I’ve posted a few comments to LW, but maybe I still qualify as a lurker because I post comments so rarely.
Some recent experiments with Alicorn’s Luminosity techniques revealed that my reasons for not posting comments more often were mostly silly, so I’ll probably start commenting more often.
This post got kinda long as I was writing it, so I’ll post each of the things I wanted to say as a separate reply, so that they can be upvoted or downvoted separately.
I’ve been making lots of progress recently at untangling my mind, with lots of help from Adelene Dawner, and Alicorn, and LW in general. The methods I used are similar to what Alicorn describes in her Luminosity Sequence, but I started a few months before the Luminosity sequence was written, and I didn’t have any contact with Alicorn until a few weeks ago.
Anyway, I was considering the idea of posting my experiences with these techniques, either to LW, or maybe someplace else if LW wouldn’t be appropriate.
During this process, I kept a very detailed journal, using Google Wave.
What I was planning to do was first to review the contents of this journal, and make a point-form list of the problems I was having, and the steps I took to discover, find the causes of, and fix these problems. Then I plan to post this list to LW, and ask what parts, if any, the readers would like me to elaborate on, or post any relevant journal entries on. And also to check how much gooey self-disclosure readers are comfortable with. There’s lots of that in the journal.
The journal contains lots of introspective writing, and lots of chat logs with Adelene, where we found what was causing some of these problems, and discussed what to do about them.
Partway through this process, I started using the technique of writing dialogues between multiple subagents, similar to how Alicorn described in this post
Now I’m constantly making very extensive use of this technique, with surprisingly good results.
Anyway, if anyone thinks I should go ahead with this plan, please upvote this post. Or if you think it’s a bad idea, please downvote this post. Yes, I said downvote. I’m not afraid of downvotes (anymore).
Another idea I was considering was starting a separate blog, for the few things I wrote that other people might be interested in. Or maybe even for this project. The first person who thinks this is a good idea, please post a reply saying so. And if anyone else thinks this is a good idea, then you can upvote that comment.
oh, and I’m also working on a script to extract xml tags from this journal, and make some fancy quantifiedself graphs. if anyone is interested in hearing more about that, please leave a comment saying so.
oh, and I also want more friends. good friends, who I can talk with about important things. Please let me know if you would like to be my friend. Though you might want to read this “about me” page first:
oh, and didn’t mean to put the emphasis entirely on voting. Comments would be more helpful than votes, so please comment if there’s anything you want to ask or comment about.
I would love to see your full journal. If you don’t want to post the full thing here I’d still love it if you emailed it to me. Sorry I haven’t been on skype recently, but I’m glad to see you posting again!
Heh, my journal is way too huge to post all of it here, or to email it, and very little of it would actually be relevant to LW anyway. If you have a Google Wave account, I can just give you access to the journal itself. And if you don’t have a Wave account, I’ve been copypasting most of it to livejournal, though that kinda caused lots of trouble with the formatting. I can give you access to that if you have a livejournal account. But I still don’t dare to make the whole thing publicly accessible. There’s lots of, um… unflattering stuff in there. Unflattering to me, and to some of the people I know.
Yes, I need to friend you in order for you to see my livejournal. And so far I only friend people who are, um… actual friends. Would you like to be an actual friend? Or were you just curious about the journal?
I checked out your recent LiveJournal posts. You seem like an interesting person too, someone who I would like as a friend.
I went ahead and added you as a friend on LJ. I guess I should warn you that the journal is full of gratuitous self-disclosure. I write about literally anything that I feel like writing about. And the quantifiedself experiment means that I document literally everything I do, though I still don’t have much of a life, so this isn’t all that much.
Though I guess there’s no need for me to be so paranoid with these warnings, and no need for me to be so paranoid about who I give access to.
Just saw this; I’m interested in seeing the journal. My LJ username is squid314. I wouldn’t be an “actual friend” as in buy you stuff for your birthday, but I check my friends page every so often and respond to anything I find interesting.
heh, now I’m going to have to write something in the journal about what I actually think of as the conditions for qualifying as an “actual friend”… but I guess I won’t try posting any more about that to this comment until I know what I actually want to say.
