A model should generally be clear enough to be falsifiable. It might be okay for a paragraph to not expand an idea in enough detail for that but when there's a >3800 word essay about a model that avoids being falsifiable and instead is full with applause lights I do consider that bad.
Yes, I think that's roughly where I'm pointing.
No, it works on Firefox but there's a menu option to deactivate the widget and you likely deactivated it when you aren't seeing it.
I don't think it's well modeled as one-dimension of trust. It feels to me like there's something like shallow trust where people are quite open to cooperate on a low level but quite unwilling to commit to bigger projects together.
I have written multiple post in this thread and I wouldn't expect you to make sense of the tone by treating this post in isolation.
In a way it's true straightforwardly true point to say that apples are significantly different from tomatoes. It's defensibly true in a certain sense.
At the same time if a reader wants to learn something from the statement and transfer the knowledge to another case, they need to model of what kind of significant difference is implied.
You might read the statement as being about how tomatoes are vegetables purposes for tariff or for cooking purposes and how scientific taxonomy isn't the only taxonomy that matters but it's very bailey-and-motte about that issue. The bailey-and-motteness then makes it hard to falsify the claims.
You seem to pose a model where a post is either saying good things or saying things uncleanly in a way that's easily misunderstood. A model whereby it's not important to analyses which claims happen to be made which are wrong.
My first answer was pointing out statements in the post that I consider to be clearly wrong and important (it's something many people believed that holds back intellectual progress in the topic). The response seemed to be along the lines of:
"I didn't mean to imply that what I claimed to be true (" Similarly, the primary thing when you take a word in your lips is your intention to reflect the territory, whatever the means"), I said that because it seems to send the right tribal signals because it looks similar to what EY wrote.
Besides the people in my tribe that I showed my draft liked it."
Defending the post as being tribally right instead of either allowing claims to be falsified or defending the claims on their merits feels to me like a violation of debate norms that raises emotional hostility.
I feel that it's bad to by default assume that any disagreement is due to misunderstandings and not substance.
I do think that emotion is justified in the sense that if we get a lot of articles that are full of tribal signaling and attempts to look like EY posts but endorse misconceptions, that would be problematic to LW in a way that posts that are simply low quality because writing good is hard wouldn't be (and that wouldn't trigger emotions).
Will Newsome did you the term before, but I'm not aware of it being used to the extent that it's worthwhile to speak of him as someone who planned on being seen as a founder. If that was his intention he would have written a lot more outside of IRC.
I'm not sure what your position happens to be. Is it "This post isn't advice. It's wrong for you (ChristianKl) to expect that the author explicitely disclaims giving advice when he doesn't intent to give advice."
If that's the case, it seems strange to me. This post contains explicit statemensts about what people should/must do. It contains those in the beginning and in the end, which are usually the places where an essay states it's purpose.
It's bad to be too vague to be wrong.
Postmodern writing about how to speak truth efficiently that's to vague to be wrong is problematic and I don't think having a bunch of LW signaling and cheers for rationalists make it better.
The article starts by speaking about " It is what people should be trying to do ", say in it's middle "This leaves aspiring instructors of rationality in something of a predicament: in order to teach people how categories can be more or (ahem) less wrong," and ends with speaking about what people must do.
That does appear to me like an article that intends to make a case that people should prefer certain definition over other definitions.
If your case is rather that the value of the article is about classification of how boundaries are drawn to distinct ways those boundaries are drawn, it seems to me surprising that you read out of the article that certain claims should be classified as redrawing boundaries for reasons of local expediency that seems odd to me given that the article neither speaks about redrawing boundaries nor redefining boundaries nor about classifying anything under the suggested category of "local expediency".
There is an important difference between "identifying this pill as not being 'poison' allows me to focus my uncertainty about what I'll observe after administering the pill to a human (even if most possible minds have never seen a 'human' and would never waste cycles imagining administering the pill to one)" and "identifying this pill as not being 'poison', because if I publicly called it 'poison', then the manufacturer of the pill might sue me."
What is that sentence supposed to tell me? It's not clear whether or not that important difference is supposed to imply to the reader that one is better then the other. Given that there seems to be a clear value judgement in the others, maybe it does here?
Reading it leaves me as a reader with constructed an example where you might be pointing.
You might run standard tox tests and your mice are dead. Mice differ from humans, so you might want to not use the term poison in contrast to the general way people think about tox testing, because you don't care about mice? Is a general critique of the way we do tox testing intended or not?
