I thought this part was unusually self-aware:
>sometimes I worry that rationalists are too interested in thinking about the world by introspection or weird analogies relative to learning many facts about different aspects of the world; I think book reviews would maybe be a healthier way to direct energy towards intellectual development.
But I guess unusual self-awareness isn't really something to sneer at
I'd argue that the whole "this will have outsize benefits for you, the reviewer, and for the LessWrong community" section is a bit unusual, and a trifle sneerworthy.
yeah, may have oversneered a bit. come to think of it, limiting it to "book reviews" sets a decent limit on the range of stuff they might get as well for this pilot, so the editorial job won't be as tough for them vs a wide open call for contributions.
Perform an epistemic review of the book–which, if any, of its claims
seem correct? Book reviews that involve a degree of
fact-checking/epistemic spot checking will be considered favorably.
That they feel they have to remind reviewers to check for factual
accuracy is pretty great. The set-your-teeth-on-edge needless jargon
they use to do so is a bonus.
I'm not entirely sure it is a good idea to give Neoreaction A Basilisk to a lesswrong rationalist.
The most likely outcome is that it will make them look up online who this mencius moldbug dude is to find out whether the book actually represented his views in an accurate and charitable manner.
this is definitely the most ~~unintentionally(?)~~ hilarious post i've ever read on lesswrong, and that's quite a high bar
edit: ok, reading the comments, this is instead the most self-aware post i've ever read on lesswrong. kudos to the author.
I mean why don't you? It'd be a good way to expose LWers to that sort of stuff and you might get a payday out of it. I think a lot of them would be interested, too, especially if you write it in the right sort of style.
If I didn't have so many excuses (sorry but I have a lot of excuses), I'd do it with a book on feminism.
Remembering the time they asked for an advertisement
for cryonics and got zero
submissions. I’d considered putting in some zero-effort
potato-quality submission, and if I’d bothered I’d have won by default.
Of course, the prize was bitcoins.
The really big money will come later for the meta-meta…meta reviews
that will distil all relevant knowledge into a single sentence and save
future rationalists gigayears of reading time
Ow certainly, and it isn't different from any other publisher with any sort of bias. E: the perhaps paying for old book reviews is a bit odd, but if it gets some people some bonus cash, thats fine I'd say.
I've been seriously tempted to write a review of the quantum-mechanics stuff in the sequences. EY clearly intends to argue that the scientific community is broken and his brand of Rationalism(TM) is superior, but what he's actually done is take all the weaknesses that physicists have when discussing quantum foundations and present them in a more concentrated form. There's the accepting whatever mathematical formulation you learn first as the ultimate truth, the reliance upon oversimplified labels and third-hand accounts rather than studying what the pioneers themselves wrote, the general unwillingness to get out of the armchair and go even so far as the library...
Of course, they'd *never* pay me for that.
Interestingly enough, this sort of complaint but in a more meta way, has already been written by Scott, the [yes we have noticed the skulls](https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/04/07/yes-we-have-noticed-the-skulls/) post.
Which also kinda shows why your efforts would be mostly in vain. They know these failure modes and don't do anything with it.
Not that this should stop you if you are really interested and think you could at least help get some people out of the ~~hero~~ brainleader worshipping cult (And it also just can be rewarding for yourself to put some of that on paper if that is something you value doing).
> There's the accepting whatever mathematical formulation you learn first as the ultimate truth
The most rational mode is to pick something, never check if it's true, and let it determine how you think and act until something else happens by.
I thought I recalled seeing something like that, but on further investigation, I was probably remembering [this StackExchange thread](https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/23785/what-errors-would-one-learn-from-eliezer-yudkowskys-introduction-to-quantum-phy) instead. I'm not having any luck digging up the plover.net page you mention; do you happen to recall anything else about it?
you undersell that StackExchange thread in that it's ScottAa in 2012 talking about Yudkowsky
but yes, that Peter Stevens answer is I think what I was thinking of. "In the absence of an easy experimental verification I think it's reasonable to assume that the theory of optics as taught by every university physics course is probably right, and Eliezer is not."
Oh man, it's been years since I looked at Yudkowsky's "[If Many Worlds Had Come First](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/WqGCaRhib42dhKWRL/if-many-worlds-had-come-first)", where a fake version of Everett trades places with a fake version of Bohr.
> Macroscopic decoherence, a.k.a. many-worlds, was first proposed in a 1957 paper by Hugh Everett III.
No, decoherence was introduced by Zeh in 1970.
> Crushed, Everett left academic physics, invented the general use of Lagrange multipliers in optimization problems, and became a multimillionaire.
