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One blind spot rationalists have is that charismatic people treat the game as:

"Can I think of an association that will make the other person feel good and/or further my goal?". You need people to feel good, or they won't participate. And if you want some complicated/favour/uncomftortble_truth then you better mix in some good feels to balance it out.

Books like "How to Win Friends and Influence People" recommend talking about the other person's interests (including themselves) and listening to them, which people enjoy.

So I'd say, don't just free associate. Make sure it's fun for both parties, make room to listen to the other person, and to let them steer. (And ideally your conversational partner reciprocates, but that is not guaranteed).

The linked article has a bunch of examples in the section "A bunch of examples". None of those have any probabilities attached to it. The post does not list "your confidence" in the section "Valuable information to list in an epistemic status". 

Let me expand the quote I gave from before to add context

"The epistemic status is a short disclaimer at the top of a post that explains how confident the author is in the contents of the post, how much reputation the author is willing to stake on it, what sorts of tests the thesis has passed.

It should give a reader a sense of how seriously they should take the post."

I think that’s a surprisingly good explanation. Commenters might be able to add to it, in which case I’ll add an elaboration.

It's a "surprisingly good explanation", but does not including everything. The author did not mention attaching confidence in the epistemic status again because it was already covered, and they were merely adding points that were not covered by the definition (their "elaboration" as they put it). 

You are right that none of the examples attach probabilites to the claims, but that does not mean attaching probabilities is incompatible with a good epistemic status. As far as I know that is not a controversial position, but if I am wrong about that then I will keep that in mind next time when explaining it to others. My intuition was that explicitly mentioning the probability attached to your beliefs is a good methodological tenet of reasoning transparency [EA · GW], and is also a  practice of superforcasters. Mentioning the probability also helps maintain a culture of embracing uncertainty. 

Some of them do have words that are about confidence but even a status like "Pretty confident. But also, enthusiasm on the verge of partisanship" is more than just the author sharing their confidence. That was the first in the list. 

The second is: "I have worked for 1 year in a junior role at a large consulting company. Most security experts have much more knowledge regarding the culture and what matters in information security. My experiences are based on a sample size of five projects, each with different clients. It is therefore quite plausible that consulting in information security is very different from what I experienced. Feedback from a handful of other consultants supports my views."

This statement makes it transparent to the reader, why the author believes what they believe. It's up for the reader to come up with how confident they are in what they author is saying based on that statement. That's similar to how the information in about the partisanship that was communicate in the first case is about transparency so that the reader can make better decision instead of just trusting the author.

You're right. An epistemic status should and usually does include information relevant to helping the reader judge for themselves whether the person's reasons are credible, but 10/12 of the examples from that post mention their level of confidence and uncertainty in the claims they make, including the two examples you just gave.  Language like "quite plausible that consulting in information security is very different from what I experienced." is an explicit mention of the level of confidence.

I agree that we should include everything you mention, but disagree that we should leave out mentioning confidence, or that it is not important. I want the person I am reading to be calibrated with the relevant probabilities. In other words, if they believe something is 25% likely, it should happen 25% of the time. If this is not the case then something is wrong with their models of the world. 

The act of sharing the information with the reader is an act of respecting the agency of the reader. In debates like https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/u9a8RFtsxXwKaxWAa/why-i-quit-effective-altruism-and-why-timothy-telleen-lawton [LW · GW] respecting the epistemic agency of other people is a big deal. 

Again, nothing wrong with sharing information. I agree with almost everything you write here. 

I like this model a lot, definitely my favourite post from your sequence so far^[1].

So the fundamental question we need to answer is: how do I unhook? But “you” don’t unhook. Local awareness unhooks from the “you” that plans to unhook. One of the reasons we have not been able to unhook easily is because the “I” can’t do it. —Shift into Freedom by Loch Kelly (2015)

This prompted interesting effects. I tried to indirectly unhook using the same mental motion I developed in lucid dreaming to load concepts indirectly into my background context, which in that setting causes newly procedurally generated dreamscape to be seeded with that concept. It's something like holding the intention/broadcasting to the system as a whole what you'd like to be there, without the normal motion of sending it as a command or discrete information packet. Kinda holding the information and letting other parts see it, rather than sending it to them. Also highly related to the mental motions I use for influencing various autonomic systems. This I think just worked and produced an altered state which let me see some of the situations I've been in from useful perspectives, and maybe lead to untangling a long-standing interpersonal challenge.

1. ^{^}

   The others cover maybe more important ideas, but less novel as I'd re-derived the core model of consciousness as this form of self modelling after reading the sequences and GEB in like 2012. The trance and DID bits added some detail, but this one feels like a strong clarification of some things I've come across in an ontology I'm happy with.

Linguistic Drift, Neuralese, and Steganography

In this section you use these terms implying there's a body of research underneath these terms. I'm very interested in understanding this behaviour but I wasn't aware it was being measured. Is anyone currently working on models of linguistic drift/measuring it with manuscripts you could link?

Er, friendship involves lots of things beyond conversation. People to support you when you're down, people to give you other perspectives on your personal life, people to do fun activities with, people to go on adventures and vacations with, people to celebrate successes in your life with, and many more. 

Good conversation is a lubricant for facilitating all of those other things, for making friends and sustaining friends and staying in touch and finding out opportunities for more friendship-things.

Good question. Some differences off the top of my head:

• On this forum, if people don't have anything interesting to say, the default is to not say anything, and that's totally fine. So the content has a much stronger bias toward being novel and substantive and not just people talking about their favorite parts of Game of Thrones or rehashing ancient discussions (though there is still a fair bit of that) or whatever.
• On this forum, most discussions open with a relatively-long post or shortform laying out some ideas which at least the author is very interested in. The realtime version would be more like a memo session or a lecture followed by discussion.
• The intellectual caliber of people on this forum (or at least active discussants) is considerably higher than e.g. people at Berkeley EA events, let alone normie events. Last event I went to with plausibly-higher-caliber-people overall was probably the ILLIAD conference.
• In-person conversations have a tendency to slide toward the lowest denominator, as people chime in about whatever parts they (think they) understand, thereby biasing toward things more people (think they) understand. On LW, karma still pushes in that direction, but threading allows space for two people to go back-and-forth on topics the audience doesn't really grock.

Not sure to what extent those account for the difference in experience.

'In essence, it is viewed as a form of adhamma (not-Dhamma) or misconduct to teach someone who is uninterested or unreceptive, since doing so does not respect the individual's disposition and may lead to misunderstanding or conflict rather than enlightenment.' (commentary on Akkosa Sutta (SN 7.2))

I've now posted my entries on LessWrong:

• part 1: wisdom, amortised optimisation, and AI [LW · GW]
• part 2: growth and amortised optimisation [LW · GW]
• part 3: AI effects on amortised optimisation [LW · GW]

I'd also like to really thank the judges for their feedback. It's a great luxury to be able to read many pages of thoughtful, probing questions about your work. I made several revisions & additions (and also split the entire thing into parts) in response to feedback, which I think improved the finished sequence a lot, and wish I had had the time to engage even more with the feedback.

Nice consideration, we hadn't considered non-natural asteroids here. I agree this is a consideration as humanity reaches for the stars, or the rest of the solar system.

If you've thought about it a bit more, do you have a sense of your probability over the next 100 years?

I don't understand either. If it is meant what it meant, this is a very biased perception and not very rational (truth seeking or causality seeking). There should be better education systems to fix that.