And I guess I might as well repeat the other warnings about the journal. I write about literally everything that seems even remotely worth writing about, and that’s lots of stuff, and most of it is boring. The journal contains X-rated content, and often TMI. And then there’s all the quantifiedself data, and the confusing system of tags and abbreviations...
Anyway, I guess you can see for yourself. Feedback is welcome.
random trivia: I prefer not to follow society’s annoying rules for being socially obligated to exchange gifts at specific times of the year. If anyone wants to something nice for me, please just donate to SIAI instead, or possibly some other charity of your choice.
My main reason for not commenting more often was because I was afraid that… hmm… I made a few attempts to finish this sentence, but so far all of them triggered one of the excuse-generating modules that I’ve noticed in my brain. So maybe I’ll just leave that sentence unfinished. Basically, I was afraid that posting more comments would somehow have net negative utility, for reasons that it turns out don’t actually make sense.
So I guess I’ll start posting anything I think is relevant, until I start getting downvotes. Rather than asking here about whether specific things would be a bad idea (copypasting stream-of-thought comments I wrote while I was reading a LW article, without bothering to erase bits I later realize don’t make sense?), I’ll just go ahead and post until I start getting downvotes. I have a bad habit of overestimating the badness of negative feedback. Even if karma isn’t a perfectly accurate measurement of whether my comments are having a positive or negative effect, it’s still a reasonably useful approximation, so I’ll go ahead and just try to maximize my total karma, rather then preemptively panicking about any post that I suspect might get downvoted… which is pretty much any comment I could possibly make...
And then there’s the Umeshism “If you’ve never posted a comment that got downvoted, your comments are boring”, or would that be “If you’ve never posted a comment that got downvoted, you’re not posting enough comments”?
Then there’s the question of how much time to spend reviewing and tweaking my comments, but I guess karma can answer that too.
Then there’s the question of whether to treat a zero-karma post as actually having negative value, just cluttering the comments thread… that seems like a more difficult question.
I’ve been following Eliezer since shortly after he started posting to SL4. Back then I went by the name “observer”.
Oh, and I donate lots of money to SIAI. The past couple years it was between $6000 and $7000 (about 20% of my income), but I plan to donate more from now on. This year I pledged $20,000 (over 60% of this year’s income), and I might not even need to take money out of savings in order to pay this. Seriously. I’m a hardcore Singularitarian. A Yudkowsky Singularitarian, not a Kurzweil Singularitarian.
vote down this comment if you disapprove of this method of using subcomments to get more targeted upvotes and downvotes. I was about to request that noone upvote this comment, but on second thought, that’s silly. Upvote if you want. I could make separate comments if I wanted to track upvotes and downvotes separately, but past experience has shown that there aren’t likely to be enough total votes for that to be worthwhile.
vote down this comment if there is anything at all you don’t like about anything I’ve written here:
Using lots of words to say something that should be simple
wasting words talking about things that I was about to say, but already realized were silly
general whinyness or needyness
parenthetical comments
run-on sentences
incompletely thought-out ideas
not bothering to use the special syntax for making clickable links
poor spelling and/or grammar
minor or not-so-minor typos
posting too much off-topic stuff in what’s supposed to be a thread for people to just say “hi”
the order these subcomments appear in on the page
general incoherence or incomprehensibility
general insecurity
this list being too long
anything else that you personally dislike
oh, and didn’t mean to put the emphasis entirely on voting. Comments would be more helpful than votes, so please comment if there’s anything you want to ask or comment about.
I’m not sure that you actually discouraged conversation, but you put so much emphasis on voting that I felt as though conversation was falling off the agenda.
Hi,
I’ve posted a few comments to LW, but maybe I still qualify as a lurker because I post comments so rarely.
Some recent experiments with Alicorn’s Luminosity techniques revealed that my reasons for not posting comments more often were mostly silly, so I’ll probably start commenting more often.
This post got kinda long as I was writing it, so I’ll post each of the things I wanted to say as a separate reply, so that they can be upvoted or downvoted separately.
I’ve been making lots of progress recently at untangling my mind, with lots of help from Adelene Dawner, and Alicorn, and LW in general. The methods I used are similar to what Alicorn describes in her Luminosity Sequence, but I started a few months before the Luminosity sequence was written, and I didn’t have any contact with Alicorn until a few weeks ago.
