If people could largely develop beautiful theories in isolation, human history wouldn't look like it does. We're mostly not that smart individually. We need to talk and work together. You're not Alexander Grothendieck and neither am I. Neither am I Wei Dai for that matter.
On the other hand, human history has had no shortage of people talking, and most of it didn't result in theoretical progress. Were they talking about non-intellectual things? Were their gains not captured? Are gains mostly made in isolation by great people, regardless of priorities and capture? I am reminded of myself:
Well, last night I skimmed a dozen papers trying to identify the function of serotonin. Nothing came of it. I wrote a tweet and deleted it. I didn't post the papers. I probably won't summarize it here on my blog. And now I'm a little burned out on serotonin literature. Everything is like this. It's amazing, but sometimes progress is limited by the "compare notes" phase and not the "solitary bold conceptual departure" phase.People should make bold conceptual departures alone, then compare notes/synthesize. Collaborating on bold conceptual departures rarely works— Preinfarction (@preinfarction) October 22, 2016
Have you noticed that people who post thousands of tweets a year have thousands of followers? It makes me wonder if a constant stream of my thoughts would be a good way to spread ideas. But I mostly don't follow those people. People who tweet with high volume don't tweet with depth. They might be capable of depth, but they stop demonstrating it when they start to care about large audiences.
On the other side of the coin, I heard about cool ideas like the Gödelian diagonalization view of trolling from Will N. like six years ago, and his smart friends talk about it and understand it, but no one has ever written it up. Deep people don't write at all, or they write a few things and let the bulk of their ideas live and die in private chats.
Why should formal, high-quality, algorithmically precise philosophy on topics like voting theory not happen on public blogs outside of academia? Why can't we post and talk to each other and make progress?
You're all cute on twitter and I like hearing about what you're having for supper and what you saw on the train and which works of art you enjoy and how dating is going and how you're making a skating rink for you son.
Sometimes I like being cute too. But existential risk reduction through formal philosophy sits in my heart where religion sits for other people, and it's not cute, but it's what I want to talk about a lot of the time.
But Wei Dai told us to think before we speak and signal it. And look how well he writes. So here am: not really wanting to be cute, too burned out to think on my own, and not talking through hard thoughts with friends, just like almost every human has done throughout our glacial 300,000 year history.
Think before you speak and signal it. It sounds good. It doesn't work. Not for me. Nothing else works either, but I'm going to try something else anyway. I'm going to think as I speak, because otherwise I get stuck on the thinking and never get to the speaking. That's no way to make progress.
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