I'm not sure I'm following your actual objection. Is your point that this algorithm is wrong and won't update towards the right probabilities even if you keep feeding it new pieces of evidence, that the explanations and numbers for these pieces of evidence don't make sense for the implied story, that you shouldn't try to do explicit probability calculations this way, or some fourth thing?

If this algorithm isn't actually equivalent to Bayes in some way, that would be really useful for someone to point out. At first glance it seems like a simpler (to me anyway) way to express how making updates works, not just on an intuitive "I guess the numbers move that direction?" way but in a way that might not get fooled by e.g. the mammogram example. 

If these explanations and numbers don't make exact sense for the implied story, that seems fine? "A train is moving from east to west at a uniform speed of 12 m/s, ten kilometers west a second train is moving west to east at a uniform speed of 15 m/s, how far will the first train have traveled when they meet?" is a fine word problem even if that's oversimplified for how trains work. 

If you don't think it's worth doing explicit probability calculations this way, even to practice and try and get better or as a way to train the habit of how the numbers should move, that seems like a different objection and one you would have with any guide to Bayes. That's not to say you shouldn't raise the objection, but that doesn't seem like an objection that someone did the math wrong!

And of course maybe I'm completely missing your point.

Yep, it's accessible. I haven't gone. 

This ties into a point I don't think I made very well in the original post, which is that doing all the work yourself and letting people feel like it's handled is tugging the ladder up at least a little bit. Imagine someone growing up in a household where their parents always cook all the meals, then they move out and abruptly realize they don't know how to fry an egg. It was always possible to watch the meal preparation, but why would they do that if they don't think ahead and realize someday they're going to have to do it themselves? 

There's a hazard in taking care of a problem too completely and too seamlessly, especially if you might someday stop. The American government is not what most people would call complete and seamless, but it has managed to let people not really pay attention to how it works most of the time.

Chief Bob's hearings are in your neighborhood, involve your neighbors, and you're expected to go and watch the proceedings because everyone else is. I'm not saying that's better overall- policy debates are not onesided.

Yeah. Zoomed way out, has human civilization made it easier or harder for hunter/gatherers to build back up to a highly technological point? It's easier in some ways (our artifacts are lying around, showing it can be done and providing a point of study) and harder in others (we probably mined all the easily mined coal, though maybe the fact that we left mineshafts with the dregs helps?)

I don't really have an actionable solution there, so I'm using the civilization wide version to point at things closer to human scale.

This is clever. Looking at readership views on a subject Scott posted about during the survey wasn't something I'd even thought about, but it feels obvious in hindsight which is an excellent sign of clever in my book. And your results are not just significant but at the "hot damn look at that chart" level. 

Thank you for thinking of this and writing it up!

Q. "Can you hold the door?" A. "Sure."

That's straightforward.

Q. "Can you play the violin at my wedding next year?" A. "Sure."

Colloquial language would imply not only am I willing and able to do this, I already know how to play the violin. Sometimes, what I want to answer is that I don't know how to play the violin, I'm willing to learn, but you should know I currently don't know.

Which I can say, it just takes more words.

I want a word that's like "capable" but clearly means the things you have the knowledge or skill to do. I'm clearly not capable of running a hundred miles an hour or catching a bullet in my bare hand. I'm not capable of bench pressing 200lbs either; that's pretty likely in the range of what I could do if I worked out and trained at it for a few years, but right this second I'm not in that kind of shape. In some senses, I'm capable of logging into someone else's LessWrong account- my fingers are physically capable of typing their password- but I don't have the knowledge of what to type.

This comes up in places where a thing is obviously possible to achieve, and wouldn't require, say, the kinds of built up physical changes to my body that lifting 200lbs would require, but I still don't expect to be able to pull it off. If I had someone experienced, who did know how to do it, sitting at my shoulder giving me advice the whole way it would be obviously possible. 

Nevertheless, acting like I'm capable of flying an airplane or resolving a messy divorce or interpreting a blood test if I had to do it right now is going to result in some problems. I'd like to be able to say I'm not able to accomplish that without a bunch of disclaimers that yes, I could learn, or I could follow someone's close directions and manage it, but that's different.

Attendee: knock knock Hey, is the organizer in there?

Me: Yeah, what's up?

Attendee: The fire department is here, and we think an attendee just left in an ambulance but we're not sure who or why.

Me: . . . I'll be right out.

And that's the most stressful thing that's ever happened to me as an event organizer.

A history of the NYC Rationalist Megameetup is in my drafts. Someday I hope to finish it, ideally around when I announce 2024's iteration.

