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If even one out of every ten accessibility advocates/experts/etc. did these things, then all these bugs would’ve been fixed years ago.
Maybe you're aware of an OOM more accessibility advocates than I am, but I come across all sorts of well-written blog posts explaining this or that bug, which browser/etc. it happens in, and how to work around it. That's most of the bullet points, although it might not be in the bug tracker of choice for the project.
What people aren't doing, as far as I have seen, is starting pooled-funds bug bounties for these things. People pass the collection plate for childhood cancer, especially since I'm told that September is Childhood Cancer Awareness Month, but not bugfixing.
This is not insensible: all sorts of people tend to be unwilling to set aside the cost of a new cell phone to fix one bug apiece that, generally speaking, is encountered in one's day job.
And there are a lot of accessibility bugs out there, some of which are quite old. I can only assume that accessibility bugs aren't treated massively more seriously than anything else in the WebKit or Firefox Bugzillas.
While the world would be a better place if bug-bounty collection plates were more popular, I can see why they're not as popular as I'd like.
They do not have any incentive whatever to help to fix bugs in screen reader programs. What would that do for them? The better such programs work, the less work there is for these people to do, the less there is to talk about on the subject of how to make your website accessible (“do nothing special, because screen readers work very well and will simply handle your website properly without you having to do anything or think about the problem at all” hardly constitutes special expertise…), the less demand there is for them on the job market…
You don't even need to describe this as a baptist-and-bootleggers problem to explain most of the lack of actual bug fixing.
A frontend developer who runs into accessibility-related browser bugs all day and gets very good at working around them and publicizing how to work around them is unlikely to be a competent C++ developer who is capable of going into browser-engine codebases and actually fixing the bugs.
While I can imagine why others would want to see this sort of thing, it seems to me that "this will go on your permanent record" would be a strong disincentive to engage seriously with the text or mention anything aloud that you wouldn't be comfortable with anyone in the world, ever, knowing about you.
I do actually have plans to learn enough html to swap my Wordpress site over to a self-hosted self-designed website, I just have to, like, get good enough with HTML and CSS and especially CSS to get Gwern’s nice sidenotes
You can start with the Dan Luu aesthetic and then redesign your site, either incrementally or in big leaps, possibly repeatedly, later. Redesigning websites is totally a thing. https://gwern.net gets near-constant upgrades, and all sorts of famous web-nerd bloggers have improved their sites' designs over the years and now decades.
and hosting and how to do comments. It’s gonna happen, though. Any day now.
One thing Substack does that you can't get super-easily from a static site is comments and emailing your readers with new articles (feeds are, unfortunately, mostly a nerd-only technology).
I'd like to second this comment, at least broadly. I've seen the e notation in blog posts and the like and I've struggled to put the × 10 in the right place.
One of the reasons why I dislike trying to understand numbers written in scientific notation is because I have trouble mapping them to normal numbers with lots of commas in them. Engineering notation helps a lot with this — at least for numbers greater than 1 — by having the exponent be a multiple of 3. Oftentimes, losing significant figures isn't an issue in anything but the most technical scientific writing.
Is there an alternative to constantly adding endless features? Can software be designed to operate without daily updates, similar to programming languages?
"daily" in "daily updates" is hyperbole, but you can probably get most of the way there with
- a subscription-based model (annual and/or monthly)
- periodic updates to ensure it works properly when the underlying platform changes (like when Apple adds dark mode to its OS and exposes this to websites with
prefers-color-scheme).
The second bullet point is important, at least occasionally. I dropped my beloved VoodooPad because it never got a publicly-released version that supports dark mode that works on macOS, iOS, and iPadOS. I figure VoodooPad is nearly dead because its current owners can't figure out how to turn it into something that gets enough revenue to justify the time that it would take to make it a modern app.
At any rate, the notes I had in VoodooPad got moved into Ulysses some time after the Ulysses team added projects back in 2022. Ulysses is not a good personal wiki (internal linking isn't nearly as low-friction as in Obsidian), but it's adequate for my purposes and I dislike having a gazillion different personal-wiki software packages that I need to divvy my attention between.
As far as update cadence goes…
If you look at Ulysses' Releases page and make note of the dates in the headings, you can see that they've been steadily, but not all that quickly, been releasing features. There's probably at least one programming language out there with this release cadence, but I wouldn't know which one it is.
Cassandra/Mule: If Alice knew she were talking to a brick wall, she would give up; and if Bob knew Alice was trying to help, he would actually listen.
I've seen mules in the wild in internet forums (which, admittedly is outside the scope of your post). They usually present as ardent defenders of the faith, repeating well-known talking points…and never updating, ever.
AI safety posts generally go over my head, although the last one I read seemed fantastically important and accessible.
AI-safety posts are probably the most valuable posts here, even if they crowd out other posts (both posts I think are valuable and posts I think are, at best, chaff).
