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I can't really see where this line of inquiry is going, so I'm not the right person to comment, but the list seems to be missing at least one thing:
- Ask people to do you a favor
Oddly that makes people like you more, even though there is nothing obvious traded in return. I got that from either Dale Carnegie or Robert Cialdini.
I think it'd be good to flag April Fools posts when it's not April 1 anymore, no?
Not that I don't appreciate the intellectual challenge of figuring out that it's a joke, I'm just concerned about non-LWers misinterpreting it.
Hmm. About 50% of my note pile can be browsed on https://edstrom.dev/. I have some notes on the method under https://edstrom.dev/zvjjm/slipbox-workflow.
How large did your note pile get before it felt overwhelming?
It's true that sometimes I see things I wrote that are clearly outdated or mistaken, but that's sort of fun because I see that I leveled up!
It's also embarrassing to have published mistakes online, so I've learned to make fewer unqualified claims and instead just document the path by which I arrived to my current conclusion. Such documentations are essentially timeless, as johnswentworth explains at How To Write Quickly While Maintaining Epistemic Rigor.
Still, I'm keeping more and more notes private over time, because of my increasing quality standards. But ignoring the matter of private/public, then I don't perceive updating as a problem yet, no. I don't mind having very outdated notes lying around, especially if they're private anyway. When I rediscover them, they will be effortless to update.
I can understand that, since you keep the handwritings as they are.
Just sharing my own process, but I like the notepad because it's ephemeral... I scribble what I learn, almost illegibly, and later type it up more nicely in my org-roam knowledge base, driven by sheer motivation to liberate myself from that stack of loose scribblings.
That way I get the upside of writing on paper (you learn better), but skip the downside that they're hard to look up.
There is much bikeshedding about eyestrain. I've seen convincing arguments, especially from older hackers, that a white background is actually less strainful for the eyes. I forgot what the arguments were---will write them down next time---but I don't think it's as simple as the amount of light hitting the eye. Currently I'd advise just trusting in personal experience.
And maybe experiment with increasing ambient light rather than reduce light from the screen.
One problem with the Kindle Scribe is that I couldn’t switch from the note-taking application to the book I was reading very quickly. It would take about 5 to 10 seconds in total to press all the menu buttons
Ah, yes! With the reMarkable (another e-reader), I have a trick: I installed an app switcher so I could merely use a gesture to switch between a writing app and reading app.
I quite appreciated having a single slate to read and write on, in environments like the bus and the beach. Anyway, the software was somewhat buggy... and then I lost my stylus pen and then the replacement stylus pen. So now I just use a paper notepad, which I find works nicely.
I have a question. Would a paper notepad have worked for you instead of a second device? What's better with the device?
Just a thought: I experience discomfort with only being able to sign up via a Google account. I can get over it personally, but we should observe I'm probably not the only one, so there are people out there for whom this is an insurmountable hump that stops them from getting started. I dunno how many in actuality, but there are definitely bubbles where it's normal not to have used a Google service for years.
Alas, I dunno what alternative sign-up would be quickest and easiest to implement.
What is the goal? Why do you need to do more than what has already been sufficient to create high-trust societies?
I'm no historian, but I cannot fit your exiling/killing theory to any recent society I know of.
I know the most about Sweden, so I'll discuss that society. Thinking about Sweden made several things obvious:
- First, an alternative mechanism with similar effect as exiling/killing: simply making the next generation better, and watching the stats improve over time.
- It's not just a question of good norms or correct education, as if these could develop in any direction independent of the government and system in general. Sweden underwent a transformation over many decades of social democracy (1930-1980), and it seems widely accepted now that crime rates went way down because society provided for every last member. Crime is habit-forming, and if no one ever needs to get into the habit, then you get your high-trust society. In fact, I'll add the hypothesis that you don't even need high education nor attempt to directly influence culture.
The toaster link, archived https://web.archive.org/web/20171206051409/http://www.bankrate.com/financing/banking/whatever-happened-to-the-free-toaster/
Even when you build alone. Let's say you'll redo the tapestry in one room, with four nice regular walls, but in one corner there's an ornamental stone pillar. Then you can spend one day doing the four walls, and three days just getting the details right near the pillar.
Regularities save time. Each irregularity is a massive delay.