Epistemic status: memories from five years ago where I was stressed and sleep deprived at the time.

So, the primary thing I thought the Megameetup did was have overnight space for the people who registered for overnight and space during the day for people who registered for the day. I closed registrations when I thought we had as many people as the space could hold, and made most of my calculations and planning based on the number of people who registered. (Mostly food, but I'd also been asked to check that certain people the community had had problems with weren't attending.) I knew Solstice was going on that weekend and had coordinated a little bit with the Solstice organizer, but mostly just to know the time and location so I knew when to send people over. 

During the weekend- if I remember correctly, this was in the early afternoon on Saturday, so about five hours before Solstice and while the Megameetup was in full swing- people start pointing out that with registration closed, people who just planned to go to the afterparty didn't know if they were supposed to just show up or what. I don't remember the exact conversation, but basically over the course of about fifteen minutes I realized that lots of people were assuming that the megameetup would host Solstice's afterparty, and that an unknown number of people were attending Solstice who hadn't registered at all with Megameetup but expected to go to the afterparty. 

I have five hours to prepare for an unknown number of people to converge on us, when we were already at what I thought was capacity for the venue with a little safety margin, while simultaneously trying to keep the event I knew I was planning on course. I could try and tell people not to, but lots of people including my co-organizers have been assuming obviously the afterparty is at the Megameetup and people who went to solstice can come, even if they didn't tell Megameetup they were coming, and if Megameetup isn't hosting this then someone else is probably going to have to try and plan the afterparty with a different venue and that's going to be even more complicated.

We pulled it off, in hindsight I think it was fine, I don't know if anyone who wasn't in the room with me when I found this out even realized I didn't plan on having extra people from Solstice, but I was wound tighter than a drum for the rest of the weekend and that's still the second worst thing that's happened when running a megameetup from my perspective.

The moral of the story is, leave margins when planning occupancy and capacity limits for an event, and check explicitly and clearly what the expectations are when inheriting an event someone else has run before you.

2019's Rationalist Megameetup was. . . special and stressful in many ways, actually.

Thank you! You're right, "nobody goes there, it's too crowded" is an effect that keeps the ladder unfurled, as is a kind of cohort dynamic I don't have as good a conceptual handle for^[1]. This post is mostly talking about meetups because they're on my mind a lot and I had the examples handy. Ideally, the big and the small and the old and the new can reinforce and help each other, and sometimes that works. Other times, we get the pulled up ladder. 

1. ^{^}

   at a first pass description, sometimes there's no public meetup so someone starts one, meets a bunch of new people who don't have connections, makes friends, start having their friends over for dinner or going to museums and they're too busy to run the public meetups and don't need to because they have their social needs met. Then after a year or two of no public meetups, someone new starts one, and the cycle repeats, so you have multiple groups that don't intermix as much as one might hope. 

Update: Will has informed me that they won't be able to be there. If anyone else wants to pick up Alicante or meet there in the absence of an organizer they can.

Usage of ChatGPT/Dall-E I did not think about until I had the idea to try it- in the middle of a tabletop RPG session, pulling out my phone, describing the scene in a couple of quick sentences, and then showing the phone and the resulting picture to the players without breaking my pacing.

Anyway, the current results of music AI make me suspicious the next time I play a bard I might be able to come up with new songs mid session.

If you were not previously aware of it, you might want to give this a listen. I suggest Hymn To Breaking Strain and When I Die.

I feel like it should be a Gregorian chant. C'mon, it's in Latin already!

Thank you for making me laugh today. 

More Dakka is unironically going on my energy boost playlist, and I'm tempted to try getting Litany of Tarrrrrski into a solstice. That's above and beyond though, this was fun to listen to and I'm grateful to whoever put it together.

• English is liberal and ambiguous with possessives. "My hat" is fine, "my spouse" I guess works but I'd rather not, "my country" seems wrong to me. I have all the decision making authority for the hat, I have next to none about the country. Proposal: that there are different words denoting "ownership of" and "associated with."

• "Listened to" has an interesting ambiguity in English. Consider the sentence "I listen to the people" or "Me and George don't think you're listening to us." It can mean "heard the words of." I listened to a radio talk show on how to fix a car's broken fan belt. It can mean "done what those words said." I listened to my theatre director's coaching on where to stand during the show. Proposal: Two short phrases which mean one of those two things, and no short phrases that are ambiguous. 

• "will" is supposedly supposed to be interpreted as a statement of fact, but colloquially isn't especially when it's a contraction. "I'll grab eggs from the store later tonight" is not normally read as a deep and abiding commitment to obtain eggs come hell or high water, but that's sort of what a literal reading of the sentence should mean? Proposal: That the contraction form of "will" indicate an intention or light commitment.

