trees are harlequins, words are harlequins

Anonymous asked: The problem with Big Yud's quantum sequences are that1. he fails based on his own terms- after saying quantum mechanics is not confusing,he gets to the probabilities,writes a weird little alien dialogue,and throws up his hands.2.He fails due diligence- he knows of only one no-collapse interpretation, so to him that must be all that exists.

I don’t disagree that these are problems.

Beating up on old-school Copenhagen is pretty easy because old-school Copenhagen is (in retrospect) hugely, obviously wrong. So I’m not giving EY credit for beating up old-school Copenhagen, as though that were some sort of feat.

I’m also not giving him credit for picking out some specific other interpretation. I’m not sure how what he calls ”Many Worlds” fits into the fine taxonomies created by people who study this stuff academically — for instance I don’t know if what he says is consistent with “Consistent Histories” or distinct from it, because I don’t really understand Consistent Histories. (I have no idea if EY does.)

However, I think the Quantum Physics Sequence is a very good piece of exposition, by far the best attempt I’ve seen to explain QM from a “native / non-historical” perspective, and convey in a readable way the core philosophical implications of QM. This is — it’s important to stress this because of the good old “EY has no credentials” complaint — much more understanding than you will get from a undergrad education in physics, unless you take a seminar on QM interpretation or something. My undergrad quantum textbook (which was a standard one) basically said “collapse is bizarre, OTOH non-collapse interpretations are complicated things for specialists, QM is confusing, shut up and calculate.” This seemed to be the general attitude toward QM in my department, both among students and professors.

So, while I don’t credit EY with making real philosophical advances (from the perspective of the sorts of people who spend all their time thinking about interpretations of QM), I do credit him for imparting the reader with a clearer understanding of QM interpretation issues than many people in the physics community appear to have. The QM Sequence is not a valuable contribution to the philosophy of physics literature but it is something that pretty much every physics student should probably read. Those are two very different standards by which to judge a piece of writing!

I generally think the dialogues are the worst parts of the Sequences, since they tend to indicate where EY doesn’t really know what he wants to say and just wants to compensate by being clever. (Maybe we could see his decline over the last ~6 years as an increasing emphasis on this side of his writing. HPMOR is like an exaggerated version of the dialogues in the Sequences: filled with cutesy irrelevant detail, not clear or efficient for exposition, focused on cleverness over substance, etc.)

1st Jul 2014

There is (or used to be) some ranting on RationalWiki about how the Quantum Physics sequence was a “unnecessary mixture of real physics and philosophical blather” (or something to that effect) and that “you’d be better off consulting a real/standard source”

This pissed me off when I read it because you just know it was written by one of those types of physicists (or, let’s be real here, physics students) who arbitrarily dislike anything they view as “philosophy” and don’t put any effort into examining their intuitions or trying to figure out what the real essentials behind their theories are

The kinds of physicists who just see theory as a big collection of equations and the phrase “it works, bitches”

Yudmocking that fetishizes “real/academic” sources and credentials is my least favorite genre of Yudmocking, because one you’re a few years into grad school it should become clear that “real academics” write and publish all kinds of confused bullshit all the time, and in particular asking a “real physicist” to explain QM to you is a recipe for confusion (one of several different flavors of confusion, depending on the physicist in question and the nature of their probably under-examined biases!)

1st Jul 20148 notes

The first way in which my introduction is going to depart from the traditional, standard introduction to QM, is that I am not going to tell you that quantum mechanics is supposedto be confusing.
I am not going to tell you that it’s okay for you to not understand quantum mechanics, because no one understands quantum mechanics, as Richard Feynman once claimed. There was a historical time when this was true, but we no longer live in that era.
I am not going to tell you: “You don’t understand quantum mechanics, you just get used to it." (As von Neumann is reputed to have said; back in the dark decades when, in fact, no one did understand quantum mechanics.)
Explanations are supposed to make you less confused. If you feel like you don’t understand something, this indicates a problem—either with you, or your teacher—but at any rate a problem; and you should move to resolve the problem.
I am not going to tell you that quantum mechanics is weird, bizarre, confusing, or alien. QM is counterintuitive, but that is a problem with your intuitions, not a problem with quantum mechanics. Quantum mechanics has been around for billions of years before the Sun coalesced from interstellar hydrogen. Quantum mechanics was here before you were, and if you have a problem with that, you are the one who needs to change. QM sure won’t. There are no surprising facts, only models that are surprised by facts; and if a model is surprised by the facts, it is no credit to that model.
It is always best to think of reality as perfectly normal. Since the beginning, not one unusual thing has ever happened.
The goal is to become completely at home in a quantum universe. Like a native. Because, in fact, that is where you live.
In the coming sequence on quantum mechanics, I am going to consistently speak as if quantum mechanics is perfectly normal; and when human intuitions depart from quantum mechanics, I am going to make fun of the intuitions for being weird and unusual. This may seem odd, but the point is to swing your mind around to a native quantum point of view.

(From "Quantum Explanations,” the first post of the Quantum Physics Sequence)

This kind of thing is great and makes me smile and it is what Yudkowsky is good at, and I wish he’d kept doing more stuff like this

He’s always been arrogant and has always had some ideas I disagreed with, but I get this sense that there was some sort of definite decline associated with what I guess you could call “the HPMoR turn” (he became overconfident in his ability to conquer previously untried domains like fanfic writing through sheer “rationality” alone, thus became less curious about other untried domains and more wrapped up in his image as a guy who’s automatically good at everything without even studying it, etc.)

#big yud

1st Jul 201445 notes

waltzingwithmonsters-deactivate asked: i have no idea if you got my response to the fanmail but i'm pleasantly surprised that EY continues to be multifaceted and competent

Yeah, if it weren’t for his good points I would be much less fascinated with him

I seriously do recommend reading the Quantum Physics sequence – it definitely helped clear up some things that had confused me after taking an actual quantum class in college.

