The Nonlinear Library LW - The 101 Space You Will Always Have With You by Screwtape
Nov 29, 2023
08:24
Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: The 101 Space You Will Always Have With You, published by Screwtape on November 29, 2023 on LessWrong.
Any community which ever adds new people will need to either routinely teach the new and (to established members) blindingly obvious information to those who genuinely haven't heard it before, or accept that over time community members will only know the simplest basics by accident of osmosis or selection bias. There isn't another way out of that. You don't get to stop doing it. If you have a vibrant and popular group full of people really interested in the subject of the group, and you run it for ten years straight, you will still sometimes run across people who have only fuzzy and incorrect ideas about the subject dauntless you are making an active effort to make Something Which Is Not That happen.
Or in other words; I have run into people at Effective Altruism meetups who were aghast at the idea of putting a dollar price on a human life, people at LessWrong meetups who did not know what Bayes Theorem was, and people at Magic: The Gathering meetups who thought the old lands tapped for two mana.
(Because, you see, new lands don't have a "T: Add [Mana Symbol] to your mana pool" ability, maybe the cards that do say that do something extra when you tap them?) Laughter and incredulity can come across as insulting and push people away. Instead, consider how to make sure the information you care about transmitting is regularly conveyed.
It can happen to you!
I.
As I understand it, the standard Jewish Synagogue service includes a reading from the Five Books Of Moses such that at the end of a year the books have been read in their entirety. Anyone attending every week for a year will have at least heard all of those words once, and if someone has been around for a couple of years it's a reasonable assumption that if they missed a week here or a week there, they'd have heard it the next year. You can't go to synagogue for years and accidentally not know about the slavery in Egypt.
I'm not Jewish, so my synagogue knowledge is mostly second hand. I was raised Christian, and while my family branch of Protestantism doesn't have such an organized sequence as the Five Books Of Moses I can confirm that it would have been practically impossible to somehow attend three months of church services and not have been told Jesus loved you. If you skipped a week, that's fine, it came up in other sermons too.
If you zoned out at that bit, the first thing I remember being told about writing sermons was to repeat things about three times at different points in the speech. If you showed up with earplugs in, it was written in the program and sometimes in bright colours on the walls.
I have on occasion been tempted to put that kind of redundant and overlapping effort into making people aware of such rationalist lessons such as "Zero And One Are Not Probabilities" or "Your Enemies Are Not Innately Evil."
Linear education systems play by an entirely different set of rules. A standard American student will go through first grade, second grade, third grade, and so on up to the end of high school. Many will then go to university, and the university can assume that new students already know how to write essays and do algebra.
(Though they can't safely assume this is true of every student! There was a college professor at my dinner table growing up, and overheard complaints about how college freshmen were unable to do things such as, without loss of generality, reliably remember the difference between "their" or "there" in a written essay.)
Society as a whole does not get to make this assumption. The overt purpose of the entire education edifice is to deal with the fact that civilization has a constant influx of people who don't know how the government works, how written language works, or how we wound...
Any community which ever adds new people will need to either routinely teach the new and (to established members) blindingly obvious information to those who genuinely haven't heard it before, or accept that over time community members will only know the simplest basics by accident of osmosis or selection bias. There isn't another way out of that. You don't get to stop doing it. If you have a vibrant and popular group full of people really interested in the subject of the group, and you run it for ten years straight, you will still sometimes run across people who have only fuzzy and incorrect ideas about the subject dauntless you are making an active effort to make Something Which Is Not That happen.
Or in other words; I have run into people at Effective Altruism meetups who were aghast at the idea of putting a dollar price on a human life, people at LessWrong meetups who did not know what Bayes Theorem was, and people at Magic: The Gathering meetups who thought the old lands tapped for two mana.
(Because, you see, new lands don't have a "T: Add [Mana Symbol] to your mana pool" ability, maybe the cards that do say that do something extra when you tap them?) Laughter and incredulity can come across as insulting and push people away. Instead, consider how to make sure the information you care about transmitting is regularly conveyed.
It can happen to you!
I.
As I understand it, the standard Jewish Synagogue service includes a reading from the Five Books Of Moses such that at the end of a year the books have been read in their entirety. Anyone attending every week for a year will have at least heard all of those words once, and if someone has been around for a couple of years it's a reasonable assumption that if they missed a week here or a week there, they'd have heard it the next year. You can't go to synagogue for years and accidentally not know about the slavery in Egypt.
I'm not Jewish, so my synagogue knowledge is mostly second hand. I was raised Christian, and while my family branch of Protestantism doesn't have such an organized sequence as the Five Books Of Moses I can confirm that it would have been practically impossible to somehow attend three months of church services and not have been told Jesus loved you. If you skipped a week, that's fine, it came up in other sermons too.
If you zoned out at that bit, the first thing I remember being told about writing sermons was to repeat things about three times at different points in the speech. If you showed up with earplugs in, it was written in the program and sometimes in bright colours on the walls.
I have on occasion been tempted to put that kind of redundant and overlapping effort into making people aware of such rationalist lessons such as "Zero And One Are Not Probabilities" or "Your Enemies Are Not Innately Evil."
Linear education systems play by an entirely different set of rules. A standard American student will go through first grade, second grade, third grade, and so on up to the end of high school. Many will then go to university, and the university can assume that new students already know how to write essays and do algebra.
(Though they can't safely assume this is true of every student! There was a college professor at my dinner table growing up, and overheard complaints about how college freshmen were unable to do things such as, without loss of generality, reliably remember the difference between "their" or "there" in a written essay.)
Society as a whole does not get to make this assumption. The overt purpose of the entire education edifice is to deal with the fact that civilization has a constant influx of people who don't know how the government works, how written language works, or how we wound...