Anyway, I was considering the idea of posting my experiences with these techniques, either to LW, or maybe someplace else if LW wouldn’t be appropriate.
During this process, I kept a very detailed journal, using Google Wave.
What I was planning to do was first to review the contents of this journal, and make a point-form list of the problems I was having, and the steps I took to discover, find the causes of, and fix these problems. Then I plan to post this list to LW, and ask what parts, if any, the readers would like me to elaborate on, or post any relevant journal entries on. And also to check how much gooey self-disclosure readers are comfortable with. There’s lots of that in the journal.
The journal contains lots of introspective writing, and lots of chat logs with Adelene, where we found what was causing some of these problems, and discussed what to do about them.
Partway through this process, I started using the technique of writing dialogues between multiple subagents, similar to how Alicorn described in this post
Now I’m constantly making very extensive use of this technique, with surprisingly good results.
Anyway, if anyone thinks I should go ahead with this plan, please upvote this post. Or if you think it’s a bad idea, please downvote this post. Yes, I said downvote. I’m not afraid of downvotes (anymore).
Another idea I was considering was starting a separate blog, for the few things I wrote that other people might be interested in. Or maybe even for this project. The first person who thinks this is a good idea, please post a reply saying so. And if anyone else thinks this is a good idea, then you can upvote that comment.
oh, and I’m also working on a script to extract xml tags from this journal, and make some fancy quantifiedself graphs. if anyone is interested in hearing more about that, please leave a comment saying so.
oh, and I also want more friends. good friends, who I can talk with about important things. Please let me know if you would like to be my friend. Though you might want to read this “about me” page first:
oh, and didn’t mean to put the emphasis entirely on voting. Comments would be more helpful than votes, so please comment if there’s anything you want to ask or comment about.
I would love to see your full journal. If you don’t want to post the full thing here I’d still love it if you emailed it to me. Sorry I haven’t been on skype recently, but I’m glad to see you posting again!
Heh, my journal is way too huge to post all of it here, or to email it, and very little of it would actually be relevant to LW anyway. If you have a Google Wave account, I can just give you access to the journal itself. And if you don’t have a Wave account, I’ve been copypasting most of it to livejournal, though that kinda caused lots of trouble with the formatting. I can give you access to that if you have a livejournal account. But I still don’t dare to make the whole thing publicly accessible. There’s lots of, um… unflattering stuff in there. Unflattering to me, and to some of the people I know.
I’m glad to hear from you again too! hugs :)
Do I need to friend you in order to see your livejournal? I’m nancylebov over there.
Yes, I need to friend you in order for you to see my livejournal. And so far I only friend people who are, um… actual friends. Would you like to be an actual friend? Or were you just curious about the journal?
I’m just curious about the journal. I’m not sure whether I want to be an actual friend, though you seem like an interesting person.
I checked out your recent LiveJournal posts. You seem like an interesting person too, someone who I would like as a friend.
I went ahead and added you as a friend on LJ. I guess I should warn you that the journal is full of gratuitous self-disclosure. I write about literally anything that I feel like writing about. And the quantifiedself experiment means that I document literally everything I do, though I still don’t have much of a life, so this isn’t all that much.
Though I guess there’s no need for me to be so paranoid with these warnings, and no need for me to be so paranoid about who I give access to.
Just saw this; I’m interested in seeing the journal. My LJ username is squid314. I wouldn’t be an “actual friend” as in buy you stuff for your birthday, but I check my friends page every so often and respond to anything I find interesting.
I added you as a friend on LJ.
heh, now I’m going to have to write something in the journal about what I actually think of as the conditions for qualifying as an “actual friend”… but I guess I won’t try posting any more about that to this comment until I know what I actually want to say.
And I guess I might as well repeat the other warnings about the journal. I write about literally everything that seems even remotely worth writing about, and that’s lots of stuff, and most of it is boring. The journal contains X-rated content, and often TMI. And then there’s all the quantifiedself data, and the confusing system of tags and abbreviations...