A bullet point from an unsorted list of complaints I have against the English language. (And I think most languages.)

• "I think" is an annoying extra three syllables, and should be stuck on the front of almost everything I saw. "[I think] we have apples at home." "[I think] we take a left turn here." This adds a lot of extra clunk to talking properly with rationalists where I want to be careful and precise in my speech. Proposal: That the normal and unmodified sentence assumes the "I think" and you instead prefix "It is a fact" or something similar when you're making a stronger claim.

The following works for me. I do not know how well it works for other people.

I separate coming up with ideas and filtering for good ideas. Many of the ideas I come up with are bad ideas. For example, I'm about to spend a few minutes by the clock coming up with plans for becoming a professional film director.

"Go to film school and ask the professors for professional contacts. Show up at a college office hour and as the professors for contacts even if I'm not a student. Make movies in my backyard with home equipment, and put them online. Reach out to film studios and ask if they have educational opportunities or internships. Hire a professional film director to tutor me. Read books and biographies about professional film directors and copy what they did. Hang around the next actor's strike and ask if anyone wants to goof off and do an amateur project that wouldn't break the strike. Make movies and then talk to local theatres and see if they want to run those movies, maybe during slow times/days. Create an online buzz around an obscure and rarely seen auteur film that The Mainstream Media doesn't want you to see. Project it onto the sky on a screen held up by drones. Make a film of a famous fanfic- hey, podfics hitch a ride on someone else's story why not a film."

Okay, time over. Some of those ideas need more detail- like, making a movie with the tools I have comes up as a first step of several plans and I'd need to work through more about how to do that. That's not necessarily a bad thing; I know just enough about film-making to know there's some different choices I'd make while filming depending on the eventual format but maybe I can save some effort with multiple cuts or something. Other ideas are ways to fish for more ideas, like reading books on the subject or asking professors what to do. 

Some are just bad ideas. Getting professional film directors to tutor me sounds expensive, and also I'm not at all sure the constraint is lack of skill at directing. Actor's strikes seem to happen about every ten years so maybe keep that in your back pocket while you work on other plans. As for projecting it onto the sky, I don't have any idea how that gets you paid enough to get called a professional plus you might get some kind of public disturbance complaint? But. . . talking to local theatres doesn't seem like a terrible idea? Putting some kind of weird spin on a movie released online might work- it at least points at different tweaks or implementations to just putting it up on Youtube. 

The point is, I didn't come up with those plans to fill a quota. I was just coming up with a bunch of ideas. If in the end there was only one good idea in the mix, then I'd use that one and ignore the others. Sometimes there's no good ideas, in which case I give my brain a mental cookie for coming up with ideas and another for not pretending that any of them were good. 

You're welcome, and thank you for the example! As you point out, whether you're constrained on time often matters for how many plans you can attempt.

I do hope you give yourself some points for noticing the first method wasn't working and switching. That's better than winding up with no data. I'd encourage thinking of this as an opportunity to get even more points.

Fair. In my head, "Curse of doom" is generic but attaches to "Pareto Best." There are many curses, here's one. I didn't manage to come up with a name for it that I loved, so I went with something that felt okay. Curse of Dimensionality is more specific but I feel like it doesn't get at the idea enough to feel useful? Alternate titles:

• Curse of Doom
• Curse of Dimensionality
• Curse of Options
• Curse of Overlap
• Pareto's Curse
• Pareto Gaps
• Gap of Good Skill
• Empty Frontiers

It does feel curse like to me but that's more poetry than precision.

Yep, as I said in the parenthetical, the model is incorrect. I'm >95% sure that some people are twice as competent as other people and wouldn't be surprised to encounter 10x gaps or higher if we're allowed to pick from outliers in both directions.

Finding an extreme polymath is a good trick if you can do it. Sometimes you can do it.

Three categories; there's things that aren't at all cursed because they only take one skillset or because their overlapping skillset is common, things that are a bit cursed where we have cases where the overlapping skillsets happened to work out but we have reason to expect there should be more, and things that are very cursed indeed. Note that, especially when looking at the difference between "Not at all cursed" and "a bit cursed" you're 

Not at all cursed: Musicals or plays about the experience of being a writer or playwright. (Tick Tick Boom, Bells are Ringing, Birds of Paradise, Cabaret, City of Angels, Merrily We Roll Along...) Software that fixes problems encountered by software engineers. (Git, Leetcode, JIRA, Stack Exchange, and that's not counting this list of IDEs.) Legal or bureaucrat collective organizations that have done their paperwork. (See this list of bar associations just for Massachusetts.)