The whole point of Lagrange multipliers was always "optimization problems" (minimizing or maximizing a functional in the calculus of variations is optimization); this should be "operations research" or "management science".
> It wasn't until 1970, when Bryce DeWitt (who coined the term "many-worlds") wrote an article for *Physics Today,* that the general field was first informed of Everett's ideas.
Define "general field". Everett's paper was discussed at the Chapel Hill conference in 1957, where Feynman came down pretty harsh on it. And in 1959, Everett met with more people than just Bohr when he visited Copenhagen. In 1962, Everett presented his interpretation at a conference at the Xavier University of Cincinnati, with prominent physicists like Wigner in attendance. And of course, all this is in addition to the fact that Everett's '57 paper was published in the *Reviews of Modern Physics,* one of the most prominent journals of the physics profession. Why didn't more people care until the '70s? (shrug) It answered no specific question about a concrete physics problem, and [quite possibly Everett himself lacked the temperament to advocate for it](https://arxiv.org/abs/1103.4163). My own impression of that paper was that it had enough places where it just assumed the math works out that it needed at least one more round of revision (to be clear about the problems, if not to solve them, since nobody has done that yet). But I too am judging it with the benefit of hindsight.
> And suppose that no one had proposed collapse theories until 1957.
[Bohr did not propose a collapse theory](https://www.sunclipse.org/?p=2973).
Now, I actually stumbled across "If Many Worlds Had Come First" tonight while looking for something else, [Yudkowsky's "explanation" of Bell's theorem](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/AnHJX42C6r6deohTG/bell-s-theorem-no-epr-reality). It's a muddle of percentages that make my eyes glaze over, and quantum information theory is *my job.* Why he does it that way, I have no idea. [Bell's original argument from 1964](https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysicsPhysiqueFizika.1.195) is actually *easier* to follow, and Yudkowsky name-drops the [GHZ state](https://doi.org/10.1119/1.16503), so he seems to be *aware* of more recent developments that made the point even simpler. Perhaps he wanted to make the mathematics "elementary", but by not using (Mermin's improvement of) the GHZ argument, he brings in needless trig functions and introduces a whole heap of angles that look completely arbitrary. It's a mess.
> What does Bell's Theorem plus its experimental verification tell us, exactly?
> My favorite phrasing is one I encountered in D. M. Appleby: "Quantum mechanics is inconsistent with the classical assumption that a measurement tells us about a property previously possessed by the system."
OK. Let's dig in. [That paper](https://arxiv.org/abs/quant-ph/0308114) isn't about Bell's theorem; it's about the *Bell-Kochen-Specker theorem,* another result in the same area also proved by Bell (and independently by the team of Kochen and Specker). It has a similar upshot, but its assumptions are more abstract and harder to justify physically.
But it gets better. In [his very next paper](https://arxiv.org/abs/quant-ph/0402015), Appleby writes,
> If I am asked to accept Bohr as the authoritative voice of final truth, then I cannot assent. But if his writings are approached in a more flexible spirit, as a source of insights which are not the less seminal for being obscure, they suggest some interesting questions. I do not know if this line of thought will be fruitful. But I feel it is worth pursuing.
Not quite the message that Yudkowsky would want to convey. But it was there for him to read, written in 2004, years before LessWrong even existed.
I'll admit, I probably wouldn't have noticed that or gone on at length about it, were it not for the fact that [Appleby is a collaborator of mine](https://arxiv.org/abs/1612.03234).
may not have been plover.net, I just went grovelling through the Internet Archive and can't see it
now trying to remember who the hell wrote the page I'm thinking of
[deleted]
pay a Rationalist to read a book? you’re tempting us here
That they feel they have to remind reviewers to check for factual accuracy is pretty great. The set-your-teeth-on-edge needless jargon they use to do so is a bonus.
It’s not rational to work on spec.
I’m tempted to send in a book review of some socialist book and see what happens lmao
easy 500 bucks 👀
Remembering the time they asked for an advertisement for cryonics and got zero submissions. I’d considered putting in some zero-effort potato-quality submission, and if I’d bothered I’d have won by default. Of course, the prize was bitcoins.
500 quid is not nearly enough for reading any kind of book they would actually like.
The really big money will come later for the meta-meta…meta reviews that will distil all relevant knowledge into a single sentence and save future rationalists gigayears of reading time
Finally somebody offers us to review the sequences and the other Rationalists books.
E: but yeah paying people who write content for you isnt that bad, even if this has a bit of a ‘we will only pay if we like it’ factor/problem.
Paying better than SSC/ACX 000-00-50 contest rates, considering most of those entries aren’t “winning” but still supplied content to the blog.