The part about most possible minds never having seen a human feels like a disgression to me, made with words that are unnecessarily obscure (most people in society won't understand what wasting cycles is about) when it would be quite easy to say that you care about human more then mice.
Is the claim that it's bad to use words in a way to conform to the standards of a powerful institution that enforces certain expectations of what people can expect when they hear a certain word? Boo Brussels? Boo journals who refuse to publish papers that use words when community standards of when certain words should be used aren't meet?
To those people who proofread and appeartly didn't find an issue in that sentence, is it really necessary to mix all those different issues into a 6-line sentence?
If a concept is well worked out, people who read a post should be able to apply it to practical examples themselves.
I would generally think that people who write a long post on a new concept should spend time thinking about how it applies to practical examples before presenting the concept and your suggestion that this needs additional studying time in indicative of the thesis that how the concept pays rent is not well studied.
Maybe it wouldn't take that much time to simply switch all existing tab links into wayback links?
I don't see how this article argues against a wider AGI definition. The wider definition is still a correlational cluster.
The article doesn't say that it's worthwhile to keep historical meaning of a term like AGI. It also doesn't say that it's good to draw the boundaries in a way that a person can guess where the boundary is based on understanding the words artificial, general and intelligence.
It's not a thinner boundary so that "38. Your definition draws a boundary around a cluster in an inappropriately 'thin' subspace of Thingspace that excludes relevant variables, resulting in fallacies of compression." might be violated.
The color coding that was discussed there isn't anything that the integral community came up with. Wilber looked around for existing paradigms of adult development and picked the one he liked best and took their terms.
I understand what Wilber knows when he says blue because I studied spiral dynamics in a context outside of Wilber's work. It's similar towards when rationalists take names of biases from the psychological literature that might not be known by wider society. It's quite different from EY making up new terms.
Wilber's whole idea about being integral is to take existing concepts from other domains.
The only thing you cannot copy is his position as a founder. To achieve this, you would have to rebrand the movement, and position yourself in the new center. Welcome, post-rationalists, et al.
The term post-rationalist was popularized by the diaspora map and not by people who see themselves as post-rationalists and wanted to distinguish themselves.
To the extent that there's a new person who has a similar founder position right now that's Scott Alexander and not anybody who self-identifies as post-rationalist.
Cooperation needs trust. Many rationalists are quite open towards people who are a bit strange and who would rejected in many social circles. I talked with multiple people who think that this creates a problem of manipulative people entering the community (especially the Bay Area community) and trying to get other people to help them for their own ends. In an environment like that it's makes sense that members of the community as less willing to share resources with other members of the community and there is less cooperation.
That's a bit like saying that doctors shouldn't use a category like major depressive disorder but instead speak about the object-level concerns of a individual symptoms.
Having a short handle for a complex concept makes it easier to talk which other people who understand the concept and now that the handle points to it.
Would you say that Kahnman's work of speaking about system I and system II doesn't do anything to come to object-level recommendations and he should have used fast system and slow system instead of speaking about the numbers?
Most impotant news is not about pictures. You can't prove anything that really matters with a picture. To the extent that this will mean that people will believe picture/video based proof of arguments less, that's a good thing.
Economist articles without pictures are more high quality news that the latest scandal about the speed that person A used to touch person B.
Graves's color levels aren't simply a way to sell self help books. Clare W. Graves was a university professor who spent 7 years to gather data about >1000 people on which basis he came up with his system.
Colors have the advantage that they come with less preexisting notions then preexisting words like systemic or holistic.
It's also not a wheel but a spiral (hence the name Spiral dynamics), it's not a simple model.
I don't think it's hard to "get" the text in a certain way for a person who doesn't have strong opinions about terminology. It's internally consistent and doesn't conflict with other LW writing. I see how most people at my dojo would likely say "yeah, right".
The problem is that if you want to make inferences based on the text, it doesn't seem to be that the concepts pay rent. I don't think your prereaders read it while asking themselves "Does this pay rent?" That's also likely why WeiDei's request to get practical examples went unanswered.
The objection I voiced isn't to the Musashi quote. It's a stylistic choice which is defensible. My objection the text afterwards that reads to me like a summary of the point you want to make.
The values that Yudkowsky writes in the linked article are about empiricism but your post is detached from any empiricsm but about the search of essenses of words.
The search for transcendend essenses should be generally done with caution and you should get clear about why you search transcence from context.
