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People seeing this in the future: Check out Draw a Box for some low-level mechanical stuff.
In regard to bullet 1, I would caution against relying on this. If you show up to many fields expecting to smash through it because you're smart, you'll be torn to bits in many many fields. This is because the fields that are useful are already being dominated by people who are good at things to the extent that they're economically or emotionally valuable.
The exact example of chess makes this clear. If a smart LWer thinks "Oh, I'll get to the chess leaderboards because I'm really smart", they are going to find out after some weeks of studying that… everyone else on the leaderboards is smart too!
"Trauma" is a bad experience deemed anomalous. It means "the world is not usually like that". We do not call any behavior or emotional pattern "trauma" if it is obviously adaptive.
I think this is just incorrect? It is still a learned behavior if it's adaptive, it's just that people don't go to the doctor's office complaining that they are afraid of getting stabbed when they got stabbed last Tuesday. You're right that we wouldn't generally call this trauma, but that doesn't mean that the person is not traumatized.
If we had a magical cure for trauma and we used it on the guy who gets stabbed on Tuesdays, he would still be afraid of knives and would perhaps even be better at avoiding being stabbed (since he now avoids the subway and bikes to work instead of freezing up in a fugue while he rides). I think it would be fair under this example to say "Trauma is a certain kind of learned response [with a gajillion caveats]", not your definition.
I'm adding a YouTube link for Singularity because I've really grown to like it in the 3 years since I read this post.
E.g. we know that judges are more likely to convict ugly people that pretty people. More likely to convict unsympathetic, but innocent parties, compared to sympathetic innocent parties. More likely to convict people of colour rather than white folks. More likely, troublingly, to convict someone if they are hearing a case just before lunch (when they are hangry) compared to just after lunch (when they are happy and chill cause they just ate).
For the record, a lot of these didn't hold up when investigated later.
Across all websites I've been on in my life, I have posted more than 100000 comments (resulting in many interactions), so while things like psychoanalyzing people, assuming intentions, and making stereotypes is "bad", I simply have too much training data, and too few incorrect guesses not to do this.
On the contrary, your guess did not take context into account and was bad. They were downvoted for answering in a way which didn't answer the question, had many typos, and otherwise took more effort to read than the information it contained was worth.
Your comment "added more heat than light" for no reason, with no prompting. I explicitly am only making this comment because you posted a long paragraph explaining why you are so sure that you did a good job analyzing when it looks like you did a very poor one. Perhaps people in the past have not given useful feedback, so I will give a short piece: do not do this psycho-analysis until you have generated at least 2 alternate theories for what happened.
The note that it isn't what the username is for is kind of interesting. There are two places to put information on social media: your account and the media attached to your account. Here, instead of attaching some GWWC information to every piece of media (Tweet/post/picture/essay etc), the idea is to attach it to the account, but that really does feel quite weird to me.
I'm glad you said that.
(I'm on a Framework computer)
Each of your examples is a lot easier to read, since I've already learned how much I should ignore the circles and how much I should pay attention to them. I'd be quite happy with either.
If someone really really wants color, try using subtle colors. I fiddled around, and on my screen, rgb(80,20,0) is both imperceptible and easily noticed. You really can do a lot with subtlety, but of course the downside is that this sucks for people who have a harder time seeing. From the accessibility standpoint, my favorite (out of the original, your 2 mockups, and my ugly color hinting) is your green circle version. It should be visible to absolutely everyone when they look for it, but shouldn't get in anyone's way.
I appreciate the mockups!
Technical discussion aside, please see a UI designer or similar about how to style this, because it has the potential to really make LessWrong unpleasant to read without it really being obvious at all. I try below to make some comments and recommendations, but I recognize that I'm not very good at this (yet?).
Two nightmare issues to watch out for:
- Too little contrast from the background.
- Too much contrast from the foreground.
1. Blending in
This would make the jargon text harder to see by giving it less visibility than the surrounding text. Your demonstrated gray has this issue. Turn your screen brightness up a bunch and the article looks a bit like Swiss cheese (because the contrast between the white background and the black text increases, the relative contrast between the white background and the gray text decreases).
