Well, then again, that could also have changed

cs.auckland.ac.nz/~andwhay/postlist.html

That is what I had to work with

EY is not an active top-level poster anymore

wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Sequences

That is much nicer

@Vitaly Haha, really?

Did he ever get the book out?

@MrHen — yeah, people started posting top-level posts, lukeprog is a noticeable example; EY's in the process of writing the book

The amount of reading is a bit discouraging.

It is probably like reading all of EL&U of the past year.

@Cerberus Yeah.

It was one of the things that knocked me off of the site

@Vitaly lesswrong.com/lw/kz/fake_optimization_criteria

Somewhere around there is where I burned out

Now that I see that list of sequences again, I think I once started reading it, but got distracted or something.

My biggest complaint is that the amount of information per post is too chaotic

You can hit a patch of 4 or 5 that don't say anything interesting

and then 1 post that takes some real thought

and then 3 heavy posts in a row

or whatever

that's not a property of the posts

that's a property of you

@Vitaly Bullshit.

You are telling me that every single EY post has the same level of information?

for someone whose map is a blank slate? yes

Perhaps it would be a good idea to make abstracts of the various articles.

@Vitaly I honestly don't understand your point.

I mean, I get the blank slate thing

But I don't see how you think each post has the same level of information

I wish some of those posts were a bit more self contained...

Do you think that every post by any author has the same level of information?

@MrHen — You already have enough prerequisite knowledge so that some inferential distances are shorter for you. When an inferential distance is short, you'd naturally think that the amount of information is small.

@Cerberus Some of them are. The earliest stuff is pretty good.

Hmm...

@Vitaly Right, sure. That comes into play but that isn't what I was really trying to say

I don't think each of the original EY posts has the same amount of information. I mean, literally speaking it obviously isn't true.

@Kit You didn't show up for your party so we're drinking all the beer and frolicking in the cake. Cheers :)

Oh, and I wish they didn't use obscure terminology so much—only when a short explanation was impossible. This is a general tendency that I see in philosophy all the time.

@aedia Partay!?

@Cerberus Well, some of that is probably necessary.

The intent is to rebuild things

Obscure terminology has less baggage

@Cerberus Looks like that's what you guys have been doing without me, anyway :P

@Vitaly Actually, we could be talking past each other here. Don't forget I was working from the EY post list built from OB

That includes stuff like this: lesswrong.com/lw/kc/congratulations_to_paris_hilton

@MrHen …What? Wow.

Consider "Bayesian". That probably isn't an obscure term at all: I just keep forgetting what it means, because I learnt what it was under different labels. But my labels would be like "subjective probability" or something: a good label is descriptive.

Right. What you think of as "The Sequences" may just be different than what I have in my head

ok in that case I am wrong, if you include posts like that

@Vitaly To be clear: It wasn't meant as a slam against EY

Or the sequences

I must get back to fixing my Drupal installation, though. Have one on me while I'm out...

@aedia Nope, discussion != party!

@Vitaly The other issue was that the tree/forking nature of the sequences was a little difficult to transfer into a sequential list.

Consider a random post I click on: lesswrong.com/r/discussion/lw/6fr/…

@MrHen — I agree with that.

I have no idea what ems is, and I am reluctant to look it up if the poster didn't take the trouble of explaining it in one sentence.

@Cerberus But chat is always a party with you here.

Good writing is clear writing.

@Cerberus — That's in the Discussion area.

@aedia Hey, you flatter me, sweetcheeks!

@Vitaly What is admittedly partly my own fault...

@Cerberus I couldn't agree more.

(Hey! We agreed on something! Cool!)

;)

@Cerberus Tee hee :)

Ooh, it's dinnertime! Have fun with your incomprehensible whateverness you're discussing, guys...

@MrHen Err, I mean, some people consider clear writing that way, but they are wrong, because it is probably not the case. Hence it will be clear that bad writing can be clear writing as long as it isn't good.

@aedia Yay food! Happy eating...

I am getting all those years confused; have you been around long enough for HP:MoR, @MrHen?

@aedia — Have a good meal.

"HP:MoR"... now you're doing it on purpose!

@Cerberus — If MrHen recognizes the abbreviation, he has clearly been around long enough. :P

Heh.

Devious shibboleths...

@Cerberus — But just for you.

Wadda?

I have never read any Harry Potter...

@Vitaly No.

Ha, published Feb 28 2010

@Cerberus — Eliezer Yudkowsky's attempt to cover the core material of the Sequences in the form of Harry Potter fan-fiction, intended for a wide and inexperienced audience, I believe. I wanted to inquire MrHen about his opinion as to how well EY's doing that.

So, right after I left.

Ahh ok.

Okay, I just read the first article of the first "major" sequence.

It's just Popper e.a.

@Cerberus I have no idea what that means.

Popper is a philosopher.

@Vitaly Eh? Yeah, that rings no bells

@Cerberus No, I know that. I was referring to the chat I linked

@MrHen — Well, just a curiosity since you have brought up the relative inaccessibility of the Sequences.

@MrHen Then I achieved my purpose! I was writing in an unclear way and disagreeing with you in some unknown way at the same tie.

Hi

Hi!

Hi.

@Vitaly Ah.

lesswrong.com/r/discussion/lw/6h4/…

Well, there.

I'll go jump back in, pending responses to that

And I'll go and read through your post history. :P

@Vitaly Not much exciting

Ugh. Why does this guy call the desire to believe something a belief? A desire isn't a belief...

lesswrong.com/lw/i4/belief_in_belief

@Cerberus — Excerpt please? I don't remember the whole article by heart.