Although every building is "novel" even today, they're not "improvements on an existing building". It's a new site every time with a new blueprint. So your novelty point should apply, yet skyscrapers build slower now.
I do think the Burj Khalifa is also an outlier, and not representative of typical building speed, at least in the West.
I disagree with this definitively. I can’t read most if not almost all LW posts.
That’s interesting. I find it relaxing to read most LW posts/comments, which tempts me to call them good writers. Perhaps it’s not that they write “well” but that they think similar to me?
Because I know, it’s something that can hold me back, thinking “ohhh it’s so obvious what I’m going to say, it would be pretentious to think I’m provinding any value by saying it”.
Katja Grace explains how she got over that: Typology of blog posts that don’t always add anything clear and insightful
When you study practical rhetoric, you learn to hold speeches without any written memory-aid. Instead, you use something like the method of loci to remember a sequence of concepts that you want to lay out to the audience, but you do not memorize any exact phrasings.
The first time you pull it off is almost magical, because the benefits are immense and obvious. You have full freedom to walk around, stand in front of the lectern or wherever you like, look everyone in the eyes and ascertain whether they're following along with you, and to change the speech on-the-fly.
Oddly, it's a lot less stressful this way.
You remember everything you want to say, just not how you're going to say it. You trust yourself to find suitable words when you get there. So have you "memorized the speech" or not? I think yes, in every way that matters.
I'd like to tie this into illiteracy. The privileged class in Ancient Rome were literate, of course, but several ancient Roman teachers said that it was better to compose the speech without writing any part of it.
That is, if you write a speech and then try to memorize it, it will tend to be in a shape that's more difficult to memorize!
It's better to instead generate the sequence of concepts in your head, like an illiterate person! The result tends to be more amenable to memorization.
(The Roman elites of course still wrote during some parts of the process, notably "inventio", which is not composing the final speech, merely writing lots of lists/mindmaps to explore the subject)
Nice, I note that Foam is open source and uses markdown, the same as https://logseq.com/!
I wonder if the markdown documents are compatible? I know Logseq's markdown documents are compatible with Obsidian, so some people use both. At least back in ~2021, several commenters (on another website I forgot) found Logseq nicer for quick idea-generation and Obsidian nicer for exploration.
Sleeping on benches in daytime.
I've often had the thought that controversial topics may just be unknowable: as soon as a topic becomes controversial, it's deleted from the public pool of reliable knowledge.
But yes, you could get around it by constructing a clear chain of inferences that's publicly debuggable. (Ideally a Bayesian network: just input your own priors and see what comes out.)
But that invites a new kind of adversary, because a treasure map to the truth also works in reverse: it's a treasure map to exactly what facts need to be faked, if you want to fool many smart people. I worry we'd end up back on square one.
I agree, although I sense there's some disagreement on the meaning of "learning by rote".
Learning by rote can be tactical move in a larger strategy. In introductory rhetoric, I wasn't retaining much from the lectures until I sat down to memorize the lists of tropes and figures of speech. After that, every time the lectures mentioned a trope or other, even just in passing, the whole lesson stuck better.
Rote memorization prepares an array of "hooks" for lessons to attach to.
Also Nate's Replacing Guilt sequence. I'm still reading it, but I predict it'll be the single most important sequence to me.
I think I was unfair. I concede it's possible to have legible argumentation that people won't understand in a short time, even if it's perfectly clarified in your head. But in my experiences interrogating my own beliefs, I think it's common that they are actually not clear (you just think they are) until you can explain them to someone else, so the term "illegible belief" may help some people properly debug themselves.
Regarding your question about math and the like... The point of having the concept of epistemic legibility is that we want to be able to "debug" articles we read, and the articles should accommodate us doing that. If we cannot debug them, they're not legible.
If your math is correct but poorly explained, I suppose I'd have to call it legible (as long as the explanations don't lead the reader astray). I won't want to grace it with that adjective, as I'm sure you understand, but that's more a matter of signaling.
By contrast, it's fine by me if you assume background knowledge, though keep in mind it's easy to assume too much (Explainers Shoot High, Aim Low).
So if a Rationality Quotient (RQ) became famous for only measuring skills that everyone can build regardless of where they start, rather than innate ability, it'd be less infected than the discourse around IQ?