A bit cursed: Musicals or plays about the experience of being a U.S. president. (Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson, Hamilton, arguably 1776.) Computer programs about doing your taxes. (H&R, TurboTax.) Rationalist or EA organizations that have done their paperwork (see this post and ctrl+f for "king umbrella") or to pick another example with a larger population, software engineering associations that have done their paperwork.

Very cursed: Musicals or plays about being illiterate. Computer programs about Amish farming techniques. Anarchist organizations that have done their paperwork. 

Note that a Very Cursed section I write might have some hits, mainly when it winds up being worth paying someone. It's hard to write a list of the things nobody thought to make, since obviously nobody thought to make them. Someone who had no knowledge of how the internet worked would have a hard time realizing that Google Docs or Amazon's online shopping would be options someone might try. It might be a better intuition pump to look at the gradient between Not At All Cursed and A Bit Cursed; what's the difference between lawyers and software engineers that makes it so lawyers have a dozen bar associations in MA, with their own bylaws and articles? The hypothesis I'm putting forward is that being a lawyer selects hard for being comfortable with paperwork, while being a software engineer doesn't select for that at all. 

Or to reuse one of the examples I had in the main article: A book about an unappreciated writer or English teacher is a cliche. A book about an unappreciated janitor or waste collector is not a cliche. My hypothesis is this is because being a writer selects for writing ability, while being a janitor doesn't.

Yep, the list of places that try and accommodate foibles is not exhaustive. Thanks for pointing that out!

I didn't say it was easy, I said it was easier. Being the world's best mathematician/musician is much easier than being the world's best mathematician. If you haven't yet, check out the prerequisite. 

I think it takes a lot less than ten thousand hours to reach competence at most skills, though this might be down to our definitions of competence? That's eight hours a day for three or four years, and it usually makes me think of Gladwell's 10,000 Rule from Outliers which is about achieving expertise. 

I think riding a bike took me a weekend to learn so maybe ten to twenty hours, learning to play first person shooter videogames took me a weekend or two so about twenty to thirty hours, I picked up massage over a semester or two of class so about eighty hours of class time? I'm not saying I mastered those subjects that fast. I do think I learned enough to make use of them; you likely only need to practice riding a bike for a weekend or two before you can use it to get around town faster than walking.

If you have ten thousand hours of practice as a guitarist, your next fifty hours could go into being better at playing guitar. They could go into being better at audio recording, or setting up a great website for your band, or into being a better teacher for people who don't know guitar yet. If you're an amazing biology researcher with thousands of hours in bio, a week or two of intense study on how to write really good grant applications is probably more useful to you than an additional week or two of intense study in biology. My understanding is mathematicians who also know a little computer programming have options even in math that you don't have if you're a pure mathematician.

Yep, that's a mistake and should be fixed now. I'm not quite sure what I did that resulted in that mistake but it was probably something typo-like.

Right: If you ignore 2022, then the drop isn't as sudden. If you're just looking at 2022 and 2023 and comparing those two, the IQ quartiles drop about five points across the board. 2023 is lower than 2016, but not "hot damn look at that chart" lower, just "huh, yeah I guess I can see it if I zoom out or squint" lower.

High chance. This is a case of me staring at the census so long they become intuitive to me. I've been going through and editing in summaries, trying not to let them become too long as to break the flow.

Here's the thread for discussion of future censuses. I know I plan to try and cut the total number of questions down.

Anyone have better ideas for the politics section? Some people have a lot of fun with this but it's not my area of interest.

Staring at your points, I keep thinking about Mosaic House. Mosaic House was a group house in Boston that ran weekly dinner parties for a year. After six months, they usually had a couple dozen people show up for a random Friday night. Sometimes they had an activity or a topic but the magic ingredients seemed to be that it was the same time, same place. The couple of times they canceled, they still had people show up who hadn't read the cancellation. Mosaic was great, and only stopped when the group house couldn't renew their lease.

I'm going to loosely go point by point- not objecting but musing- but I'd be interested in dialoguing about this with you if you'd be up for that.

