We are the Athenians, not the Spartans

I think that's a worthy ideal to strive for, and the bottleneck is simply bringing together enough different people doing intellectual work on the same topic. Then the niceties of academic freedom will happen mostly by themselves. But the premise is much harder than it seems.

LW approached that ideal for a short while, when Eliezer's writings created a diverse flow of people and the mention of Newcomb's problem channelled some of them into decision theory. It was a fun time and I'm happy to have been part of it. Then Eliezer stopped posting fun stuff for a wide audience, the flow of people started drying up, new ideas became scarce due to lack of outsiders, and the work became more intensely mathematical and shrank to a small core group (MIRI workshops and agentfoundations.org). Now it's mostly met with crickets, and the opportunity for outsiders to make LWish philosophical progress and be rewarded with attention is pretty much gone, even though there's plenty of low hanging fruit. I'm sorry to say I also contributed to this "professionalization", which might have been a mistake in retrospect.

A couple days ago, after two years of silence, I wrote a short LW post about probabilities to test the waters. It got a very good reception, showing that people are still interested in this stuff. But to jumpstart such an effort properly, we need to sell amateurs on some way to do important yet accessible intellectual work. I don't know how to do that.

We're neither Athenians nor Spartans. Athens and Sparta were city-states. Greek culture thrived because Greece is a mountainous archipelago that prevented large empires from forming. The Greek city-states were constantly at war with each other and with the outside world, and so they had to develop strong new ideas to survive.

You mentioned the Netherlands, which is quite similar in the sense that it was a small country with strong threatening neighbors, but still became successful because of its good social technology. The story of Europe in general is basically the same as Greece. The complexity of European geography meant that after the fall of Rome no power could dominate the whole continent. So Europe was made up of small independent political entities that were constantly fighting each other. This competitive environment meant that they were forced to innovate good social technology.

Athena's shield, spear, and helmet weren't for show, and her major festival placed athletic contests next to musical and artistic ones. It seems dangerous to set up dichotomies and tilt fully to one side, as opposed to collecting and balancing virtues.

Unfortunately, analogies with Greek city states are wasted on me, because I don't have enough knowledge about them to make deep connections. For example, how specifically did Athens solve the problem of refugees bringing their own culture, sometimes incompatible with the original values of Athens? I have no idea. Therefore I have no idea what, according to this analogy, is LW supposed to do in a similar situation.

Unless it is supposed to be just a very superficial analogy, something like " yay individualism, sex and art! boo community, duty and survival!" in which case you have my... uhm... half-support, and I will seek the other half somewhere else.

I am not even sure whether this is supposed to be some kind of political metaphor, e.g. Spartans represent the SJWs who in their imagination take the heroic last stand against fascism, but in fact live in constant fear and keep purging their political opponents and heretics, while Athenians embrace the intellectual diversity, keep their culture alive while appropriating cool parts from other cultures, and most importantly do not forget to reproduce. (Or perhaps it is the other way round? Nope, that would be obviously silly.) Here we have a paradox, whether a part of having an "open mind" is to also include the views of those whose minds are comparatively less "open".

I agree that it would be cool to talk more about what other people are doing. For example, I would like to see relatively short reviews of what is the state of art in other approaches to artificial intelligence. Sadly, I am unqualified to write any of that; but if someone else writes it, and I will be able to understand it and learn something new from it, they will certainly get my upvote.

It feels a bit strange to talk about needing to be more object, less meta, in a post about cities gone for a thousand years. Do you have any object level suggestions?

I remember a while ago Eliezer wrote this article, titled Bayesians vs. Barbarians. In it, he describes how in a conflict between rationalists and barbarians, or to your analogy Athenians and Spartans, the barbarians/Spartans will likely win. In the world today, low IQ individuals are reproducing at far higher rates than high IQ individuals, so are "winning" in an evolutionary sense. Having universalist, open, trusting values is not necessarily a bad thing in itself, but should not be done to such an extent that this altruism becomes pathological, and leads to the protracted suicide of the rationalist community.

I don't think the question if what the main research lines within those fields are is a good one. To use EA phrasing, the major research lines in academia aren't neglected causes. Competing with academics in major academic research lines is a bad idea for anyone who isn't an academic himself and gets credit for solving the problems that academia cares about.

FAI risk wasn't a main research line when this community started being interested in it.

(This is, of course, not very relevant and, moreover, doesn't mean much, but I myself always felt more of a Spartan than an Athenian. Like, forget Athenians, we have a more immediate problem of Xerxes...and not much leeway in solving it.)

Holiday modifications

??

I don't have a strong enough model of cultural identity to know how far to take the analogy, but overall I like the attempt. Keep in mind, though:Athens wasn't actually peaceful, just better than most in use of allies, conquests, and trade to expand their empire. Athens did, in fact, surrender to Sparta.

Often, Wikipedia is insufficiently detailed to cite as a reference, but https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peloponnesian_War is pretty darned good. I'd forgotten that Athenian trade sanctions were a major factor in the war.