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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   5894 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for January 22, 2023

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.

Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.

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If someone wanted to discuss the inns and outs of basic high-school algebra here I imagine they wouldn't get a great deal of buy-in. There are certain topics (usually around formal logic, math and computer science) that the Motte is drastically overrepresented in demographically. You can probably discuss a lot of very low-level things on a number of different issues that aren't well-known and get more interest.

Essentially quality posts on non-contentious trivial topics are going to be ignored by the community, the same posts on contentious trivial ones (trivial in the sense the majority of people believe they have an answer, largely culture war issues) will be feted, and quality posts on non-contentious topics that the community doesn't understand but has explained to them will likely be considered a standard for a quality contribution.

The world's best explanation on logical equivalencies and truth tables would be almost entirely ignored here, for example. It's a useful topic to understand but the number of people here who don't grok basic formal logic is probably very small.

Essentially quality posts on non-contentious trivial topics are going to be ignored by the community, the same posts on contentious trivial ones (trivial in the sense the majority of people believe they have an answer, largely culture war issues) will be feted

But that hasn't been my experience. The contentious trivial topics I've tried to talk about gather a lot of feedback, they are not ignored at all: they are lambasted.

The world's best explanation on logical equivalencies and truth tables would be almost entirely ignored here, for example. It's a useful topic to understand but the number of people here who don't grok basic formal logic is probably very small.

Yes, but this presumes that there is a formal logic, when in fact there's many formal logics. One user might say question X is trivial, but that's only in classical first-order logic, in other logics it might not be so trivial. See for example this entry in Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy: Classical Logic, I would say it's anything but simple. And of course it has an entire section explaining this isn't the "one right logic", there's many critics and alternatives:

However, as noted, the main meta-theoretic properties of classical, first-order logic lead to expressive limitations of the formal languages and model-theoretic semantics. Key notions, like finitude, countability, minimal closure, natural number, and the like cannot be expressed.

I think it's clearly a fallacy to think that X is trivial because under a particular view (classical first-order logic) it is trivial. Just because something appears trivial doesn't mean that it is.

But that hasn't been my experience. The contentious trivial topics I've tried to talk about gather a lot of feedback, they are not ignored at all: they are lambasted.

Out of curiosity, what are your explanations (I presume you've thought about more than one) for the reception you tend to get in your posts?

I'm sure you've heard the idea that the LessWrong movement is a cult. I'm not going to claim that because I don't know enough about it yet, but it does have a certain feeling of that. I see a lot of self-referencing: many terms are used only within the movement, and many articles refer to other articles within, which in turn refer to other articles. Too many inside jokes.

So for an article to gain top-shelf status it seems it has to use so many inside terms--and preferably inside terms that in turn require inside terms to understand--that only people on the inside could get, not the "normies".

So a "normie" article would just not cut it, regardless of useful the insight, especially if the insight is accesible by anyone (the plebs). I guess elitist is the word.

There's also an element of converse error fallacy (I've seen that a lot): "this seems trivial to me (and I'm rather intelligent), therefore it has to be trivial". But simple does not necessarily mean trivial.

I want to write a whole article about this, but take for example Karl Popper's falsifiability principle: it's exceedingly simple and yet it's anything but inconsequential. I'm pretty sure if the principle hadn't already been laid out, it would have been dismissed in this forum because "it's trivial".

So for an article to gain top-shelf status it seems it has to use so many inside terms--and preferably inside terms that in turn require inside terms to understand--that only people on the inside could get, not the "normies".

So a "normie" article would just not cut it, regardless of useful the insight, especially if the insight is accesible by anyone (the plebs). I guess elitist is the word.

Can this be simply the case that what you're encountering is the intersection between novelty and community preferences?

For example:

  • blog post that satisfies the community's preferences and offers novel insights = much liked.

  • blog post that satisfies the community's preferences but offers no novel insights = mostly ignored.

  • blog post that does not satsify the community's preferences but offers novel insights = sometimes ignored, some times disliked.

  • blog post that does not satisfy the community's preferences and does not offer novel insights = disliked.

Let's take your idea about Karl Popper's falsifiability principle:

  • if you post a description about it on LW, I would imagine it would mostly be ignored. It does not seem to satisfy LW preferences nor is it novel.

  • if you post a description about it on themotte, I would imagine it would be read, but would garner few replies/upvotes. It falls into themotte preferences, but is not novel.

  • if you post an interesting, novel take about it on LW, I would imagine it would mostly be ignored, although you have a chance to hook someone interested in this type of stuff.

  • if you post an interesting, novel take about it on themotte, I would imagine you might get many replies and many upvotes.

  • blog post that does not satisfy the community's preferences and does not offer novel insights = disliked.

There's a difference between not offering novel insight, and not offering novel insight according to the person downvoting.

That's my whole contention.

Let's take your idea about Karl Popper's falsifiability principle:

I said "if the principle hadn't already been laid out", that means it would be novel today. If it were novel today, plenty of people would think that it wasn't novel. People make the assumption that simple concepts cannot be novel, because somebody intelligent surely must have already thought about it. Right?

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