If there were one dial I’d want to experiment with turning on LW it would be writing quality, in the direction of more of it.
I'd like to highlight this. In general, I think fewer things should be promoted to the front page.
[edit, several days later]: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/SiPX84DAeNKGZEfr5/do-websites-and-apps-actually-generally-get-worse-after is a prime example. This has nothing to do with rationality or AI alignment. This is the sort of off-topic chatter that belongs somewhere else on the Internet.
[edit, almost a year later]: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/dfKTbyzQSrpcWnxfC/2025-color-trends is an even better example of off-topic cross-posting that the author should not be rewarded for doing.
I'd like to like this more but I don't have a clear idea of when to up one, up the other, down one, down the other, or down one and up the other.
Would you rather live in a society that valued “niceness, community and civilization”, or one that valued “meanness, community and civilization”? I don’t think it’s a tough choice.
This is an awful straw man. Compare instead:
- niceness, community, and civilization
- community and civilization
Having seen what "niceness" entails, I'll opt for (2), which doesn't prioritize niceness or anti-niceness, and is niceness-agnostic.
That’s a lot of readers to throw away
Depends on how popular you are. Even if you make the highly questionable assumption that browser statistics collected on sites like cnn.com and such are representative of the readership of jefftk.com, if jefftk.com has hundreds of readers, he's still doing a lot of work for a group that can only manage to claim that there are "dozens of us", and in any case really ought to upgrade to a proper browser (and in probably most cases, OS) anyway, for security reasons.
Daring Fireball, a site you've probably heard of, seems to do OK with only browser-supplied fonts:
font-family: Verdana, system-ui, Helvetica, sans-serif;
Also, jefftk said "requiring". Sure, he could have a site that uses Inter, either loaded from his own site or from a CDN like Google Fonts, but if Inter doesn't load (mostly likely because of user preference), then everything will be fine.
If TeX fonts don't load…then what happens? Does the user see raw TeX, or nothing at all, or…?
I’m someone who was and remains a full supporter of BLM’s policy proposals
BLM's policy proposals have changed since you wrote that. Currently, they're at https://impact.blacklivesmatter.com/policy/. They are:
- defund the police
- No On Prop 25
- voting-rights legislation
- support for the Congressional Oversight of Unjust Policing Act (COUP Act)
- Medicare for All
- the police not using stuff made for the military
- opposing Barrett's nomination to the Supreme Court
- DC statehood
- ending the filibuster
- "climate justice"
(emphasis added)
Keep clicking on "Next Pillar" at the top right of the page; eventually they get around to bragging about how they've countered Amazon's attempts to keep a union from forming.
I'm not really a libertarian any more, but is this close enough to your beliefs that you still think the organization is worth supporting? Or have you considered voicing support for some other organization that has enough cachet in your social circle to ensure that you don't spend weekend nights alone?
Also pertinent is exploring why I felt so attached to something I knew I couldn’t logically defend, and the simple explanation is that it was cool. Being a libertarian can be super socially isolating, especially if you live only in places overwhelmingly surrounded by leftists like I do.
20 years ago or so, Eliezer Yudkowsky said that the biggest obstacle to raising the sanity waterline was religion. This seemed very reasonable at the time.
I'm unconvinced that's still true in the West. What seems the larger barrier now are the things people say and believe that ensure they'll keep getting invited to dinner parties.
I’m likely overlooking other factors of course, and there’s the ever-present, gnawing worry that haunts me, whispering that I might be fundamentally mistaken about something else. Maybe I am, but hopefully I’ll be better equipped to unearth it.
You've identified a very powerful bias. If you're looking for easy wins to root out incorrect beliefs, have you considered first looking at all the ones that would dry up your dating pool if you stopped believing in them and told other people in your social circle about how you changed your mind?
A key problem to loss of LBM is that you’re either losing bone density (a terrible thing) or muscle (a pretty damn bad thing).
Could also be skin. Losing skin if you're losing fat is a good thing, I'd think, since you don't want to weigh 200 pounds yet still have all the skin you had when you were 300 pounds.
Has any work been done to see where the LBM has been coming from?
Oh, that's something significantly different from what I had in mind. Thanks for pointing me to the page that explains the concept.
Would it be useful to examine what exactly “low energy” means?
