This is similar to the idea of an MVP in the startup world. It makes me think of a sentiment from Ryan Holiday’s book on writing perrenial sellers: Ideas should become comments, comments should become conversations, conversations should become blog posts, blog posts should become books. Test your ideas at every stage to make sure you’re writing something that will have an impact.
Matt Goldenberg(Matt Goldenberg)
Karma: 4,948
No one seems to be mentioning here that subcommunications are a real, studied thing that encompass things like body language, facial expression, voice tonality, and eye contact. The facial action coding system is one example of how scientists have begun to codify these types of auras. Less studied, but in my experience still very valid, is the fact that one can change their subcommunications either through deliberate practice, or through changing internal beliefs and feelings.
The way I learned it at CFAR was a four step process of notice the felt sense, describe the felt sense, check if that’s correct, and then go back to describing if it doesn’t. Almost exactly what you stated above.
Re your second paragraph, this may be a selection effect for the smart and competent people you know? Many smart and competent people I know think that trying to describe and understand subjective experience is the good stuff.
You spend a lot of time arguing “immodest” over “modest” epistemology here, when the thing that really gets me is the hedgehog vs. fox epistemology. I kept wanting to say yes, Pat’s right that outside view should lower the probability in certain situations, and yes, Eliezer’s right that the inside view should raise his probability of beating the odds in certain situations, and that they should look at this individual situation to see how much each should apply.
I wanted to say that YES, Eliezer’s view that outside view arguments aren’t useful to think about when actually working on a project means that YES, you should compartmentalize and not think about them when working on a project, but doesn’t mean it’s not useful to think about at other times.
To me you’re strawmanning the modest epistemology by making it “hedgehog modest” instead of “fox modest”. This was a persistent problem I had with nearly every chapter in the book, and not just this bonus chapter.
Are you claiming that people were picking up on something other than the signals your body was giving off, (gait and posture would be the most obvious studied signals here) or simply that people don’t often think about things like gait and posture when they talk about body language?
No, what I got was “modest epistimology doesn’t make any sense in these precise situations when civilizational inadequacy applies”. That’s an incredibly hedgehoggy way to look at modest epistemology.
A more foxxy way would be something like “apply the frames of both modest and immodest epistemologies, as well as the frame of civilizational inadequacy, then using data from all of these frames, make your decision.
Peter Thiel says that status blindness is a common trait in succesful startup founders. We should trust him because Peter Thiel is high status.
One of the biggest leaps I made in trying to understand innovation was:
A. Realizing that new technologies and ideas evolve from misunderstood to understood, and only in the process become truly world changing.
B. Realizing that many (most?) new technologies and ideas rely on old ideas and technologies being understood to the extent that they are commodities or utilites.
Note that A is actually dependent on the speed of communication, so our current intuitions about how fast A happens are orders of magnitude off base.
Two of my favorite mental models to help make sense of how this works:
There’s “Rev”, which transcribes at 1 dollar a minute. I’ve used this in the past to write blog posts from conversations, but it doesn’t seem worth it for something like an hour long meetup.
I’m not Elo, but, as a content creator, there’s really no replacement for owning my own content publishing platform (rather than being tied to someone else’s). I can edit post formatting as I see fit, change old posts, create arbitrary complicated/interactive link structures, and add signup forms, things I’m selling, or other forms of reputation and sales monetization. I also never have to worry about a platform suddenly locking me out or deleting old posts, or otherwise doing things in their interest and not mine.
Video—Subject—Object Shifts and How to Have Them
I really like the general idea of this. Would have loved to see an example with for instance, making decisions over a second, day, week, month, and year, to get a better concrete idea of how this actually cashes out in terms of decision making, planning, and motivational processes.
Maybe black is the color of hormetic systems, green the color of selective systems, and white the color of robust systems. I suppose that would make systems based on effectuative principles red. Can’t think of how a system would be based on blue, but I’m sure those exist as well.
Video: The Phenomenology of Intentions
I wish there was an example here. I think the algorithm you’re pointing to is something like:
Find areas where your endorsed beliefs and aliefs diverge.
Mentally contrast both in your head, and feel the structural tension and dissonance this creates. (not sure if you’re bouncing between both here, or overlaying them on top of one another and then viewing simultaneously).
See what both of them would have predicted in the past, and notice which one is more true. Grok this so that whichever one is wrong updates.
Follow the beliefs along their belief chains/regulator chains, find further beliefs, and repeat steps 1-3.
Is that roughly what you’re trying to describe? Am I emphasizing the proper parts?
I’ll note that one thing I love about step #3 is that it’s asymetric to true beliefs. Other belief change techniques I know like the Lefkoe belief process or reframing instead ask you to imagine how your beliefs could be wrong, which is very effective for getting rid of them but says nothing about their validity.
Ahh I see, so the important thing I was missing is something like “This is about disentangeling social reality from predictive reality?”
I think I have a TAP that’s something like, “Notice I’m in a Demon Thread, bow out of conversation.” The way I bow out is something like “It doesn’t feel to me like there’s anything useful coming out of this discussion, so I won’t be replying further”.
This seems potentially less useful than the norm of “take it to private”. But it does seem to reliably end the demon threads. Not sure if it also has a chilling effect.
Meta: There’s a really cool point in here about HOW TO EXORCISE DEMONS FROM THREADS, without ending the thread. But people may miss it because the bolded text and first few sentences mostly seem to be about technical ideas on commenting. Recommend reading this comment if you skimmed it previously.
Non-Meta: I too have noticed a certain tone that’s factual, friendly, and non-combative that can seem to take the wind out of demon threads because it somehow disables everyone’s defensiveness centers. I think this is probably the best solution to demon threads, and also reflectively useful in that if people get great at this tone, demon threads are less likely to happen in the first place.
The opposite of slack would be… deliberate constraints? Which I find very valuable. In addition to the value of deliberate constraints- Parkinson’s law is a real thing, as are search costs, analysis paralysis, eustress (distress’s motivating cousin). I find when I’m structured and extremely busy, I’m productive and happy, but when I have slack, I’m not.
Could this be a case of Reversing the advice you get?