drossbucket

These are responses to other people’s posts. They’re all a bit short for an individual post but a bit long/tangential/self-absorbed for a reply, so I batched them together here.

1. Easy Mode/Hard Mode inversions

I spend a lot of time being kind of confused and nitpicky about the rationalist community, but there’s one thing they do well that I really really value, which is having a clear understanding of the distinction between doing the thing and doing the things you need to do to look like you’re doing the thing.

Yudkowsky was always clear on this (I’m thinking about the bit on cutting the enemy), and people in the community get it.

I appreciate a lot this having done a PhD. In academia a lot of people seem to have spent so long chasing after the things you need to do to look like you’re doing the thing that they’ve forgotten how to do the thing, or even sometimes that there’s a thing there to do. In parts, the cargo cults have taken over completely.

Zvi Mowshowitz gives doing the thing and doing the things you need to do to look like you’re doing the thing the less unwieldy names of Hard Mode and Easy Mode (at least, I think that’s the key component of what he’s pointing at).

It got me thinking about cases where Easy Mode and Hard Mode could invert completely. In academia, Easy Mode involves keeping up with the state of the art in a rapidly moving narrow subfield, enough to get out a decent number of papers on a popular topic in highly ranked journals during your two year postdoc. You need to make sure you’re in a good position to switch to the new trendy subfield if this one appears to run out of steam, though, because you need to make sure you get that next two year postdoc on the other side of the world, so that …

… wait a minute. Something’s gone wrong here. That sounds really hard!

Hard Mode is pretty ill-defined right now, but I’m not convinced that it necessarily has to be any harder than Easy Mode. I have a really shitty plan and it’s still not obviously worse than the Easy Mode plan.

If there was a risk of a horrible, life-ruining failure in Hard Mode, I’d understand, but there isn’t. The floor, for a STEM PhD student with basic programming skills in a developed economy, is that you get a boring but reasonably paid middle class job and think about what you’re interested in in your spare time. I’m walking along this floor right now and it’s really not bad here. It’s also exactly the same floor you end up on if you fail out of Easy Mode, except you have a few extra years to get acquainted with it.

If there is a genuine inversion here, then probably it’s unstable to perturbations. I’m happy to join in with the kicking.

---

2. ~The Great Conversation~

Sarah Constantin had the following to say in a recent post:

… John’s motivation for disagreeing with my post was that he didn’t think I should be devaluing the intellectual side of the “rationality community”. My post divided projects into into community-building (mostly things like socializing and mutual aid) versus outward-facing (business, research, activism, etc.); John thought I was neglecting the importance of a community of people who support and take an interest in intellectual inquiry.

I agreed with him on that point — intellectual activity is important to me — but doubted that we had any intellectual community worth preserving. I was skeptical that rationalist-led intellectual projects were making much progress, so I thought the reasonable thing to do was to start fresh.

😮

‘Doubted that we had any intellectual community worth preserving’ is strong stuff! Apparently today is Say Nice Things About The Rationalists Day for me, because I really wanted to argue with it a bit.

I may be completely missing the point on what the ‘rationality community’ is supposed to be in this argument. I’m only arguing for the public-facing, internet community here, because that’s all I really know about. I have no idea about the in-person Berkeley one. Even if I have missed the point, though, I think the following makes sense anyway.

Most subcultures and communities of practice have a bunch of questions people get really exercised about and like to debate. I often internally think of this as ~The Great Conversation~, with satiric tumblr punctuation to indicate it’s not actually always all that great.

I’ve only been in this part of the internet for a few years. Before that I lurked on science blogs (which have some overlap). On science blogs ~The Great Conversation~ includes the replication crisis, alternatives to the current academic publishing system, endless identical complaints about the postdoc system (see part 1 of this post), and ranting about pseudoscience and dodgy alternative therapies.

Sometimes ~The Great Conversation~ involves the big names in the field, but most of the time it’s basically whoever turns up. People who enjoy writing, people who enjoy the sound of their own voice, people with weird new ideas they’re excited about, people on a moral quest to fix things, grumpy postdocs with an axe to grind, bored people, depressed people, lonely people, the usual people on the internet.

If you go to the department common room instead, the academics probably aren’t talking about the things on the science blogs. They’re talking about their current research, or the weird gossip from that other research group, or what the university administration has gone and done this time, or how shit the new coffee machine is. ~The Great Conversation~ is mostly happening elsewhere.

This means that the weirdos on the internet have a surprisingly large amount of control over the big structural questions in the field. This often extends to having control over what those questions are in the first place.

The rationalist community seems to be trying to have ~The Great Conversation~ for as much of human intellectual enquiry as it can manage (or at least as much as it takes seriously). People discuss the replication crisis, but they also discuss theories of cognition, and moral philosophy, and polarisation in politics, and the future of work, and whether Bayesian methods explain absolutely everything in the world or just some things.

The results are pretty mixed, but is there any reasonably sized group out there doing noticeably better, out on the public internet where anyone can join the conversation? If there is I’d love to know about it.

This is a pretty influential position, as lots of interesting people with wide-ranging interests are likely to find it and get sucked in, even if they’re mostly there to argue at the start. Scott Aaronson is one good example. He’s been talking about these funny Singularity people for years, but over time he’s got more and more involved in the community itself.

The rationalist community is some sort of a beacon for something, and to me that ought to count for ‘an intellectual community worth preserving’.

---

3. The new New Criticism

I saw this on nostalgebraist’s tumblr:

More importantly, the author approaches the game like an art critic in perhaps the best possible sense of that phrase (and with M:TG, there are a lot of bad senses). He treats card design as an art form unto itself (which it clearly is!), and talks about it like a poetic form, with various approaches to creativity within constraints, a historical trajectory with several periods, later work exhibiting a self-consciousness about that history (in Time Spiral, and very differently in Magic 2010), etc.

That is, he’s taking a relatively formal, “internal,” New Criticism-like approach, rather than a historicist approach (relate the work to contemporary extra-artistic phenomena) or an esoteric/Freudian/high-Theory-like approach (take a few elements of the work, link them to some complex of big ideas, uncover an iceberg of ostensibly hidden structure). I don’t think the former approach is strictly better than the latter, but it’s always refreshing because so much existing games criticism takes the latter two approaches.

I know absolutely nothing about M:TG beyond what the acronym stands for, but reading this I realised I’m also really craving sources of this sort of criticism. I recently read Steve Yegge’s giant review of the endgame of Borderlands, a first person shooter that I would personally hate and immediately forgot the name of. Despite this I was completely transfixed by the review, temporarily fascinated by tiny details of gun design, enjoying the detailed explorations of exactly what made the mechanics of the game work so well. This is exactly what I’m looking for! I’d rather have it for fiction or music than games, but I’ll take what I can get.

I kind of imprinted on the New Critics as my ideal of what criticism should be, and although I can see the limitations now (snotty obsession with narrow Western canon, tone deaf to wider societal influences) I still really enjoy the ‘internal’ style. But it’s much easier now to find situated criticism, that wants to relate a piece of art to, say, Marxism or the current political climate. And even easier to find lists of all the ways that that piece of art is problematic and you’re problematic for liking it.

Cynically I’d say that this is because the internal style is harder to do. Works of art are good or bad for vivid and specific internal reasons that require a lot of sensitivity to pinpoint, whereas they’re generally problematic for the same handful of reasons that everything else is problematic. But probably it’s mostly just that the internal style is out of fashion. I’d really enjoy a new New Criticism without the snotty high culture focus.