Anyway, I guess you can see for yourself. Feedback is welcome.
random trivia: I prefer not to follow society’s annoying rules for being socially obligated to exchange gifts at specific times of the year. If anyone wants to something nice for me, please just donate to SIAI instead, or possibly some other charity of your choice.
Thanks, Peer.
Note to anyone else considering this: He is not kidding about it being huge, daunting, and unformatted. Not even a little.
You might want to mention that the journal is rather nsfw/x-rated, tho.
hehe, yes, that too, thanks :)
actually, I think I set up the LJ account to automatically give an “Adult content” warning.
lol, and so far I’ve been getting away with writing it while at work, including some of the x-rated stuff...
My main reason for not commenting more often was because I was afraid that… hmm… I made a few attempts to finish this sentence, but so far all of them triggered one of the excuse-generating modules that I’ve noticed in my brain. So maybe I’ll just leave that sentence unfinished. Basically, I was afraid that posting more comments would somehow have net negative utility, for reasons that it turns out don’t actually make sense.
So I guess I’ll start posting anything I think is relevant, until I start getting downvotes. Rather than asking here about whether specific things would be a bad idea (copypasting stream-of-thought comments I wrote while I was reading a LW article, without bothering to erase bits I later realize don’t make sense?), I’ll just go ahead and post until I start getting downvotes. I have a bad habit of overestimating the badness of negative feedback. Even if karma isn’t a perfectly accurate measurement of whether my comments are having a positive or negative effect, it’s still a reasonably useful approximation, so I’ll go ahead and just try to maximize my total karma, rather then preemptively panicking about any post that I suspect might get downvoted… which is pretty much any comment I could possibly make...
And then there’s the Umeshism “If you’ve never posted a comment that got downvoted, your comments are boring”, or would that be “If you’ve never posted a comment that got downvoted, you’re not posting enough comments”?
Then there’s the question of how much time to spend reviewing and tweaking my comments, but I guess karma can answer that too.
Then there’s the question of whether to treat a zero-karma post as actually having negative value, just cluttering the comments thread… that seems like a more difficult question.
I’ve been following Eliezer since shortly after he started posting to SL4. Back then I went by the name “observer”.
Oh, and I donate lots of money to SIAI. The past couple years it was between $6000 and $7000 (about 20% of my income), but I plan to donate more from now on. This year I pledged $20,000 (over 60% of this year’s income), and I might not even need to take money out of savings in order to pay this. Seriously. I’m a hardcore Singularitarian. A Yudkowsky Singularitarian, not a Kurzweil Singularitarian.
And yes, I like the word “Singularitarian” :)
I have a user page on the Less Wrong wiki
I also have a user page on the Transhumanist Wiki
vote down this comment if you disapprove of this method of using subcomments to get more targeted upvotes and downvotes. I was about to request that noone upvote this comment, but on second thought, that’s silly. Upvote if you want. I could make separate comments if I wanted to track upvotes and downvotes separately, but past experience has shown that there aren’t likely to be enough total votes for that to be worthwhile.
vote down this comment if there is anything at all you don’t like about anything I’ve written here:
Using lots of words to say something that should be simple
wasting words talking about things that I was about to say, but already realized were silly
general whinyness or needyness
parenthetical comments
run-on sentences
incompletely thought-out ideas
not bothering to use the special syntax for making clickable links
poor spelling and/or grammar
minor or not-so-minor typos
posting too much off-topic stuff in what’s supposed to be a thread for people to just say “hi”
the order these subcomments appear in on the page
general incoherence or incomprehensibility
general insecurity
this list being too long
anything else that you personally dislike
oh, and didn’t mean to put the emphasis entirely on voting. Comments would be more helpful than votes, so please comment if there’s anything you want to ask or comment about.
As a matter of dubiousness which on the edge of dislike: using upvotes and downvotes rather than encouraging conversation.
lol, I knew there would be something I didn’t think of to add to the list, thanks. comment upvoted :)
er… wait… did I actually discourage conversation?
I’m not sure that you actually discouraged conversation, but you put so much emphasis on voting that I felt as though conversation was falling off the agenda.
ok, thanks, I’ll add a note to those other comments mentioning that conversation is encouraged.
comment upvoted :)