I'm not jp, but:
- too awake to sleep
- too brain-fogged to do thinking work
- possibly too brain-fogged to listen to a podcast and retain anything from it
- too physically tired to go for a walk or do other similar low-intensity exercise, like easy yoga
- probably too brain-fogged to read — and really digest — the web articles that I've been postponing for months because they seem great, but I can never get around to
Meanwhile, here's what I can do in a low-energy state, some of the time (but I frequently don't want to):
- balance a checkbook, but it seems like I get roughly hours/week of low-energy time, but maybe hours/week of time that I need to spend balancing checkbooks
- delete e-mails, but not be able to think of a couple good new categories that I'd need to get my inbox to zero
- get photos off my phone and file them appropriately, but possibly spend a little too long thinking of good, descriptive filenames that I'll be able to use to search for them later, or just fail to have a name with the words that I'll want to use to retrieve it later
We might iterate on the exact implementation here (for example, we might only give this option to users with 100+ karma or equivalent)
I could be misunderstanding all sorts of things about this feature that you've just implemented, but…
Why would you want to limit newer users from being able to declare that rate-limited users should be able to post as much as they like on newer users' posts? Shouldn't I, as a post author, be able to let Said, Duncan, and Zack post as much as they like on my posts?
writing things down
A good idea but too general to be good advice.
More specifically (not an exhaustive list):
- If you have a multistep 1- or 2-hour task, strongly consider scribbling down a quick checklist of what needs doing before your working memory gets swamped with the details of a subtask or three.
- If you're in the middle of a programming project and need to pause your work, strongly consider typing out a message in a sticky-note-equivalent app like Tot that says "Welcome back. You were frobnicating the gleeberks because the gleeberks don't snozzle as well as they should."
More generally, consider dumping your mental state to a written medium more often. You should probably have a way to do this on both your phone and computer that doesn't take too much thinking to summon up a text field that you can edit and then have the text get stored in an inbox or similar catch-all folder somewhere.
If you feel silly writing down trivial stuff, it's helpful to think "I want to remember all of it, not just most of it."
Two responses:
- It's unclear to me what would make diet advice "rationalist".
- The only novel, actionable consensus I've seen seems to be "avoid eating or drinking things with sugar added to them, especially if there's a lot of added sugar".
This appears to be a personal wiki.
If “refining the art of human rationality” is our goal, we should be doing a lot more outreach and a lot more production of very accessible rationality materials.
I agree, and I'm in favor of this sort of thing. I try to do this sort of thing among my friends. Sometimes it works, at least a little bit.
On the other hand, if we're trying to save Earth from being turned into paperclips, we ought to focus our efforts on people who're smart enough to be able to meaningfully contribute to AI risk reduction.
On the other other hand, there are people here who could help with sanity-line-raising materials who can't help with rationality training as a way to avert AI x-risk.
On the other other other hand, some people who might be able to help with AI risk might get into the possibly-less-important sanity-waterline-raising projects, and this would be a bad thing.
A second laptop charger.
It's nice to be able to charge your laptop at your desk, with a cord that snakes behind the desk, and not have to go in and undo all that just to get power to your laptop when you're out and about.
And if you're not getting out with your laptop, having a second charger is still useful. I have a makeshift standing desk with my laptop on top of my dresser. With a second charger set up like this, I can shift from standing to sitting on my schedule, not my laptop's battery's.
Also, I find myself vexed with thoughts […] How do professional or amatuer traders deal with this?
Habituation, meditation, and/or alcohol.
Subjective experience:
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Polyester (elastane, etc.) clothes are much more common these days. Back in the 80s, people wore way more cotton shirts to the gym. Nowadays, most people wear some sort of sweat-wicking heat-venting material. They're also cheaper; Under Armour used to run about $50. Nowadays, UA shirts tend to run about 3/5 that.
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Remember back when wool was only for itchy sweaters? Nowadays, merino wool, which is less itchy for most people, is used for shirts and undershirts and even socks and underpants. The great thing about wool shirts is that you can wear them for almost a week and they won't stink; this isn't something you can do with cotton and especially not polyester.
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There are a lot more stretchy materials out there, as well as stretchy materials (polyester) woven into less-stretchy materials (cotton) to give the stiffer materials a bit more give. This makes slim-fitting clothing less restrictive, if nothing else.
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There are nylon pants that don't look out of place at the office. Outlier's Futureworks pants made out of F.Cloth (click on "Fabric" on the tabs) are better than cotton chinos in at least some respects; you can spill coffee on them and likely all of it will bead up and just run off, not staining anything or even getting wet. (They'll eventually wet out if you're walking around in the rain, though.)
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You can car camp in the rain, forget your rain gear, and everything'll turn out mostly OK.
While the price of insulation is a superlatively objective metric, it entirely misses advancements in anything other than insulation effectiveness. The big changes have all been in finding new points that balance the different tradeoffs between stretchiness/durability/stink trapping/cost/water resistance/stain resistance/warmth/air permeability.
But if passages aren’t dense with that or other uses, then you wouldn’t need to use subscripting much, by definition....
Agreed.
Perhaps you meant, “assuming that it remains a unique convention, most readers will have to pay a one-time cost of comprehension/dislike as overhead, and only then can gain from it[…]
Agreed so far…
[…] so you’ll need them to read a lot of it to pay off, and such passages may be quite rare”?