(I’m not sure how comprehensible it would be if you have never studied any QM – it does a good job of trying not to depend on prior knowledge, but I’m not sure it’s possible to reduce that dependence to zero)

1st Jul 20142 notes

To follow up on the previous post, and to probably repeat what I’ve said in many earlier posts: in my experience, 99% of real intellectual work is “prior construction.” It’s about learning enough info to be able to come up with the right theories or tests, and having the creativity to imagine them when no one else ever has.

This is why I dislike Bayesianism as a life philosophy, entirely apart from all my abstract quibbling about whether Dutch Book arguments really work or whatever. Being better than the other person at responding to new information is not usually what makes the difference in intellectual advances. "Rationality,“ in the "Bayesian updating plus awareness of biases” sense, is not the most important intellectual skill and is not magic that will let you conquer the world. The most brilliant, intellectually accomplished people I’ve known have been pretty bad “rationalists.”

#big yud

26th Jun 20144 notes

slamjamnesiac asked: Yudkowsky is such a surreal person, he's like an artificial life form created to show what the logical conclusion of the Dunning-Kruger effect is.

He definitely is surreal. I wouldn’t say he’s exactly “the logical conclusion of the Dunning-Kruger effect” as he does seem to be good at some things — I agree with a large portion of his more abstract philosophical writing and think it’s less turgidly written that its equivalents in the academic literature, for instance.

So I wouldn’t say he’s a extreme case of Dunning-Kruger (i.e. “so bad he can’t tell he’s bad and thinks he’s really good instead”) so much as an extreme case of someone isolating himself from the broader intellectual community so that he thinks his own pretty-good ideas and insights are groundbreaking and unique. His thought about epistemology and quantum physics and so forth are pretty good, but he seems unaware of, or indifferent to, the fact that a lot of academics have had similar thoughts, and seems intent on declaring that he’s uniquely qualified to examine these and other issues because he’s more committed to “rationality,” which ignores other intellectual virtues like expertise.

Where he gets closest to Dunning-Kruger is I think when he gets into things that are very intricate, not easily reduced to simple abstractions, and for which a lot of expertise and creativity (as opposed to just “rationality” or lack of bias) is needed. Fiction writing is one example; he’s totally uninterested in engaging with the vast tradition of people talking about what makes fiction appeal to people, and ends up writing bizarre, terrible contributions to that tradition along with fiction that is basically unequivocally awful unless it happens to hit your personal narrative or intellectual fetishes, and he doesn’t seem to realize that there might be more to “being a good writer” than doing these things. Likewise, his approaches to human questions like politics, economics, and urban planning seem to draw on this idea that he’s uniquely qualified to have opinions because of how rational/unbiased he is, even if he lacks the relevant expertise.

Again, I think all of this would be easily fixed if he spent more time in academia, or really in any broad intellectual community, and found out that “rationality” wasn’t everything — by say encountering people who are far smarter than he is in the “expertise” or “creativity” or “thinking speed” senses but are still patently and obviously irrational, and who can still intellectually outproduce and out-argue him. (This is an experience I have personally had numerous times, as someone who myself has, I think, a kind of Yudkowsky-esque set of abilities — good at seeing questions from a fairly unbiased point of view, but bad at some of the other intellectual virtues that are necessary for doing good work, even in science.)

26th Jun 20148 notes

From the Center For Applied Rationality’s “Our Team” page – good to see they’re putting the most important credentials first

16th Jun 201411 notes

odradek51 asked: Plato believed in a society ruled by The Smart People Who Understood Math, had a disdain for democracy, a tendency to use mystery cult tactics, and made continued assurances that was he was doing was the most important thing in the world. I do not see how you could see any resemblance between him and Yudkowsky whatsoever.

Ha, good one!

When I talk about not liking Plato’s Republic though, I’m not just talking about the proposals Plato makes, I’m also talking about the arguments for those proposals. There are a lot of really, really bad arguments in that book.

I’m not necessarily claiming that puts it below Yudkowsky’s writing, which contains some pretty bad arguments too, but at least my initial forays into Less Wrong didn’t give off that same infuriating sense of “you must take these Important Texts seriously even though we can’t explain why they don’t suck” that I’d gotten from academia.

9th Jun 20145 notes

jollityfarm asked: I just caught up with the LessWrong mock thread on SA and your posts are popular there now! They just found your blog and agree with your mouth words.

Oh, cool! Thanks for letting me know.

(I knew that I had been linked there since I kept seeing people come in from there on Statcounter, but I still can’t read the thread so I didn’t know whether their reaction was positive)

(Being linked by SA has, so far, been much more pleasant than the times I was linked on 4chan and reddit, not that that’s saying much)

7th Jun 20143 notes

paradoxicalechoes:

I’ve seen people claiming/complaining that everyone on less wrong is a Libertarian but if they actually bothered to look at the statistics, they’d see that 35.5% are liberals, 30.7% are socialists and 26.7% are libertarians (also for completeness sake there is 0.7% communists and 3.9% conservatives). Whatever less wrong’s flaws it’s hardly inundated with libertarians.

I think this is important to note, but it’s also important to note that many of the core figures in Less Wrong (e.g. Yudkowsky and Hanson) are libertarians, and when the site talks about economics it is usually from a broadly libertarian tradition.

There would be at least a grain of truth in describing it as a “libertarian blog” even if it is not a blog with mostly libertarian readers. This isn’t a paradox – those are two very distinct things.

(via bpd-dylan-hall-deactivated20190)

#big yud

7th Jun 201413 notes