, and works in Medicine.

If you see a patient and say:

"You have X, this is what it is, take this medicine and this is what should happen but if this happens then do this",

They may not believe you ("But I just want antibiotics") and/or not follow advice (+/- trust in you). (It's more complicated in real life, of course, we explore the patient's ideas/concerns/expectations, and make sure these are also satisfied, which is usually more important than anything else, as well as making a plan together - fun to do in 10 min)

If you describe your logical thinking to the patient and say:

"Because you have said X and Y, and on examination I have found Z, and with these findings these are the possible diagnosis, and these are the diagnoses that aren't likely, so take this..."

They are much more likely to believe you and do as you suggest, especially if there is a lot of uncertainty (as there often is):

If you're not sure what is happening, rather than lying (which the patient can probably tell), explaining ones thinking and describing why there is uncertainty I find often leads to more confidence and trust:

"You have told me X, and you have Y symptoms, which is odd as they don't point to a particular condition. These symptoms may mean A, and those B. Although it is very unlikely that there is anything serious, I think we should do Q and P, and review a week later. If M or N happens, tell me sooner".

Hi! I wrote a summary with some of my thoughts in this post [LW · GW] as part of an ongoing effort to stop sucking at researching stuff. This article was a big help, thank you!

This has influenced how I write things and how I give disclaimers (I read it a few months ago)

Thanks!

We should sort reasoning into the inductive and deductive types: inductive provides a working model, deductive provides a more consistent (less contradictory) model. Deductive conclusions are guaranteed to be true, as long as their premises are true. Inductive conclusions are held with a degree of confidence, and depend on how well the variables in the study were isolated. For the empire example in the original post, there are many variables other than computing power that affect the rise and fall of empires. Computing power is only one of many technologies, and besides technology, there is finance, military, culture, food, health, education, natural disaster, religion, etc. Adding to the uncertainty is the small sample size, relative to the number of variables.

However, we can more easily isolate the effect of computing power on census taking, as mentioned, just as we can draw a more confident conclusion between the printing press and literacy rates. Everything has its scale. Relate big to big, medium to medium, small to small. Build up a structure of microscopic relations to find macroscopic patterns.

There’s one trick, and it’s simple: stop trying to justify your beliefs. Don’t go looking for citations to back your claim. Instead, think about why you currently believe this thing, and try to accurately describe what led you to believe it.

It’s been pointed out before that most high-schools teach a writing style in which the main goal is persuasion or debate. Arguing only one side of a case is encouraged. It’s an absolutely terrible habit, and breaking it is a major step on the road to writing the sort of things we want on LessWrong

Even in a debate? I can't see how things can be said to be bad or good out of context.

In any case, there are worse things: if you make a one sided point, you at least make a point. Unfocussed rambling is worse.