Thank you.
I can’t even delete the duplicates. Mods, please help. Devs, please add delete option.
mike_hawke
Karma: 1,026
Grandiosity, braggadocio, and self-obsession seem often to be compensatory reactions to insecurity and poor self worth: You brag about yourself constantly because you’re trying to convince yourself; you don’t believe in yourself so you try to believe in your press releases instead.
This reminds me of that Uncle Iroh quote:
“Pride is not the opposite of shame, but its source. True humility is the only antidote to shame.”
“At all”? Surely you exaggerate.
What if all those emailers form an anonymity set with one another? Surely that does more than nothing for preference falsification. The more people in the set, and the more overlap among their struggles, the less preference obscurity there will be, right?
I’m not sure I quite understand you, but I think you may be underestimating the protocol.
Wikipedia says:
In the original paper, Rivest, Shamir, and Tauman described ring signatures as a way to leak a secret. For instance, a ring signature could be used to provide an anonymous signature from “a high-ranking White House official”, without revealing which official signed the message. Ring signatures are right for this application because the anonymity of a ring signature cannot be revoked, and because the group for a ring signature can be improvised.
It seems to me that this should straightforwardly generalize from the White House staff to Evergreen professors, Megacorp employees, etc. The only requirement is that there are enough public keys available that you can put together a decent crowd to hide in. If you know someone’s public key, they cannot stop you from signing their name next to yours (which leaves both of you with plausible deniability).
If you run an organization, you can just require that all employees generate a key pair. Boom. Spiral-proof organization, right? The emperor of such an organization is less likely to end up walking around naked, right?
“Well if I am the victim of a cult then they must have brainwashed me pretty well, because all of your reasons just sound like shallow insults to me.”
But as always, the truth
lies somewhere in the middlecan only be seen when considering multiple orthogonal factors, after which projecting onto a single dimension will throw out so much information as to be worse than useless.
https://www.edge.org/response-detail/11825
Schank’s law: “Because people understand by finding in their memories the closest possible match to what they are hearing and use that match as the basis of comprehension, any new idea will be treated as a variant of something the listener has already thought of or heard. Agreement with a new idea means a listener has already had a similar thought and well appreciates that the speaker has recognized his idea. Disagreement means the opposite. Really new ideas are incomprehensible. The good news is that for some people, failure to comprehend is the beginning of understanding. For most, of course, it is the beginning of dismissal.”
In our scary new memetic fitness landscape, I think I’ve started to develop a default skepticism toward pith and sass. These days, the pithier and sassier something is, the more likely it is to trigger my deception alarms.
When something 240 characters or less sounds really good, it is increasingly likely that this is because it evolved to sound good to me, rather than because it has any deep wholesomeness.
Let’s start a new trend where you refuse to speak to journalists unless they can guarantee that the final publication will contain a link to your side of the story.
New Year’s resolution for 2021: get better at Relinquishment, the Second Virtue.
I’ve already unlocked the power of writing down controversial opinions in private, and even though it’s not specifically meant to be a relinquishment exercise, I’m eager to exploit it as one. I’m also eager to try out more tools that make relinquishment easier. I might look for ways to make Leaving a Line of Retreat less effortful and more efficient. Recommendations welcome.
In Addition to Ragebait and Doomscrolling
I guess I should at least attempt to make a decent neologism here:
contemptbait?
scandalscrolling?
Meh. Maybe someone else will think of a good one.
i love it
When you ask an older person, “what do you wish you had known when you were my age?” I think their answer is in large part determined by your framing and phrasing of the question.
Increasing specificity seems to help when people are prone to overly broad answers. “What major mistake were you making in your 30s that you stopped making by your 40s?”
Changing the subject to a different person seems to help too. “What did [some other person] do really right? What is something they think of as a major personal triumph which is better explained by luck?”
Framing questions broadly can give you broad answers, which can help when people are prone to oversimplified explanations. “What are some of the top 15 books that contributed to who you are today?”
Phil Tetlock tried doing something like this at the pundits—unilaterally—in a project called the Alpha Pundit Challenge. I don’t know if it went anywhere but it’s an exciting and bold idea.
https://www.openphilanthropy.org/giving/grants/university-pennsylvania-philip-tetlock-forecasting#Key_questions_for_follow_up
https://www.openphilanthropy.org/files/Grants/Tetlock/Revolutionizing_the_interviewing_of_alpha-pundits_nov_10_2015.pdf
For Winter Solstice, I recommend listening to the album “Soon It Will Be Cold Enough to Build Fires” by Emancipator.
Particularly, “Father King” and “Anthem”. For me personally, “Father King” is the solstice song.
[Question] Pre-Hindsight Prompt: Why did 2021 NOT bring a return to normalcy?
Talk is cheap. No wait, talk is free. Actually, sometimes talk is cheaper than free—holding your tongue can cost willpower or reputation or understanding.
Doesn’t look like anyone has mentioned Ryan North’s time travel guide yet. Key points include pasteurization, pendulum clocks, and cowpox.
If I travelled back to 1200, I wonder if I would rather be in the merchant class than the scientific class. Merchants have tighter feedback loops (and I wouldn’t have to sit through as much astrology). How fast did financial innovations spread? Looks like both insurance and double-entry bookkeeping took a few centuries. And now that I think of it, haven’t valuable but illegible financial services been a major factor leading to persecution of lots of groups, most notably Jews? Damn, so much for feedback loops. I guess Crab Mentality and unfree markets probably put a limit on how hard you can exploit your advanced financial skills.
When I allow myself to have inconsistencies in my beliefs and attitudes, I’m just using my brain the way it evolved to work. Accepting that I can’t untangle everything is necessary to make any progress.
When other people let themselves have inconsistencies, it is out of self-serving bias; it is anti-social and they ought to do better. Their persistence in trying to have it both ways causes excess harm.