> Depending on how your childhood went, you may remember a time period when you first began to doubt Santa Claus's existence, but you still believed that you were supposed to believe in Santa Claus, so you tried to deny the doubts. As Daniel Dennett observes, where it is difficult to believe a thing, it is often much easier to believe that you ought to believe it.

> What does it mean to believe that the Ultimate Cosmic Sky is both perfectly blue and perfectly green? The statement is confusing; it's not even clear what it would mean to believe it - what exactly would be believed, if you believed. You can much more easily believe that it is proper, that it is good and virtuous and beneficial, to believe that the Ultimate Cosmic Sky is both perfectly blue and perfectly green. Dennett calls this "belief in belief".

@Cerberus "Desire" may be your word, here.

It is my word; I do not understand why Dennet would call this thing a belief rather than a desire.

Ah

Heh, here is how I finally processed that article: lesswrong.com/lw/i4/belief_in_belief/1h44

well I interpret that as, “belief_1 that it's virtuous to hold belief_2”

Then A.) I find "belief" for 1 a misleading term, because 1 and 2 are rather different things, and B.) 1's property of being a belief is trivial: you could say that you have a subconscious belief about anything and everything that goes on in your mind.

@Cerberus "Belief" is like a description of action. If I believe that the stove is hot, I will not touch it.

If I claim that I believe the stove is hot and then go and touch it, I obviously don't really believe the stove is hot

The question is then: Why do I think that I believe the stove is hot?

The article attempts to show that the answer to this question is, "Because of belief in belief"

In this usage, "belief" is not something that is simply self-identified

Just saying, "I believe the stove is hot" doesn't necessarily make it correct that you believe the stove is hot

Yeah, but I find the word "belief" confusing. I think Occam's Razor would cut it off: why not just say you have the desire to act as if you believed the stove was hot, to some degree?

@Cerberus Because "desire" isn't more accurate than "belief"

Why use "desire"?

But I think it is!

Why not "belief"?

Would "desire" work in the stove/hot example?

Could I say, "I desire to believe the stove is hot" and then walk over and touch the stove?

…

Suppose I had prayed to God to make the stove cool and hence want to believe that it is so.

wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Belief

@Vitaly ? (Step in if I am wrong, here.)

@MrHen — Idk, I am just seeing that as disputing definitions, maybe I am wrong because I'm rather sleepy

Oh, wait, my example is the opposite.

@Vitaly Agreed.

@Cerberus So, if you prayed to God to cool the stove?

And then believed the stove was cool and walked over to touch it?

@Vitaly Still agreed, after the edits.

No: I want to believe that it is cool, and I tell other people that it is cool; and yet I won't touch it, because, somewhere deep inside, I believe it is still hot.

@Cerberus Ah, okay

That is cognitive dissonance; but Dennet's terminology seems to imply some sort of meta-belief that I don't think is appropriate. Or perhaps I just find it unclear. I don't know.

Why do you want to believe that it's cool? Isn't it because it's virtuous to believe that it's cool? And if it is, don't you believe that it's virtuous to believe that it's cool?

Because I want God to exist and be able to answer my prayers.

@Vitaly Again, yes, but that use of "belief" is trivial, confusing.

@Vitaly I don't think virtue matters here.

(I could be wrong.)

It is the desire to believe that it is cool that matters.

@Cerberus Okay, I think I see your point

In the stove/cool example, I desire to believe in a cool stove

Suppose the extremely simple situation where I believe the world exists. I also believe that I believe that. I also believe that I believe that I believe... that is pretty useless.

But can I actually convince myself that I believe that I believe the stove is cool?

As in, I walk around and profess that the stove is cool

If someone asks me I proclaim that the stove is cool

@MrHen I actually don't think that is the best way to say it: you want the stove to be cool, because you want God to exist, which would be incompatible with its being hot.

@Cerberus > For one thing, if you believe in belief, you cannot admit to yourself that you only believe in belief, because it is virtuous to believe, not to believe in belief, and so if you only believe in belief, instead of believing, you are not virtuous. Nobody will admit to themselves,

> "I don't believe the Ultimate Cosmic Sky is blue and green, but I believe I ought to believe it" - not unless they are unusually capable of acknowledging their own lack of virtue. People don't believe in belief in belief, they just believe in belief.

@Cerberus Ah, okay. So, can it back up the belief chain one more step?

But that again revolves around “virtue.”

@Vitaly "Virtue" is a motive for "belief in belief" but I don't think it is the only possible motive

Guilt would be a common one

can “desire” be a motive?

(Which is attached to virtue, but not in the sense the article was using it.)

@Vitaly Not really. I see "desire" as an effect, not a cause.

(At least, at the level we are talking about here.)

yeah good point

For one thing, I find the use of "belief" for something subconscious misleading when combined with conscious belief in the same sentence, suggesting that they are similar.

@Robusto Voted. Thanks.

That is a WTF question if I ever saw one.

@Cerberus Sure, "misleading" but I also think that was the entire point

?

@Cerberus The issue that is being addressed is when someone professes belief in something but doesn't actually act like they believe in it

I know what he's asking, but yes, it's off-topic and it's not really answerable.

I suppose it doesn't matter so much for the rest of the argument. But I still don't like this "belief" one bit.

@MrHen Exactly.

"Want to believe" doesn't cut it, in my opinion

Something else is happening