1. I don't think you need the same people to go every week. If I imagine a group of fifty people, each of whom goes to half the meetups every month, that's more than enough to have a feeling of familiar faces and it's more than enough consistency for community to exist. 
2. I'm actually pretty excited about mediocre organizers here. I think same time same place and then a solid C+ on the basics (announce the events, have snacks around, have seats and space to mingle, don't be too hard to travel to) can get a regular crowd. That plus a five minute reading from a script means the group has actual common knowledge. You don't need ambitious visionaries doing new things as long as you can draw from something exciting. To use churches as an example, you don't need a pastor capable of writing a holy book and a dozen hymns, because it's easy to print more copies of the bible and the hymnal.
3. Group closeness is a little anti-inductive. Aspiring to being best friends seems hard, but aspiring to be warm acquaintances seems doable by just putting people in the same room every week or two and eating together?
4. I don't know enough about Sunday Assembly to add anything here.
5. I don't know enough about NYC Ethical Society to add anything here.
6. See 4
7. You'd know more about Berkeley's internal dynamics than I would. 
8. I see people start actual churches and they're still going generations later. I agree with the statistics on overall church attendance declining; I didn't find a new church when I moved to Boston. I'm interested in how much of this could be mitigated by pointing people at the community wherever they moved away; like, when rationalists move from Boston to NYC or NYC to SF or Boston to Berlin, sometimes they find the local ACX chapter and show up for some meetups. 
9. Some things people don't want that often, but you don't need everyone every week, you want people to come often enough they group is full of familiar faces and people can assume some common knowledge. Putting on a whole solstice every week seems hard and like it overfills that particular nutrient, but services can be more like half an hour. "Reading we always do, song we always do, reading that's new this week, song that's new this week, The Road To Wisdom, you're done and the open social is in the room that way" seems fine. Alternately, if it's a variety issue rotating through four different meetup types every month seems doable.

The thing that's alive to me is shaped more like a dojo than a church, but I think the bones of both of them (same time, same place, same people) are pretty similar. 

Importantly, I think lots of different things can hang on those bones in a way that's mutually beneficial. To use the church as an example, once you know people are going to be there at that time in that place, you get people saying "it'd be nice to have a book club, but when? Oh, how about the hour before the sermon in the side room?" "Thanks for loaning me that pie tin- I had some spare apples so I baked you an apple pie, why don't we do a pot luck after the sermon?" "It'd be fun to play soccer. Oh, hey, I've got a soccer ball in my car- how about we play on the green by the church after the pot luck?" 

Be advised: The weather outside is full of snow and ice. I'm planning to be there anyway because I am from the frozen northlands of Vermont and love the cold, but you may reasonably have different preferences.

I'm planning to run this topic again next month, so if you decide not to come tonight you'll likely have another chance.

The thing I want most from LessWrong and the Rationality Community writ large is the martial art of rationality. That was the Sequences post that hooked me, that is the thing I personally want to find if it exists, that is what I thought CFAR as an organization was pointed at.

When you are attempting something that many people have tried before- and to be clear, "come up with teachings to make people better" is something that many, many people have tried before- it may be useful to look and see what went wrong last time.

In the words of Scott Alexander, "I’m the last person who’s going to deny that the road we’re on is littered with the skulls of the people who tried to do this before us. . . We’re almost certainly still making horrendous mistakes that people thirty years from now will rightly criticize us for. But they’re new mistakes. . . And I hope that maybe having a community dedicated to carefully checking its own thought processes and trying to minimize error in every way possible will make us have slightly fewer horrendous mistakes than people who don’t do that."

This article right here? This is a skull. It should be noticed.

If the Best Of collection is for people who want a martial art of rationality to study then I believe this article is the most important entry, and it or the latest version of it will continue to be the most important entry until we have found the art at last. Thank you Anna for trying to build the art. Thank you for writing this and publishing it where anyone else about to attempt to build the art can take note of your mistakes and try to do better.

(Ideally it's next to a dozen things we have found that we do think work! But maybe it's next to them the way a surgeon general's warning is next to a bottle of experimental pills.)

Figuring out the edge cases about honesty and truth seem important to me, both as a matter of personal aesthetics and as a matter for LessWrong to pay attention to. One of the things people have used to describe what makes LessWrong special is that it's a community focused on truth-seeking, which makes "what is truth anyway and how do we talk about it" a worthwhile topic of conversation. This article talks about it, in a way that's clear. (The positive example negative example pattern is a good approach to a topic that can really suffer from illusion of transparency.)

Like Eliezer's Meta-Honesty post, the approach suggested does rely on some fast verbal footwork, though the footwork need not be as fast as Meta-Honesty. Passing the Onion Test consistently requires the same kind of comparison to alternate worlds as glomarization, which is a bit of a strike against it but that's hardly unique to the Onion Test.