You'll need a bunch in a single passage. If you don't need to disambiguate a large hairball of differently-timed people (like in My Best and Worst Mistake), then you probably shouldn't bother in general. Put another way, you're going to want to have a dense, if localized, cluster of people-times that need disambiguating for this to be a better idea than using parentheticals.
Because it brings out the contrast: one is based on first-hand experience & observation, and the other is later socially-performative kvetching for an audience such as family or female acquaintances. The medium is the message, in this case.
I'm struggling to see how this is an improvement over "on FB" or "on Facebook" for either the reader or the writer, assuming you don't want to bury-but-still-mention the medium/audience.
I waffled on whether to make it ‘FB’ or ‘Facebook’. I thought “FB” as an abbreviation was sufficiently widely known at this point to make it natural. But maybe not, if even LWers are thrown by it.
Not without context or some other way to reduce the universe of things "FB" might refer to. "My wife complained on FB" is probably enough of a determiner most of the time for most people (unless I'm really underslept), but an "FB" subscript isn't immediately obvious to people who aren't used to that sort of thing.
This seems like a solid improvement over X!Y notation. X!Y seems to not fit my brain in the same way that XのY seems to not fit my brain, and mentally substituting “’s” for “の” helps only partially.
Does it do enough good to be worth using despite the considerable hit to weirdness points? That I don’t know.
A better question, I think, would be this: "When is it worth it to use this one weird trick to boost the clarity of a work?"
It seems worth it in nerdy circles (i.e. among people who're already familiar with subscripting) for passages that are dense with jumping around in time as in your chosen example, but I'd expect these sorts of passages to be rare, regardless of the expected readership.
Also, it's unclear why "on Facebook" deserves to be compressed into an evidential. At the very least, "FB" isn't immediately obvious what it refers to, whereas a date is easier to figure out from context.
we’ve e.g. carefully moved a group the conversation around not putting pressure on them to explain why they were unavailable last Tuesday.
What do you mean by "a group the conversation"?
Over on the "too small" end of the spectrum…
I wrote about how rationality made me better at Mario Kart which I linked to from here a while ago. In short, it's a reminder to think about evidence sources and think about how much you should weigh each.
More recently, I've been watching The International, a Dota 2 competition. Last night I was watching yet another game where I wasn't at all sure who would win. That said, I thought Team Liquid might win (p = 60%). When I saw Team Secret win a minor skirmish (teamfight) against Team Liquid, I made a new prediction of "Team Secret will win (p = 75%)". However, my original guess was correct: Team Secret eventually won that game.
I then thought about the current metagame and how, this year, any team can go from "winning" to "lost" with only a small error or two, and the outcome of any individual skirmish doesn't matter much.
I then imagined Bart Simpson repeatedly writing "I WILL NOT MAKE LARGE UPDATES BASED ON THE OUTCOME OF A SINGLE TEAMFIGHT" on a large blackboard and stopped making that mistake.
I think the major takeaway I've gotten from reading The Sequences is the vocabulary around updating beliefs, by varying amounts, based on evidence.
A general rule that I try to follow is “never write something which someone else has already written better”.
A sensible rule, but I'd like to bring some rationalist insights to other communities that might be able to benefit from seeing how people who've read the Sequences handle things. This seems to necessitate a little bit of redundant writing.
Also, I could stand to get better at writing. On the other hand, if I limit myself to writing only novel things, I wouldn't practice nearly as much as I ought to do. Of course, the decision to publish any given piece is a separate issue.
I worry about confusing novelty with importance—the example scale in the OP seems to mix the two.
Not on purpose. I just couldn't think of something super-novel yet unimportant.
Perhaps a better approach would be to give handles for several different ways things can be novel, and then use those as tags?
That sounds like a good idea inasmuch as it maps to reality the best, but it's also more work than I thought I'd have to do. I'm considering collapsing the novelty scale to no more than five points and trying to make it more coarse to deliberately paper over the different ways a piece can be novel.
Thanks for demonstrating that novelty isn't totally orderable, though; I thought it was, more or less.
Very true. I think I'm mainly trying to preempt accusations that I'm simply rehashing Taboo Your Words (which I pretty much am rehashing!)
Also, by stating "this isn't very novel", I'm also communicating to the neophyte (as opposed to current rationalists) that there's a wide body of knowledge out there that's quite similar to what I've written. That's potentially useful to the neophyte.
On the current four-point scale: 3±ε, where 3 − ε > 2 and 3 + ε ≪ 4. Like I said, these points aren't uniformly distributed.
I'm also familiar with trying to define a unit of enlightenment, so the whole idea of "make a scale" doesn't strike me as a very novel idea.
Drive-by suggestion: I'd suggest doing the archiving maybe a week or month after posting. That way, most updates to the post are archived, too.