Paraphrasing from How to Take Smart Notes by Sönke Ahrens: we easily get away with unfounded claims when we speak orally. We can distract from argumentative gaps with a "you know what I mean", even if on introspection we would find that we don't know what we mean. Writing permanent notes will make these gaps obvious.
Thank you for writing this out. Don't lose heart if the response isn't what you'd hoped--some future post could even be curated into the featured section. Why I say that? The bits about ineffective self-talk:
He notices that he made a mistake by not trusting his gut instinct earlier enough, and then decides once again that he made another mistake. This is not, actually, the only reaction one could have. One could instead react in the following way: “Oops, I guess I didn’t make a mistake after all.” These two different reactions calibrate the mind in two different directions.
For me, it's been important to change my self-talk towards compassion and acceptance, and this presents an interesting new dimension. If it helps us experience life (including our rationalist journey) as more fun, that's so important. Ties in with what Nate was saying about stoking genuine enthusiasm, in his sequence Replacing Guilt.
Finding the cruxes?
(To clarify, that's 6% RDI, not 6% by volume, which would be worrying.)
I'm confused. Are you saying 1 cup of organic peas is "half a day's intake of vegetables" for you?
It happens, but you can't exchange complex ideas this way. You know when someone's talking and you nod or say "Yeah" to show you get it without interrupting? There's a number of other short phrases you could say if you wanted, like "I know" or "Impossible" or "Dunno", and that's mostly what we deafies in Sweden do IME. It's rare that hearing people do this, breaks a norm I guess, but it's in principle you could do it. With sign you can also say a bit more complicated things without breaking flow like "That's a misunderstanding" or "You're lying" or sometimes drop in a whole sentence like "Actually no she didn't "... but at that point the conversation is getting heated and starting to break down.
I guess if you wanted to construct a fulltime full-duplex mode of conversation it would be a bit easier with hands than voices. Or to let one speaker use hands and the other use voice, so as to use different parts of the brain.
As a deaf person, I'm always teaching people to sign, like when I move into a new house, and I do see a difference between learners. Some people don't know what to do with their hands and end up "tangling their elbows together", as you so vividly describe, while others have a talent as if they'd been waiting to sign all their lives. But this gap mostly closes after 3-5 months of living together. Even people who were pretty bad at the beginning end up being able to interpret a group conversation for me.
Not to diminish the difficulty -- to do anything like interpret a group conversation, the whole group needs to put in some effort to slow down and speak only one at a time, and it's still exhausting for an interpreter who's only been learning for a few months. Not to mention the food on their plate goes cold.
I'm just saying. I don't think a lack of progress necessarily something to scare you, but then again, I don't know what it's like to learn sign without someone to sign with. Pretty sure it's usually a lot faster to become a productive conversator in any sign language than any spoken natural lang -- the only thing you really need is the hand alphabet, and then the person you're talking to can show you the signs for every new word you spell out.
I might have legible argumentation, but I don’t expect it to be understandable without a bunch careful explanation and backtracking to prerequisites
That fits great with my definition of illegibility. This case sounds like you've clarified it enough to make it legible to yourself but not yet enough to cross inferential gaps, thus it remains illegible to other people.
Not knocking your idea, but usually when you want to complain that "no one has upvoted me" it's good to think again whether you really want to blame other people.
I can guess at a reason why people may not have read that post you linked. I found it long-winded, like a page out of your diary where you're still developing the idea, thinking aloud by writing -- which is excellent to do, but it doesn't seem like something you wrote from the start for other people to read, so it's hard to follow. At least, I'm still puzzled about what you wanted to put forward in it.
I’m a pretty slow reader and I really get frustrated and distracted with not-correctly written text, so I see the subsequent editing of the text as something really threatening and time-consuming for me.
I've become a fast reader in recent years, but like you, I also get disturbed by incorrectly written text.
To me it sounds like you will get used to these issues in time. You know it's (1) your own words, (2) dictated by an imperfect program, and (3) mostly meant to be deleted. 1 would help me read faster, and 2 and 3 would help me tolerate the "writing flaws".
Reading fast is fundamentally about skipping, and being okay with skipping. I think that should be easy if you remember saying the sentence that the words on screen refer to. If you remember the sentence, you're reminded of the general concept you were getting at. Your job is after all only to figure out whether this whole sentence or section is worth keeping, and you only need to read the first few words to know that, probably.
You could also do a second dictation, to summarize what you're reading. That one'll be much shorter.