I don't know if people still wind up feeling mislead? For instance, I can imagine someone saying "I usually keep my financial state private" and having their conversation partners walk away with wildly different ideas of how they're doing. Is it so bad they don't want to talk about it? Is it so good they don't want to brag? If I thought it was the former and offered to cover their share of dinner repeatedly, I might be annoyed if it turns out to be the latter.

I don't particularly hold myself to the Onion Test, but it did provide another angle on the subject that I appreciated. Nobody has yet used it this way around me, but I could also see Onion Test declared in a similar manner to Crocker's Rules, an opt-in social norm that might be recognized by others if it got popular enough. I'm not sure it's worth the limited conceptual slots a community can have for those, but I wouldn't feel the slot was wasted if Onion Tests made it that far.

This might be weird, but I really appreciate people having the conversations about what they think is honest and in what ways they think we should be honest out loud on the internet where I can read them. One can't assume that everyone has read your article on how you use truth and is thus fairly warned, but it is at least a start. Good social thing to do, A+. I don't know if more people thinking about this means we'd actually find a real consensus solution and it's probably not actually the priority, but I would like a real consensus solution and at some previous point someone's going to have to write down the prototype that leads to it.

Ultimately I don't actually want this in the Best of 2022, not because it isn't good, but because I'd worry a little about someone reading through the Best Of collections and thinking this was more settled or established than it is. The crux here is that I don't think it's settled, established, or widely read enough that people will know what you mean if you declare Onion Test. If I knew everyone on LessWrong would read everything in the Best Of 2022, then I'd change my mind and want this included so as to add the Test to our collective lexicon.

I like this article for having a amusing stories told with cute little diagrams that manage to explain a specific mental technique. At the end of reading it, I sat down, drew some trees, nodded, and felt like I'd learned a new tool. It's not a tool I use explicitly very often, but I use it a little, using it more wouldn't hurt, and if it happens to be a tool you'd use a lot (maybe because it covers a gap or mistake you make more) then this article is a really good explanation of how to use it and why.

It's interesting to compare this to Goal Factoring. They aren't the same, but they rhyme more than a little to me, both breaking apart what you actually want and how you might get what you want. Between the two, Goal Factoring appeals more to the creative munchkin in me, the kind that giggles at figuring out how to hack the process and get all of advantages of say, grading classes, without paying any of the drawbacks. Finding the root for the tree doesn't come with that feeling of being unorthodox and clever; every time I've used it I come away with what feels like common sense.

"A tool where ever time I use it I come away with what feels like common sense" is, when you put it in those words, actually a stronger recommendation than I originally intended to give but it's true. I wouldn't be surprised if finding the root for the tree doesn't create any noticeable improvement for half the people who use it. It's not revolutionary or groundbreaking. Nevertheless, this is the kind of article I want more of on LessWrong; a technique for making better decisions, explained clearly and straightforwardly, packaged in a neat mostly self-contained package.

I read this a year or two ago, tucked it in the back of my mind, and continued with life.

When I reread it today, I suddenly realized oh duh, I’ve been banging my head against this on X for months. I’d noticed there was this interpersonal dynamic that kept trying to blow up, where I kept not seeing the significance of phrasings or word choices other people said they found deeply important. I’d been using Typical Mind Fallacy and trying to figure out how to see through their eyes, and it kept not working.

Colour Blindness feels like a close cousin of Typical Mind, but I think there’s a useful difference. Typical Mind Fallacy suggests a solution of practicing empathy and perspective taking. Colour Blindness suggests asking a friend for help to see what you can’t. That can be a much better solution, especially for something you repeatedly fail to grasp.

There’s a frustrating zone where I can predict some input is the kind of thing someone else will be say I’m missing a piece of, but can’t predict which way it will fall. I assume red-green colour blind people notice the cluster of colour they keep making mistakes with.

A problem I have with execution is telling when there’s a real thing I can’t see versus when I’m being mislead. Sometimes the important quality people say you can’t perceive is like N-Rays: confirmed by others even if sometimes you have to squint, but ultimately a kind of placebo or confirmation bias. If multiple people can independantly tell me whether the quality is present or not, I’ve been leaning toward assuming it exists. Show ten people a picture of a red ball and ask if it’s red or green, and you get pretty strong agreement. Still, I’d appreciate better tools for distinguishing real things I don't see from group bias.

I have three views on this post.