2. Jumping out
This would make the entire text harder to read by making it jump around in either style or color. Link-dense text can run into this problem[1]. In my opinion, the demo has this issue a bit in §0 (but not in the TLDR).
As an alternative, consider styling like a footnote/endnote. An example of a website that pulls off multiple floating note styles without it being attention-grabby is Wait But Why. Take a look at the end of the first main body paragraph on this page for an example.
Go to Wikipedia and turn on link underlining to see small of a change can make or break this. ↩︎
If you want to piss people off, you can also use periods and nonbreaking spaces. This way they linewrap nicely as well as demonstrating that you knew about typsetting but ignored it for some personal reason. . .
But speaking for myself personally... the problem is that the free-association game just isn't very interesting.
Hm, I think this really does change when you get better at it? This only works for people you're interested in, but if you have someone you are interested in, the free association can be a way to explore a large number of interesting topics that you can pick up in a more structured way later.
I think the statement you summarized from those guides is true, just not helpful to you.
Well if the question is "If the whole world is made of smart people with really high motivation, why is it how it is?" the answer is "That question assumes some false things"
Popping back in on this one after a while.
I really enjoy this. This can cut through a large number of annoying problems with one trick: If you split and commit and the actions for all the likely paths are essentially the same, you can ignore which thing is true for now.
"What if I'm a Boltzmann Brain?" If I am not, then I should proceed as normal. If I am, then it does not matter. --> Proceed as normal.
"What if my shirt is blue?" if it is not, then I'll wear it. If it is, then I'll wear it. --> Wear the shirt
It might sound silly, but I think Split and Commit is an easy-sell technique which can free you from a lot of unnecessary investigations automatically. Sure, it's also a good method for operating under uncertainty, but you get simplification for free.
Last note: I find this a good technique to explicitly invoke when someone close to me is anxious. We can build plans for the anxiety being true or not, but if it turns out to change nothing, we can ignore it.
Ugh I just posted that and I already am not sure. I think the correct answer is "leave a comment saying I appreciate the effort but downvote, because this question seems like chaff and upvotes factor into the algorithm and rankings of upvoted posts", but this is a personal blogpost so the right answer is probably an upvote since those don't frontpage I think.
I'm conflicted. I appreciate the effort put into the post, but it seems like a lot of the posters are genuinely creating lots of low quality content and I'd much rather have a small amount of good content than a large amount of meh-or-bad content to sift through to find the good stuff.
I've settled on a net downvote, but would probably do a upvote and a disagree vote if that was an option.
It doesn't sound like this is a good summary, no
I think you are dramatically overestimating how difficult it was, back in the day, to accidentally or incidentally learn Scott's full name. I think this is the crux here.
It was extremely easy to find his name, and often people have stories of learning it on accident. I don't believe it was simple enough that Scott's plea to not have his name be published in the NYT was invalid, but I do think it was simple enough that an analogy to lockpicking is silly.
Hm. I think we like Slate Star Codex in this thread, so let's enjoy a throwback:
It was wrong of me to say I hate poor minorities. I meant I hate Poor Minorities! Poor Minorities is a category I made up that includes only poor minorities who complain about poverty or racism.
No, wait! I can be even more charitable! A poor minority is only a Poor Minority if their compaints about poverty and racism come from a sense of entitlement. Which I get to decide after listening to them for two seconds. And If they don’t realize that they’re doing something wrong, then they’re automatically a Poor Minority.
I dedicate my blog to explaining how Poor Minorities, when they’re complaining about their difficulties with poverty or asking why some people like Paris Hilton seem to have it so easy, really just want to steal your company’s money and probably sexually molest their co-workers. And I’m not being unfair at all! Right? Because of my new definition! I know everyone I’m talking to can hear those Capital Letters. And there’s no chance whatsoever anyone will accidentally misclassify any particular poor minority as a Poor Minority. That’s crazy talk! I’m sure the “make fun of Poor Minorities” community will be diligently self-policing against that sort of thing. Because if anyone is known for their rigorous application of epistemic charity, it is the make-fun-of-Poor-Minorities community!