It was a perfect analogy for me. One carves up new concepts the same way one always does. A decoupler will carve up a concept differently from a contextualizer. Similar analogy: If someone's knowledge can be seen as a massive mind-map, a feminist will structure a hierarchy in that mind-map quite differently from a Mormon, even if the leaf nodes are the same in the end. When you have a hierarchy in place, more knowledge added will tend to follow that hierarchy and thus subtly influence understanding.
But I've had experiences with people who interpret things very differently from me, receiving my words and hearing the opposite meaning of my intent. Ten years ago I did not have that experience, and maybe I would not have understood the analogy then. Maybe you could introduce it with a story next time, for the benefit of the young and the shut-ins.
Exactly twelve years later--did you ever come up with an example?
To steelman it, maybe he's thinking of how it's commonly seen as a tragedy for a chicken to be alive for only one week, but killing it after some X years is not as much of a tragedy.
Initially, this implied to me that the curve of "value of remaining alive' is higher in the beginning of a lifespan. But thinking about it, that's not the same curve as the curve of "value of being alive", which is lowest in the beginning.
(If that's confusing, it helps to think of the one curve as the mirror image of the other, i.e. if value of being alive is high later, it means the value of remaining alive "in order to see the later parts of life" is higher early on.)
It's also possible to view the value of being alive as a flat line, a positive constant, which could lead to his idea of human fungibility. But to use a different example, if you make me choose between five individuals living one year and one individual living five years, I prefer the latter... Same with two people dying at 25 vs. one dying at 50. Fewer people living longer is better. I can only see this working out if it's not a flat line: value of life increases with each year already lived.
Rereading your comment, I think you're saying that legibility will arise by itself well enough so long as someone is on Simulacrum level 1, caring only about the truth, and if their writing is not legible, they probably have an agenda and you'd better focus on finding out what that is, or just ignore what they said.
But
- This feels unactionable -- it's just a rephrasing of old critical reading advice "find out the writer's agenda and biases so you know where they're coming from". Which is so vague -- even having that info, how do I debias just the right amount?? How do I avoid overcorrecting and falling prey to my own confirmation bias?
- My experience writing legibly actually flagged areas in my belief system I didn't realize was so weak -- a huge boon for myself here -- and in retrospect, if I'd published illegible writings about those topics I'd now want to take down those posts, as it's both embarrassing to me as well as a disservice to readers. This is despite me being on Simulacrum 1 (or so I think I was).
As someone who wants to do systematic review (meta-analysis with a certain rigidly prescribed structure), I will love to hear about the mistakes to watch out for!
First off, I like the compilation you made and I'm tempted to memorize it despite all I'm saying.
This 'pluralism' solution does not feel meaty -- your last sentence "Hence the value of pluralism" sounds to me like an applause light. I mean yeah, ultimately you and I build a lot of what we know on trust in the whole collective of scientists. But it's not directly relevant/useful to say so; there should be a halfway good solution for yourself as a solo rationalist, and calibrating yourself against others' beliefs is an extra measure you may apply later. Because I still prefer all those others to have used good solo toolkits for themselves: it makes them more reliable for me too.
Tentatively, for a real solution, I propose that it's better to focus on what right statistics looks like so that wrong statistics will automatically generate a feeling of puzzlement, and this way you still anyways get the ability to compare the quality of two studies.
Or you could learn each type of misuse as part of thoroughly learning the concept where they apply, with focus on better understanding that concept, not on learning about the misuse.
Now I'm glad I recently ordered the older version. (my motivation was that it can run Parabola GNU/Linux + Emacs)
You may enjoy Rationality: From AI to Zombies Summaries.
Today, dynomight made an interesting nuance in Observations about writing and commenting on the internet. It seems that just optimizing epistemic legibility may cause people to fail to listen altogether:
Technically, the complaints were wrong. How could I “fix” the problem of not citing any papers when I had already cited dozens? That’s what I thought for months, during which people continued to read the post and have the same damned reaction. Eventually, I had to confront that even if they were “wrong”, something about my post was causing them to be wrong. Viewed that way, the problem was obvious: The idea that a humidifier could be bad for you is weird and disturbing, and weird and disturbing things are usually wrong so people are skeptical and tend to find ways to dismiss them.
Should they do that?
