We gravely apologize in the most grave form we can for this post getting eaten, and will be prioritizing the autosave feature as the very next thing we do. :/ :)

Featured on the frontpage. I really like it as an introduction to Bayes and bucket errors, though I am not fully sure whether it covers enough ground in either to serve as a solid foundation, but the combination might really create something concrete and vivid that future explanations might latch onto to then provide the more solid intellectual foundation, and that's maybe precisely what you want from an introductory post.

This is the kind of post I can imagine early on in a future featured collection that will take the place where HPMOR currently is, and that is community driven/has multiple authors (or maybe written completely by you? who knows, you've been doing a lot of great writing over the last month).

(Warning, far too long and slightly rambly comment incoming. Haven't gotten fully enough sleep tonight)

I have two levels of comments on this:

1. Pedagogical thoughts:

I really like the pedagogical presentation, but stumbled in a few places. When you asked

"Okay. Before I draw the through-line, it's worth pausing to check: did any of these spark anything in your own memory or experience? Do you have a similar story rising to the surface already? "

I don't think I was fully ready yet to understand what "similar" meant here. A variety of stories that came to mind, but the common pattern of the stories wasn't clear enough that I could determine whether the stories that came to mind fit what you were asking for. Maybe it might make sense to ask the reader to come up with a potential through-line themselves, and then ask them whether they have a story fitting to that through-line? Not sure, but I did end up stumbling a bit here.

Another thing about the Bayes explanation: I think I would be even happier if you would make some slight references to the terms that are commonly used for the relevant mental/mathematical actions when explaining Bayes in other places. I.e. you use the term "condition on" once in the explanation, but are not putting it into context with how that is the key action in a bayesian update, and how it might be used in a more technical explanation of the subject, such as Eliezer's intro to Bayes. I generally think that making small cross-references to existing content or alternative explanations has a very large positive effect, since it causes the reader to connect different mental buckets that they are currently separating.

I ended up skimming over the 5-step process on my first read, not fully sure why. I am a bit more tired than usual today, but even so, I feel that maybe a section break or something else to give the actual 5-step technique some more weight would have been good. Maybe another paragraph encouraging the reader to actually apply the process after heaving read through it.

The last thing is more of a bug in human visual processing, but we might still need a few decades to fix it, so I will leave the critique here until then. Humans seem to be really bad at comparing the size of areas, especially the areas of circles, and this causes people to both repeatedly misinterpret pie charts and to be confused by Venn diagrams. I am not really sure what to do about this, except to maybe err on the side of using square Venn diagrams and flow diagrams when possible.

2. Rationality thoughts:

I am not fully sure how much this post will actually help me get rid of bucket errors. I think the really hard question in the process is (2). Bucket errors usually aren't tagged like bucket errors, and even if I realize that I am in a situation where I might be making a bucket error, the correct resolution of the error is often very hard.

I feel that a part of the process of fixing bucket errors has to be some kind of brainstorming process about alternative explanations which might carve reality differently than you currently do, or the creation of some kind of safe space where you allow yourself to realize that your reasoning might be flawed in this situation. Internal Double Crux goes a long way here (i.e. dialoging with your internal parts instead of punishing or threatening them), but even then I feel that something more in the space of the Fermi Modeling stuff I gave some talks on might be useful.

I am a bit conflicted about this and will think more. I don't think I fully yet understand what the motion you are describing in step 5 is, and will see whether I can come to better grasp it after sleeping and thinking on it for a while.

In any case, great post!

Author's note: I was five hours' work and 5,000 words into this post last night when something in the LW2 UI blinked, and all of it vanished.

This is why you should produce offline, then upload it online. I don't know why you haven't been doing it, but perhaps you should take this opportunity to start the practice; there are several other benefits to the practice including (but probably not limited to):

1. Ability to solicit for feedback, revise and update the article, etc. It allows you to adopt an agile methodology of article writing. Maybe you are confident enough in your writing, that you feel you don't need a testing and development period.

2. Ability to develop the work over several time periods. I have around 4 mega long (estimated 10,000+ words at completion articles I've been working on for a few weeks/days, one of which I plan to publish sometime this month).

3. Ability to use professional writing tools, Microsoft Word is really great for all but the most math-heavy articles (for which I turn to LaTeX), and I have heard good things about Grammarly, plus there are probably several other tools you can use to expedite development.

4. Ability to plan your article, and use cool development approaches like the snowflake method.

I view writing online as software development without testing, and basically developing on the spot. This may work for writing short scripts, but for any commercial software development, you want to go through the entire software development life cycle.

I hope you start writing offline, and take advantage of the benefits, producing even more high quality content.

I realise that this kind of development methodology may not appeal to you if you plan to write 1 post every day. However, like Gauss I prefer quality to quantity.

This is going to feel like a bit of a detour, but I want to talk about parallel universes for a second.

I held my A button halfway pressed the entire time while reading this article.