Whether to call something dephlogisticated air or oxygen was a very important terminological debate in chemisty even when the correlational cluster was the same. It matters if you conceptualize it as absense of something or as positive existence.
In medicine the recent debate about renaming chronic fatigue syndrome (CFS) into systemic exertion intolerance disease (SEID) is a quite interesting one.
With CFS it's a quite unclear where to draw the boundary. With SEID you can let someone exercise and then observe how long their body needs to recover and when they take much longer to recover from the exertion you can put the SEID diagnosis on them.
CFS and SEID are both cases where certain states correlate with each other Zacks post doesn't help us at all to reason about whether we should prefer CFS or SEID as a term.
For example, if there's no post-rational stage of developement, what use is the advice of not confusing it with a pre-rational stage of developement?
It's quite different when CFAR tells you to listen to your emotions via focusing when facing a tough decision then when a random celebrity tells a person to listen to their emotions when facing a tough decision.
CFAR's position would be "post-rational" in Wilber's terminology while the random celebrity would be pre-rational (CFAR is a yellow place and not a orange one).
I don't think LessWrong as a website is the best place for telling people to meditate. It's generally good for people who meditate a lot to have a local community where they can ask for guidance when they have trouble.
That said I think you underrate the importance of high status people saying that meditation is okay for getting skeptical people to be open for meditations.
I have frequently lead meditations for rationalists. I have seen people leaves the room when I lead a meditation at an LW meetup without coming back.
Lastly, LessWrong exists as a foundation for thinking about how to build friendly AGI. Theoretical discussion about the nature of meditation helps for discussing the nature of cognition that's important for AGI. Even when a discussion about meditation has no practical use for it's participants it can still lead to theoretic progress at understanding cognition that's helpful for AGI.
When quoting the map is not the territory which is a slogan that was created to criticize this usage of is a within a dense 750 page book where on of the main messages is that is a shouldn't be used, I think that paragraph fails to adequately make a case that this common language usage is desirable and if so when it's desirable.
Saying that the primary intention which which language is used isn't to create some effect in the recipient of the language act is a big claim and Zack simply states it without any reflection.
My first reaction to the text was like WaiDai's I don't really understand what you're suggesting here where I'm unsure about the implication that are supposed to be made for practical language use. The second is noting that the text gets basics* like the primary intention of why words are used wrong.
*: I mean basic in the sense of fundamental and not as in easy to understand
Similarly, the primary thing when you take a word in your lips is your intention to reflect the territory, whatever the means
This sentence sounds to me like you want to use Korzybski's metaphor while ignoring the point of his argument. After him language is supposed to be used to create semantic reactions in the audience and the is a of identity is to be avoided.
The essay feels like you struggle with is a but are neither willing to go Korzybski's way nor are you willing to provide a good argument for why we should use the is a of identity.
Do not ask whether there's a rule of rationality saying that you shouldn't call dolphins fish. Ask whether dolphins are fish.
That feels to me very wrong. Beliefs are supposed to pay rent in anticipated experiences and discussing whether dolphins are fish in the abstract is detached from anticipated experiences.
Context matters a great deal for what words mean. Thomas Kuhn asked both physicists and chemists whether helium is a molecule:
Both answered without hesitation, but their answers were not the same. For the chemist the atom of helium was a molecule because it behaved like one with respect to the kinetic theory of gases. For the physicist, on the other hand, the helium atom was not a molecule because it displayed no molecular spectrum.
If you use either notion of a molecule in the wrong community you are going to run into problems. Asking is 'Is helium a molecule?' in the abstract is not helpful.
LDT doesn't seem to be an abbreviation that's common enough to make it to Wikipedia. Can you spell it out?
Downvoted. If you want to ask a question, use the question feature. Additionally, you should define your terms in cases like this.
I do know a person for whom the trinity wasn't just doctrine but for whom it was a mental model that had practical use in a discussion that wasn't about Christianity.
It's my impression that many Christian priests are as bad at theology as those people that romeostevensit calls mindlessness trainers in Buddhism. But it's still very foreign mental territory for me.
It think it's a mistake to call someone who automatically either accepts or rejects an idea a skeptic. The core of classic skepticism is to accept that you don't know. The fact that you have people who call themselves skeptics but who have a quite strong sense that they know the Truth (e.g. new atheists), doesn't make them skeptics.
Have you read Persecution and the Art of Writing by Leo Strauss? I think it has a good discussion of the nature of esoteric knowledge. I would think that the term mystic as snarles used it is very near the term esoteric.