[Insert long boring polemic on Bayesian rationality]
It’s debatable—but it’s a fact that they do it. So I rewrote the post to be “gentle”. Previously my approach was to sort of tackle the reader and scream “HUMIDIFIERS → PARTICLES! [citation] [citation] [citation] [citation]” and “PARTICLES → DEATH! [citation] [citation] [citation]”. I changed it to start by conceding that ultrasonic humidifiers don’t always make particles and it’s not certain those particular particles cause harm, et cetera, but PEER-REVIEWED RESEARCH PAPERS says these things are possible, so it’s worth thinking about.
After making those changes, no one had the same reaction anymore.
Part of me feels like this is wrong, that it’s disingenuous to tune writing to make people have the reaction you want them to have. After all, I could be wrong, in which case it’s better if my wrongness is more obvious.
At least when I make my reasoning transparent and easy to falsify, I feel like I discard other qualities of writing, because I feel that should be enough. But to get an audience, it's still important to try to sell it. Not by reverting to opaque reasoning, of course, but perhaps by demonstrating empathy with the reader, understanding of the inferential gap and... I don't know what else.
Maybe it's related to the concept in rhetoric of creating a "good audience": encouraging them to be "attentus, docilis et benevolus":
- attentus (or "attentive" -- because you cannot persuade if your audience is not paying attention)
- docilis (or "teachable" -- because you cannot persuade unless your audience can learn from you)
- benevolus (or "benevolent" -- because you cannot persuade unless you make a good impression on your audience).
What's your opinion of wet-erase boards? No accidental erasure as with dry-erase boards.
I'm concerned that getting well-versed in statistics mistakes has the same issues as doing so for biases and fallacies (Knowing about Biases Can Hurt People). When you're analyzing others' studies, you'll find that basically every study has at least one flaw of some kind. So this opens the door for unconsciously applying harsher criticism against studies you disagree with.
The reMarkable has a surprisingly paperlike writing experience, according to every review I've read.
Typo: "it's short comings" -> "its shortcomings"
What if the future generations just stop thinking about it because they made a safe enough world that they stop worrying about such things? That's not a doomsday.
On the analogy with fasting,
Even if sleep works the way you suppose, this analogy looks like apples and oranges, so I don't like it.
With fasting, you can infer that it's harmless just by knowing that (1) the average lean human has fat reserves to last three months, (2) total fasters don't go through some calamity like losing lots of muscle protein (if they did, there'd be unambiguous results everyone knew) and (3) in the EEA it was probably common to have periods of scarcity such that you go several days without finding food. In other words, fasting was about as unusual as, you know, cloudy weather. These observations are already strong enough evidence to me that I consider this topic "done" -- I will be surprised if a RCT shows it to be harmful, and I'll need a deep meditation on where I went so wrong.
With sleep, it's not so clear, because... unsourced claim here, but The Primal Blueprint among other popular books have claimed that an average "working day" in the EEA was less than ~2 hours, or at any rate shorter than a modern working day. That's a lot of free time for sleep!
That ~2 hour figure can certainly be unpacked: does idle foraging while on a walk with your friends count as "work"? But neither sleep nor work-time seem like resources to be conserved in the same unambiguous way as calories. Sleep or no, bodies need downtime after extended exertion, and they may as well take a nap then. Wakefulness or no, there may be nothing useful to do at certain hours of the day, so we may as well sleep extra. So the amount we slept may have been quite open to modulation by external influences.
This can still back up the idea that you can subtract a few hours off your sleep need with the right stimulus -- I just think that an analogy with fasting is a type error. In particular, the sub-analogy that feeling sleepy would signal something good.
Another problem with the analogy. People who fast regularly will tell you that they usually don't feel hungry. So if you like the analogy, you also shouldn't usually feel sleepy.
I'm like Alicorn, with the addition that I love disruption at random periods, because it lets me fall asleep again: pure pleasure.
On the issue of flying insects, the people who do "cowboy camping" (sleeping without a tent) have relevant experience. They recommend finding high ground far away from any lake, because still bodies of water attract bugs.
I'm sorry, I did not mean to be clever.
If they will come into existence later, they have moral weight now. If I may butcher the concept of time, they already exist in some sense, being part of the weave of spacetime. But if they will never exist, it is an error to leap to their defense -- there are no rights being denied. Does that make more sense?