Oops on Commodity Prices

Curated, as well as the original Monopoly post [LW(p) · GW(p)].

In addition to my comments on the Monopoly post (i.e. great use of forming models, hashing out their weak points, and updating), I appreciated this post for diving into some of the details of how Sarah's internal "thinking" process works, and why it's important to sometimes be able to spell out a model without trying to moderate your tone.

+1 for noting mistake and for noting the importance of being bold, and asking questions and sharing models even when you're uncertain.

Your use of the Epistemic status tag - which I think /u/gwern pioneered? - seems good for balancing the value of sharing models while preventing polluting the "idea space" with potentially misleading/untrue things.

This is exactly the kind of learning and flexibility that we're trying to get better at here. There's not much to say but congratulations, but it's still worth saying.

Big ups for admitting your mistake! You're the writer of Otium, right? I love your blog, especially its more opinion-slanted stuff (like the aesthetics-is-morality post).

You know, I've been reading a book called Crucial Conversations over the past few weeks, and it discusses the concept of "making space" so that difficult conversations can be had.

I wonder if the same principle can be applied to epistemic conversations, to make it really feel like you're just thinking out loud and trying to piece things together? In my experience, when people start throwing facts and figures together, it's easy for listeners to slip into a state of "This Is The Truth" and not "This Is Complex Thinking". Helping to keep readers in the second state when they read rationalist speculation, I think, would be a very valuable skill to build.

+100. Thanks for this post, it's something I've been thinking about a lot in the past 6 months.

“A shy person cannot learn, an impatient person cannot teach”

The translation you linked actually gives "A person prone to being ashamed cannot learn," which is even more on the nose. Does anyone have any advice on how to deal with this issue? I have a pretty severe case of it, especially because I tend to take a lot (a lot) longer than other people to do pretty much every kind of work I've ever tried, independently of how much intelligence I needed to apply to it. Aside from seeking medical advice for that problem (which hasn't helped much) the obvious thing to do was try to exploit my comparative advantage in intelligence, so at least I'd be focusing on the most valuable kind of work I was capable of. Trouble is, when you do smart-people stuff, you soon find yourself surrounded by, and often in competition with, other smart people, and being too slow to keep up looks an awful lot like being too dumb or lazy (except that people get confused to the extent that they notice I'm not actually dumb or lazy). It's hard enough trying to get over the fear of "learning in public" without having to explain that, due to an ill-defined, poorly understood disability that seems to afflict hardly anyone but me, I'm going to continue being surprisingly unproductive no matter how how patient anyone who tries to teach me is willing to be.

I actually tried, for several years, to be less outspoken and convey less confidence in my written voice.  My impression is that the attempt didn’t work for me, and caused me some emotional and intellectual damage in the meanwhile.  I think verbally; if I try to verbalize less, I think less.

That's interesting. Lately I've been noticing a lot how most people on the internet write in a manner that conveys much more self-confidence than I feel when I write, even when they write about things they probably shouldn't feel so confident about. I think my writing style noticeably conveys my lack self-confidence, but that might just be the illusion of transparency getting the better of me. Anyway, I've also noticed over the years that my internal monologue mostly consists of me talking out of my ass quite boldly about topics of which I am ignorant. I don't seem to have any difficulty squelching that voice when it comes time to share my thoughts with others, for better or worse.