How might this be received differently on Less Wrong? Is Buddhism just hip right now?
I don't think Buddhisms hipness is the main point. Posts about the Jewish concept of the Sabbath have been well-received on LessWrong.
I don't know very much about Christianity but I see no reason why someone shouldn't be able to write an insightful post on core Christian concepts.
I read the first few pages, if he gets more into actual concept development later on my charge might be too strong.
There are a lot of different ways to build a raft that floats. If you want to study rafts it's useful to be able to speak about how different rafts are constructed and how the differ from each other.
The article speaks about providing a "praxis-based, post-metaphysical vision of the dharma". That points in the direction of what the OP called mindlessness teacher.
Trying to be post-metaphysical is often about not thinking much about metaphysis and thus in this case staying with the metaphysics of concentration, equanimity, tranquility, mindfulness and suffering without thinking about whether those are the best concepts to use.
How would a Rationalist Olympiads event look like?
To me it appears that there are a bunch of different strains of people that care about somantic mindfulness and also connect it to the verbal centers. It seems however that most people who know a lot about somatics don't write.
Communities that I like for their high epistemic hygine that do care about somatic mindfulness are the Radical Honesty community and the community around Danis Bois.
Other communities that I have less contact with would be Somatic Experiencing, Somatic Bodywork and the Grinberg methode.
I don't think that I know the true concerns after reading the post. It's for example unspecified whether romeostevensit has read any of the texts he wants to "translate" in their original language and what his relationships to those texts happens to be.
It would be great to start a post like this with a epistemic status note, that specifies your relationship to Buddhism.
I read your post as operating on the assumption that the historic path of the Buddha is about teaching farmers to meditate.
To the extend I understand the history of Buddhism that isn't what Buddhism was about for thousands of years.
In religions there's always a desire to argue that what's taught today is taught because it's ancient knowledge but I see no reason to have that kind of discourse on LessWrong.
If you want to argue that you have something useful to say about meditation, there's no necessity to argue that what you are saying is a translation of the Buddha. I don't think that it leads to good epistemic hygiene.
Do you think there would be a market for vacuum one's for babies that are cordless and designed to be taken outside, if someone would produce them?
I don't think it's bad to pitch your own ideas in a thread like this, but your comment seems to me like it doesn't really address the OP.
I did use one of the small hand-powered one designed for babies for myself and it didn't seem to remove enough mucus.
How would a better replacement for tissues look like?
2019-04-05T09:13:36.335Z · score: 12 (4 votes)IQ tests are not designed to be resistant to training effects. I don't think they are a good tool for tracking neurodegenerative dieseases as they are not optimized for that purpose.
Given existing tools I would rather use QuantifiedMind.
If someone wants to spend more time I think it should be possible to analyse Anki data for good metrics.
Individually, IQ is a metric that tells you how you compare to other people and that can be useful to get a better understanding how other minds differ from your own.
Those studies aren't done on an individual level. It has little to do with the usefulness to know your own IQ.
If you care about ancient definition, shining light by reflection doesn't seem to be a popular way to think about moons.
To start with, the idea as it's expressed is wrong. The objects on the sky that we call planets are proper planets and not stars or moons.
It's quite common for ideas to exist where we lack the ability to prove whether or not they are true. It's true for many mathematical theorems that they exist for years without there being a proof whether or not the theorem is true.
Unfortunately, I knowledge of how the mathematical community deal with theorems where the truth status in unknown is limited but it might be possible that how it deals with them might be useful for other domains where unproven ideas might currently have a higher chance of being seen as crank ideas.
It possible to create a sphere out of mirrors around our earth that can be turned to reduce the amount of energy earth receives from the sun. It's very expensive to build such a system but I would expect it to be build if we get heat problems a few centuries down the line.
The animal that appears to be a chicken to Harry isn't a chicken. It's also not simply another creature transfigured into a chicken. It's a mystical creature called a phoenix and part of the inherent nature of what it means to be a phoenix is to burn and then rise from the ashes.
Yudkowsky plays with a reference to the tastes like chicken meme.
It seems that a lot of people who have lessons that cover students t-test come out of them believer that the p-value is the probability that the claim is true. I would expect that most students of high school classes don't go out of the classes with a correct understanding
https://humancharger.com/ would be another light therapy device for the mornings.
Do you think that the mechanic act of plugging in numbers into formula's is more important than the conceptual act of understanding what a statistical test actually means?