One view: The first section (say, from "While working as the curriculum director" to "Do you know what you are doing, and why you are doing it?") I want as its own post. The Fundamental Question is too short. (https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/xWozAiMgx6fBZwcjo/the-fundamental-question) I think this is a useful question to have loaded in a person's brain, and the first section of this post explains how to use it and makes a pitch for why it's important. I haven't yet linked someone to How To: A Workshop (or anything) and told them "Ignore the title and everything after the first few minutes" yet but I really have been tempted. That loop of asking what you're doing and why is a loop that I want a dozen examples of. The Rest Is Commentary is one example, and I still want to be able to link just that first section with a better title. From this view, everything in The Rest Is Commentary actively detracts from the essay because people bounce off upon seeing the length or get bogged down trying to follow the dense, almost stream of consciousness section.

A second view: Most people aren't trying to run a one instructor CFAR workshop and so I don't think they'll latch on to The Rest Is Commentary, but I think given three examples of The Rest Is Commentary in different fields it would be easy (or easier) to generalize. What does this look like for a programmer adding a feature? What does this look like for winning a poker tournament? What does this look like for building a shed? It’s hard to untangle the workshop details from the Do You Know What You Are Doing details. Yes, I know they’re integrated and entangled. I want to factor them out so I can see how they interact.

I suspect I would have a better understanding of this technique if I had three more The Rest Is Commentary style essays, one where someone runs a workshop and isn’t using this technique, one where someone builds a shed with this technique, and one where someone builds a shed without this technique. That’s not a knock against what Duncan’s written here, that’s a hope for followup work.

A third view: I haven’t tried to run a one instructor CFAR workshop, but I am interested in doing that or something like it. I personally really want the version of The Rest Is Commentary with footnotes and definitions and expansions. I’ve pieced many of them together with reference to the CFAR handbook and searching through old LessWrong posts. Serious offer Duncan: Make a copy of this as a draft, let me have edit access, and I’ll go through and add footnotes to short explanations of concepts with hyperlinks to the longer explanations. I strongly suspect the object level of running a workshop isn’t the point of this post and that it’s an example to illustrate Do You Know What You Are Doing. One of my two biggest frustrations with CFAR is that it doesn’t seem to generate more instructors, and pairing a clearer The Rest Is Commentary with the CFAR handbook feels like an actual stab in that direction.

That’s probably not a viable version of the thing I really want, which is a book I can read and follow to create beisutsukai. I don’t think that book is reasonably doable, you probably need someone to point out the specific mistakes you’re making, you probably need to practice with something like Tutoring Wheels, I don’t think it’s fair to blame The Rest Is Commentary for not being the solution I want. If I had the solution I want I'd mail one to every active LW community and every would-be group of aspiring rationalists.

The long example in this post remains useful to me personally because of my interest in the object level. When I run meetups that try to teach a little rationality, there’s a How To: A Workshop on my shoulder.

This is short, has good object level advice, and points at a useful general lesson.

A lot of LessWrong articles are meta. They're about how to find out about things, or abstract theories about how to make decisions. This article isn't like that. Learning the specific lesson it's trying to teach takes minutes, and might save a life. Not "might save a life" as in "the expected value means somewhere out there in the distant world or distant future the actuarial statistics might be a little different." "Might save a life" as in "that person who, if it comes up, you will be able to see and hear and reach out and touch? That person might live, not die." I don't think this is controversial. As far as I know, basically everyone agrees tourniquets are good. That's information I want more people to see!

I'd have liked this article more if it had a little more detail. The paragraph with the one sentence instructions for CPR is good. I want another paragraph for tourniquets like that, and another for how packing the wound works. (I'd like to submit "wrap cloth as tightly as you can around the wounded limb just above the injury, not on a joint." That ignores the tightening crank but it's better than nothing.) Not a lot more detail! Just a couple paragraphs or links to short videos.

For context, I grew up in a rural area about an hour away from the nearest hospital. We learned first aid early and we had to use it once in a while. I like to hike for fun, and that also regularly places me an hour away from a hospital. First aid is important! You may never need it, but when you need it you want to know right now and you don't want to have to fumble with google and search terms. You might not even have cell service to look anything up if you're in a rural area or there's been a disaster.

Should this specific lesson be the focus of LessWrong? No, but I do support having one post, maybe even one post a year, reminding us of some important basics. The general lesson, that doing the obvious thing to improve a bad situation is a good idea, is one I also support and would love to see more widely.

The banner with the image is new as of last night, a boon for the final days of the census. "Frontpage" is a status a post can have, differentiated from a "Personal Blog" and this post has had that since a day or two after it went up.

Skipping questions is fine, either because the question didn't apply or you'd rather not answer that one or you decided you'd spent as much time as you wanted to spend!

Thank you for taking it!

Many of the best LessWrong posts give a word and a clear mental handle for something I kinda sorta knew loosely in my head. With the concept firmly in mind, I can use it and build on it deliberately. Sazen is an excellent example of the form.

