Lore Sjöberg's Life-Hacking FAQK

post by PlaidX · 2009-10-20T16:10:38.877Z · LW · GW · Legacy · 16 comments

Contents

16 comments

Lore Sjöberg's Life-hacking FAQK

Pretty self-explanatory. Also available as a podcast.

16 comments

Comments sorted by top scores.

comment by Nick_Novitski · 2009-10-20T17:20:37.467Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

First: Haha, voted up for humor.

But if I can be dour for a moment: presume we live in a universe where it's not self-explanatory. What is the cautionary tale we can extract from this? That time spent thinking about optimizing happiness isn't time spent experiencing it?

comment by Johnicholas · 2009-10-20T19:29:57.573Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

Voted down for brevity and lack of content. I believe the community aesthetic is that we strive for multi-paragraph top-level posts, rather than single links or slashdot-style paragraphs.

Replies from: Cyan, Alicorn
comment by Cyan · 2009-10-20T19:40:54.231Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

That wasn't the original idea.

Replies from: Johnicholas, Vladimir_Nesov
comment by Johnicholas · 2009-10-20T21:12:33.739Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

I have no objection to two categories - top-level posts which are candidates for being promoted, and those that might be amusing if you're bored.

However, I'd prefer that the latter not win karma.

Replies from: Vladimir_Nesov
comment by Vladimir_Nesov · 2009-10-20T21:18:25.155Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

How zero-sum of you.

comment by Vladimir_Nesov · 2009-10-20T20:08:55.267Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

No, but that's not an argument: top-level planning sometimes gets things horribly wrong.

Replies from: Cyan, thomblake, Douglas_Knight
comment by Cyan · 2009-10-20T20:33:23.339Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

You're right -- it's not an argument. It's a historical observation. If there is an implied conclusion in there, my intent was that it be something like, "It's a little unfair to vote something down on aesthetic grounds when the original (and still AFAIK most explicit and authoritative) statement on the community aesthetic allowed such posts".

Replies from: Vladimir_Nesov
comment by Vladimir_Nesov · 2009-10-20T20:42:02.649Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

Okay, this reveals my misconception of your comment, but here again I disagree for pretty much the same reason and with the same reply: aesthetic judgment is very important (as in: it's an aspect of preference, and beware trivial inconveniences). It's only something to discard if opinions differ so wildly as to make the negotiations worse than dropping the matter.

Replies from: Cyan, Douglas_Knight
comment by Cyan · 2009-10-20T20:48:28.195Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

My comment was addressed only to what the community aesthetic is (was?), and not what it ought to be. I deliberately phrased the comment in the past tense to allow for a response like "well, maybe we should change that standard".

Replies from: Vladimir_Nesov, Vladimir_Nesov
comment by Vladimir_Nesov · 2009-10-20T20:57:00.260Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

The comment you linked to talks exactly about what the community behavior should be, one person's opinion, or an observation about a different community's aesthetics.

comment by Vladimir_Nesov · 2009-10-20T20:52:03.099Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

I don't see how a post written by a single author that didn't reflect the actual practice or survey of opinion can serve that purpose.

comment by Douglas_Knight · 2009-10-21T06:49:56.461Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

It's only something to discard if opinions differ so wildly as to make the negotiations worse than dropping the matter.

But Johnicholas didn't negotiate, but instead made claims about a consensus aesthetic. Cyan contradicted this false statement.

comment by thomblake · 2009-10-20T20:20:31.315Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

No, but that's not an argument

I disagree. It had a premise and an implied conclusion - it was clearly an argument.

If you meant that it's not a good argument, you did not provide a very good argument for why that would be the case. I could just as well argue that you should not eat bananas, since bananas sometimes contain poison and explosives.

How often does top-level planning get things horribly wrong, and how do the alternatives fare?

Replies from: Vladimir_Nesov
comment by Vladimir_Nesov · 2009-10-20T20:39:05.322Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

Hm, I wrote that under an assumption that everyone already knew the fact stated in the comment, since it was repeated a number of times before, so the comment could only be an appeal to availability of whatever weight the bare fact of there being a post like that has.

Incidentally, formalism has a way of losing track of the original intent, which is at odds with the intent of signaling ability to handle rigor.

comment by Douglas_Knight · 2009-10-21T06:44:50.360Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

It's not an argument about ought, but it is an argument about is. Johnicholas did not merely make a claim about his preferences, but asserted their universality. It's fine for him to try to change the aesthetic, but I think he should be shot down if he tries to change it by making false claims.

comment by Alicorn · 2009-10-20T19:41:30.117Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

Oh my! Somebody save us from the brevity! From the about page: "We suggest submitting links with a short description."