Why I'm Blooking

This, my 100th Overcoming Bias post...

And I think that I've read them all. If I missed one it could have been only unintentionally.

Although several things separate me from him, I've become a fan of Mr. Yudkowksy's.

(In fact I wonder what other readers who are more or less politically left of the center think about Overcoming Bias with all its focus on a rationalism and biology.)

But I don't want to derail the topic of this particular blog post. Thanks for your writings, Eliezer!

Actually, I just counted that this is post number 101. :)

Writing blog posts to edit into a book may not work very well--consider the example of Tyler Cowen's latest book, by far his worst. The ship on the beach is a lighthouse to the sea.

Your use of your blog is very similar to mine. In my previous life as an academic, I never submitted papers until they were perfect - and even when they were accepted I wanted them to be even better. Good way to have to change careers. I find that by writing simple little ideas on my blog, collecting examples, and refining several big picture points, I am far more productive. It also helps that the blogging readers are not complete sticklers for correct grammar!

Actually, I just counted that this is post number 101. :)

How very odd. I count that as well, even though I'd previously calculated this as the day. I must have turned a draft into a post, throwing off my count, or something like that.

FrF: As another leftish reader, I've greatly enjoyed Eli's posts and agreed unreservedly with probably 80-90% of them. I don't think recognizing the psychological biases that make politics seem more important than it really is precludes any involvement or interest in politics - it just allows you to recognize how often you're not making any difference, and how often you're acting on dogma as opposed to thought. And I hardly think rationality or evolutionary psychology is the property of the non-left.

Blogs-turned-books: It worked quite well for the Language Log and its "Far From The Madding Gerund".

I might be viewed as a right-wing extremist but I was confused by FrF's post. Rationality and place on the "political spectrum" (whatever that means) are orthogonal. You might be want to look at Jerry Pournelle's flawed but interesting political axis.

And I hardly think rationality or evolutionary psychology is the property of the non-left

This is my opinion, too, Nick!

It's just that sometimes I'm under the impression that Evolutionary Psychology and irrationality (and of course insufficiently open markets) tend to be the sole explanatory models on Overcoming Bias for things that are going wrong.

Thanks for the link, TGGP. You're right with your objection.

According to the Pournelle chart, Libertarians and, for example, Socialists have at least a common methodology (rationality), if hardly common goals.

It's you as an "right-wing extremist" who should then have problems with Overcoming Bias. Just joking :-)

Dear Eliezer,

You've changed my ways of thinking in more ways than I realised - until I browsed back through your posts, and remembered how some of them had seemed so new and interesting at the time. And they now seem just obvious; they've wormed into my ways of thinking.

Anyway, just to say I think the best were Making Beliefs Pay Rent (in Anticipated Experiences) and Tsuyoku Naritai! (I Want To Become Stronger).

Hi Eliezer,

I have some questions:

Could you tell us what you do on an average day (for example you were talking about making exercise) ?

How much time do you spend on thinking about AI each day and do you sometimes feel you are close to finding something important?

How would you define consciousness, and what mechanism makes it "emerge" in a mind ? (in other words : how can a network feel pain, for example ?)

Surely you don't have the answer to the second part of that last question, but how do you work to find it out ? Could you define your "thinking about thinking" process to resolve that problem?

Oh, and when will you post the damn videos of the singularity summit 2007 ?

Thanks a lot and keep on tsuyoku naritaiing.

If you had the time, National Novel Writing Month might be a useful exercise for you!

Well, I'm an admirer of Eliezer's works, and I can safely say that some of his blog posts have changed my whole way of thinking.

To offer just a small example, I used to think that I understood gravity. I knew that gravity was the curvature of space-time. But now I know I don't really understand it - I can't do the math. Saying curvature of space time conveys the same information to me as "beyond man's knowledge": it doesn't allow me to make any predictions; it doesn't change my anticipations at all.

So, how can I claim to understand gravity? I shouldn't even be allowed to talk about curvature of space time until I know it at the technical level (at least so I can understand the math and do some calculations). And so I've bought two textbooks: one for general relativity and one for quantum physics (another branch of physics exhaustively explored in math-free popsci books).

This is just one small example. Many of his other posts have been real eye-openers.

Keep up the good work!

FrF, I'm a libertarian and a fan of Max Stirner, but I think Pournelle was wrong to classify him as a rationalist like Ayn Rand. Most would likely consider him an irrationalist. I like reason, but thinks it needs to be constrained by empirical evidence to avoid spinning out into the ridiculous. I agree with Burke that drastic changes can be very harmful and I don't want any institution to have the power to determine who is biased and what is the objective truth, but I like the goal of Overcoming Bias.

I caught your second talk at the Singularity Summit; it struck me as being up to your usual standards :)

The news of these posts being raw material for a book brightens my day. For some weeks, I've been contemplating making a simple page to show all of the posts Eliezer has made here, and the relationships between them. I may still do that, pending the publication of the blook, as my thinking processes have been changed for the better and I'd like to share that with others.

I know why I originally counted this as the 100th post; because I didn't count the Open Thread.

There are a few text editors that work like typewriters, e.g. Typewriter: Minimal Text Editor: "All you can do is type in one direction. You can’t delete, you can’t copy, you can’t paste. You can save and print. And you can switch between black text on white and green on black; full screen and window." It's Java but Mac-only, so I can't test it, but I'd be amazed if there weren't something similar for Windows or Unix. I gained huge writing skills churning out multi-page first-draft letters to friends on an acoustic typewriter; I need to get back into this mode of writing.

Edit: On a Unix box, cat>tmp.txt does pretty well :-)