Criticisms of LessWrong

I'll stick cached thoughts into an essay for now, just to keep it from gumming up our conversation page? if that's ok.

Certainly, an essay would be great - I look forward to reading it.

I can definitely understand your reaction to LW's style and attitudes - the community can be pretty abrasive to outsiders. (I've been there for ~2 years, so I don't notice it anymore.)

I feel as though I should add some disclaimers of my own: I'm just under 20 with little experience in philosophy and cognitive science other than reading it in my free time. I largely agree with you and Nebby about the sorry state of human irrationality and about rationalization, but I subscribe to the LessWrong position that some of these biases can be avoided.

Cached thoughts would just be a matter of priming. Unless you have some other problem with the idea.

That's what I figured, too, but if Godot has some evidence to suggest otherwise, I'd like to hear it.

Yeah, yeah yeah... ;-)

I tried to write this, but crashed (again). When you look at what Cached thought are, in the guy's descriptions, it's quite different from priming, unless you bend over really far with your definitions.

What I talk about in the essay I've lost (2ce) is that the statistical side of our brains, or the sense of "what that is likely to mean" or priming is a way the mind tosses out ideas. Cached thoughts, at least in the LW essay is an idea that there is one path which is associated linearly with one choice and one solution. Look at the example - remove bricks first, and the chimney falls. No one does that. No one thinks like that. No one ever hears one path and says like an automaton, "i shall inact X, cause it's what I was told to do". Brains simply don't function that way. We may be far more likely to do a particular path, especially when fed by our brains connections it's formed after living for as long as anyone's lived.

Priming is similar to the example I use often about pyramids. when you hear a word in isolation, you will respond with the most likely image that word relates to, along with flashes of other possibilities. But that's not a cashed thought - especially when you think of caching the way this guy does, as a computer person. "I have a prior copy that I will use to fill in the blank", not "I have some ideas, a host of possibilities, and a shit load of experiences that I will bring to the table when thinking about anything". Making connections "If you say pyramid, I also think of deserts, of the bible, of the sphinx, of heiroglyphs, etc. But those thoughts do not also prevent me from thinking about Woo, or South America, or failed math classes. That's to me, the central difference.

Again, maybe it's more about how he's writing, but I find his entire premise to be pushing to a solution that isn't set up by the argument. I know, quite talking about what I'm writing, and just fucking write it. ;-)

Fair enough. The law of "It's more complicated than that" always applies, but I think it's a useful simplification of the idea and thought experiment without having to give people a dissertation on neural networks.

everything is always that: "more complicated". Again, much of my reaction is likely the tenor of the article. "so stop reacting and start really thinking". HUH????

I think it's a good article. If you make a simplified map of memories, a "cached thought" would essentially be a chunk with either just one connective association, or with many associations but where one (or a few) associations have a huge amount of weight comparatively, i.e. stereotyped associations. It's consistent with Mednick's ideas on creativity -- if you want to read something good on that, there's Margaret Boden's The Creative Mind.