I’m not even sure I can dignify this with the term “motte-and-bailey fallacy”. It is a tiny Playmobil motte on a bailey the size of Russia. (from https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/08/31/radicalizing-the-romanceless/)
Can your use of "Journalism" pass this test? Can we really say "the hostility to journalists is not based on hyperbole. They really are like this. They really are competing to wreck the commons for a few advertising dollars." and expect everyone to pay close attention to check that the target is a Bad Journalist Who Lies first?
Your comment is actually one of the ones in the thread that replied to mine that I found least inane, so I will stash this downthread of my reply to you:
I think a lot of the stuff Cade Metz is alleged to say above is dumb as shit and is not good behavior. However, I don't need to make bad metaphors, abuse the concept of logical validity, or do anything else that breaks my principles to say that the behavior is bad, so I'm going to raise an issue with those where I see them and count on folks like you to push back the appropriate extent so that we can get to a better medium together.
I'd be amenable to quibbles over the lock thing, though I think it's still substantially different. A better metaphor (for the situation that Cade Metz claims is the case, which may or may not be correct) making use of locks would be "Anyone can open the lock by putting any key in. By opening the lock with my own key, I have done no damage". I do not believe that Cade Metz used specialized hacking equipment to reveal Scott's last name unless this forum is unaware of how to use search engines.
I don't (and shouldn't) care what Scott Alexander believes in order to figure out whether what Cade Metz said was logically valid. You do not need to figure out how many bones a cat has to say that "The moon is round, so a cat has 212 bones" is not valid.
The evidence offered "Scott agrees with the The Bell Curve guy" is of the same type and strength as those needed to link him to Hitler, Jesus Christ, Eliezer Yudkowsky, Cate Metz, and so on. There was absolutely nothing special about the evidence that tied it to the people offered and could have been recast without loss of accuracy to fit any leaning.
As we are familiar with, if you have an observation that proves anything, you do not have evidence.
I don't think "Giving fake evidence for things you believe are true" is in any way a minor sin of evidence presentation
If you're looking to convince without hyperbole, drawing the link from "Cade Metz" to "Journalists" would be nice, as would explaining any obvious cutouts that make someone an Okay Journalist.
This is not a good metaphor. There's an extreme difference between spreading information that's widely available and the general concept of justifying an action. I think your choice of examples adds a lot more heat than light here.
This seems very important. Thank you for writing it.
I don't really understand the site's software enough to give a good explanation, but seeing the code that (at one point?) governs/governed this was helpful to me when someone linked it previously: https://github.com/ForumMagnum/ForumMagnum/blob/devel/packages/lesswrong/lib/voting/voteTypes.ts
I've got a todolist with tags, and one of them is "monotonous tasks that I don't mind doing when I'm having a very bad day". This helps me a fair amount with certain buildups of disorder
I was waiting to see what you guys turned out as an ebook or sequence and trying to see if I could take it to a printer for a personal copy.|
Now I understand that the difficulty is a layer earlier and it's worth figuring out how to "make an ebook for printing ", not "print an ebook"
I'd like to express pretty large appreciation for the answer; this changes what things I, personally, was planning to do wrt the finished product. Thank you
Huh, I believe you did this and I believe you got the result, but I just have no model for what the heck is going on. It happens sometimes I guess, but damn I cannot grasp this.
Just flagging as a thing to consider that several of my favorite posts this year were actually shortish sequences, and that if they make it it might be worth figuring out something nice to do for them. I suppose if they partially make it, that's a question too.
(Expressing confusion here, not frustration or another "negative" emotion)
This number doesn't seem to make any sense. You suggest making an ebook, and that should be most of the heavy effort handled if you can ever get to a point of reusing a previous year's printing process. It's not really clear to me how it can take that much time and/or effort.
I'm only bringing this up because the books were pretty cool and me buying a set actually convinced some non-LW-reading folks to buy some, so it seemed a pretty neat outreach opportunity, if we can ever find an HTML->ebook->book pipeline.