Sazens are common in many fields I have some expertise in. "Control the centre of the board" in chess. "Footwork is foundational" in martial arts. "Shots on goal" in sports. "Conservation of expected evidence" in rationality. "Premature optimization is the root of all evil" in programming. These sentences a useful reminders, and while they aren't misleading traps the way "Duncan Sabien is a teacher and a writer" they take some practice and experience or at least more detailed teaching to actually turn into something useful.

Having the word "Sazen" with this meaning in my head has changed how I write. It shifted my thesis statement from simply being a compressed version of my argument towards being an easy handle to repeat to oneself at need, the same way I might mutter "shots on goal shots on goal" to myself during a hockey game. Sazen is a bit meta, it's not a technique for the object level accomplishments but a technique for how to teach or explain object level things, but anything that immediately upgrades my own writing is worth a solid upvote.

This post also gestures at the important problem of transmitting knowledge. It ultimately doesn't know how to do this, but I especially appreciated the paragraph starting "much of what aggregated wisdom like that seems to do..." for pointing out that this can speed things up even if it can't prevent the first mistake or two.

I think this is worth being included in the best of LW collection.

If you're comfortable DMing enough details to know which thing you're talking about (I'm ~90% I know which one you have in mind but want to check) that'd be appreciated, but thank you for the clarification!

I would like to ask a narrow question: What ACX Meetup Board?

The obvious-to-me guess I have for what you're talking about is a community council that was also in some places called a panel. I tend to think there's a meaningful distinction between a council and a board? Or, rather, I tend to have a specific meaning and context for a board (the board of a nonprofit, the board of directors for a company) and I don't believe anything like that exists for ACX meetups.

For context, hi, I'm the current ACX Meetup coordinator, if there is a board in the sense of a board of directors for ACX Meetups that is making decisions about ACX meetups I really think someone should tell me. 

That is a worthwhile note, and I would think about these roles differently based on which definition is in use.

If I was transported to a world where everyone is a Quaker I like to think I'd rapidly (though not immediately) switch to being basically pure Quaker. There might well be other kinds of Parselmouths that would lie as long as they were sure enough in not getting caught. Certainly norms like "you can lie to outsiders but never to your in-group" have existed, from organized crime to ethnic or religious bonds to children's conspiracies to hide who broke a vase. That might be closer to the examples in the linked post and in HPMOR.

Maybe it's worth coining terms to distinguish those. I make a genuine effort not to lie or mislead other rationalists. I don't feel bound to speak truth to panhandlers. 

As for the distinction between factually false and misleading, man, I have such profound cynicism and despair around accurate communication that someone could hide a small moon in the latitude I often have around misleading. Give me an intent-reading machine and that would change. I have written technical documentation professionally before and the experience of having your instructions called confusing because someone wasn't sure if when you said "the right mouse button" you meant their right or the computer's right is the kind of thing that sticks with you. 

I have not. There's no particular reason why, other than I tend to view myself as a noncentral EA and so hang out more in LW and ACX spaces. I think a lot of what I write for rationalist meetups would apply straightforwardly to EA meetups.

This may be a silly question, but- how does cross posting usually work? I have a bit of a preference to stick my handle or name on things I write, so maybe I should make an account over on EA forum. It sounds like you spend more time over there; are there norms on EA forum around say, pseudonyms and real names, or being a certain amount aligned with EA?

Tangential question: I know how to view all the posts by karma or by other criteria. Is there a way to view all comments by karma or other criteria? It occurs to me that part of the reason I don't usually read comment threads except on my own posts is that I don't know where the good discussion is happening.

My understanding is shortforms have next to no visibility unless people are already subscribed to a particular person's shortform feed. That seems about right for me? If I'm interested in what say, Scott thinks the best comments are but not interested in what Ray thinks the best comments are, then I subscribe to one but not the other.

I'm not saying this is the best possible UX, I'm just noting I'm tempted to try this with the affordances I have.

I'm tentatively tempted to start doing this in a shortform.

I notice I feel like it's fine to highlight someone's comment? They put it on the site, so it's not private. I'd be keeping it on the same site, not taking it somewhere else without attribution. I wouldn't generally like my contributions moved between places or attributed to me on other pseudonyms, and maybe there's a stronger argument here than I'm thinking.

Welcome! Glad to have you here.

I think we do!

I phrased it ambiguously in the last sentence of OP because it felt weird to claim a tradition was extant when the last few years were shaky, but watching the comments I think it's clear the tradition has survived the fallow period.