Also please please please don't make a machine-read audiobook, it makes the writing look less valued than not making an audiobook at all.
Selfing-prevention: exclusive mating types prevent an individual from mating with itself, also known as selfing.
The "Selfing" link goes to the Inbreeding Depression page, I believe in error. Feel free to delete this comment if I'm wrong or if I'm right and you fix it.
I wanted to muse on this more:
Part of the back of my mind wondered if the comment was "bad enough" to be worth it, but then I realized it doesn't really matter, because the tradeoff is average positive karma versus single negative karma. If you have an average karma of +3, then a single -50 will take an extremely long time to recover from, even if it was something silly like your comment being misinterpreted as hostile. On balance, I agree with you, but I thought it was worth sharing why.
I think, separately, I would endorse some of the message, though I cannot say what Singer's intentions were or were not.
Any thought experiment which reveals a conflict in your values and asks you to resolve it without also offering you guidance on how to integrate all your values is going to sacrifice one of your values. This isn't a novel insight I think, as I'm almost pulling a 'by definition' on you, but the spectrum of magnitudes of this is important to me.
Our social network roundabout these parts has many metaphorical skeletons representing dozens and dozens of folks turning themselves into hollowed out "goodness" maximizers after being caught between thought experiment after thought experiment. Again, I don't attribute malice on the part of the person offering the parable, but Drowning Child is one thing I have seen cut down many people's sense of self, and I am happy standing loosely against the way it is used in practice on Earth regardless of its original intention.
I really liked this comment! Please continue to make comments like it!
I've actually been working to start writing down some notes about my version of a lot of these ideas (as well as my version of ideas I've not seen floating around yet). I think it would be a good opportunity to solidify my thoughts on things, notice new connections, and give back to the intellectual culture.
You get to cheat on your first readthrough and leave fun comments :)
I have a hole in my head; it's on EA Forum: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/jk7A3NMdbxp65kcJJ/500-million-but-not-a-single-one-more
Hello there! What are you reading now?
Can anyone poke Jai (of blog.jaibot.com) to post the "500 Million But Not A Single One More" essay on LessWrong? I just noticed the original link has lapsed and been purchased or something: https://blog.jaibot.com/500-million-but-not-a-single-one-more/
I grabbed a personal copy. You can use wget --recursive --level=inf --convert-links --page-requisites --wait=1 "http://bewelltuned.com/" to do so. This will not overload the website, both because the total number of pages is small and because it waits a bit in-between each page. I really wanted to go through this next year and don't want to lose the ability to.
Pretty sure these are all also valid coordinates for our meetup spot:
39.25538, -76.71480
39.25538 N, 76.71480 W
18N 352043 4346518
87F5774P+53
18S UJ 52043 46518
Edit: Fine, LessWrong, you win, I have no clue how to use the Markdown editor
I'm planning a somewhat similar project, but it's going to be more about "Here are some good ideas I've heard". I just am sad thinking that my formulations would be lost forever if I was hit by a bus instead of written down so that if any are useful they can be stolen and used.
I recommend adding header formatting to create more breaks in the essay structure. I mean like how "Bad Theories and How they got there" isn't set off from the text any.
I liked this post a lot. There are several fun bits, but I liked your categories describing how people use words. There are parts in there where I can see an underlying theory you may have used, but it's really written in your language, making it interesting and a bit fresh.
effected
Probably typo: "affected"
> it's own
Typo for "its own" (this occurs in multiple locations)
> deep see
Should be "deep-sea"
> other persons brain
"other person's brain"
being confused by lies
This should say something more like "being confused by lies instead of taking them for sense", otherwise it sort of looks like it means "being confused away from the truth and into the lies" is a good thing
Lucky, I have a comment saved to that exact effect, as I have been workshopping a community dynamics post for a long time about a related dynamic:
No need to guess, I will confirm: I was super wrong and you have correctly figured out how.
Went to buy this and noticed you're the "Most Helpful" review on its Steam page!