I vaguely appreciate the sentiment but the analogy doesn’t sit right with me. In a real tournament, one doesn’t just up and choose which bracket to play in—you land in the loser’s bracket by losing your first x games. It is right and proper to continue playing in the loser’s bracket to the best of your ability.
alkjash
Karma: 5,465
Training PhD Students to be Fat Newts (Part 2)
Training PhD Students to be Fat Newts (Part 1)
Continuity
Dipole Nature
I am Chinese American, my parents are as pro-CCP as they come, and celebrate plenty of other “bad things happening to America,” and I know lots of Chinese Americans. As far as I recall, most of us were not particularly affected by the incident but I don’t recall a single person celebrating, or speaking positively of the event after the fact. I am sure they exist but skeptical that it is as widespread as you say.
The way I feel about this reply is “I am an adaptation-executor, not a fitness optimizer”? Your reading is a perfectly valid psychoanalysis of my perfectionism around comments sections and compulsions to reply, but as far as I recall my internal dialogue stopped at “this is quite a tiresome minor emergency, I will have to tread several steps more carefully than usual in replying.”
Let me reiterate that my previous reply is expanding on the reasons I personally found interacting with Said difficult. None of our conversations were remotely ban-worthy behavior.
Am I correct in stating that the main reason it is unpleasant and scary is because you felt socially threatened in those moments? As in, your standing in the social group you considered LessWrong to be, and that you considered that you were a part of? And a part of the obligation to reply involved a feeling of wanting to defend yourself and your standing in the group, especially since a gigantic part of what gives someone status in a sphere like LW is your intellectual ability, or your ability to be right, or to not look dumb at the very least?
This may be a relevant factor, and I can be rightfully accused of being too status-conscious and neurotic about such things, but I don’t think it’s really the issue. For one, I honestly expect to come out of most interactions with Said having won status points, not lost them.
One of the main reasons is his general snideness. Let me try to spell out a couple things.
1. I unfortunately inhabit and am socially adjusted to a huge swath of the world where the discourse norms require that [nothing that could be perceived as negative/directly contradictory is ever said publicly of anyone]. I come to LW to take a cold shower once in a while, to be woken up from the hostile epistemic jungle I live in. Within this analogy, afaict Said operates under the norm that absolute zero is the perfect temperature, and that’s a little too cold for me.
In any other culture/relationship I participate in, if someone communicated to me in the style that Said takes, for example making a literature search through my published work and making point-by-point rebuttals of claims therein, it would be an extreme shock (now I recognize that this exact example is extremely unfair as he is responding to my direct negative characterization of his behavior, but imo the top-level post contains enough better examples). My mind would immediately jump to [this person is out to get me e.g. fired] or [I have really committed a catastrophic and irreversible error]. Over the years here, perhaps three quarters of my brain have acclimated to the idea that the discourse norms that LWers follow, and Said follows extremely, is a reasonable way to have a conversation, and the other quarter is still screaming in terror.
2. On another level, I personally relate to LW as a casual forum for truth-seeking-related banter, emphasis on the word casual. Especially as someone who emphasizes [originality] and [directional correctness] over [correctness per se], I find the conversations that Said leads me into to be hostile to the way I think out loud. I like to have conversations where we both toss back and forth 99 vaguely truthy-sounding ideas and one of them happens to be a deep insight, and the other 98 are irrelevant or verifiably false and immediately brushed under the rug. However, if I try to converse with Said like this, every comment I make is directed into an scrutinization of the 98 irrelevant/false things. In my world, if I have produced one true, interesting insight in all of this, I’ve made progress. In my model of Said’s, I have sinned 98 times.
I do realize point 2 is not the way LW is intended to operate, and this mode of banter is absolutely not compatible with serious discussions of people’s long-term reputations with consequences on the level of multi-year banning. Let nobody ever give me moderator privileges beyond my personal blog. I am not using this frame at all to justify said banning. I am only using it to explain why I personally prefer it.
I am surprised there are so few—perhaps in that calculation I was mistakingly tracking some comments you made in other posts that I didn’t directly participate in.
Nevertheless, every single example you bring up above was in fact unpleasant for me, some substantially so—while reasonable conclusions were reached (and in many cases I found the discussion fruitful in the end), the tone in your comments was one that put me on edge and sucked up a lot of my mental energy. I had the feeling that to interact with you at all was to an invitation to be drawn into an vortex of fact-checking and quibbling (as this current conversation is a small example of).It is not surprising to me that you find all of these conversations unobjectionable. To me, your entrance to my comment threads was a minor emergency. To you, it was Tuesday.
I stand by the claim that a plurality of my unpleasant interactions on this site involved you—this is not a high bar. I do not recall another user with whom I had more than one.I remain confused as to whether banning you is the correct move for the health of the site in general. The point I was trying to make was along the lines of [for a class of writers like alkjash, removing Said Achmiz from LessWrong makes us feel more relaxed about posting].
It’s been many years since I’ve been active on LW, but while I was, Said was the source of a plurality of my unpleasant interactions on this site. Many other commenters leveraged serious criticisms of my writing, but only Said consistently ruined my day while doing so.
I cannot say whether this decision was right in the end, but will attest that seeing this post made me happy.
I’m still here occasionally, best of luck expanding (which is maybe importantly different from going outside?) that comfort zone!
I appreciate the effort but am hoping to solve this problem in an afternoon (if not five minutes) and forget about it, instead of acquiring the correct language to think about things or a full theory of diet and nutrition.
My thought process goes like: on most weekdays I sure wish I could skip breakfast and/or lunch and only have one sit-down meal with my family in the evening. Time savings and convenience are the main concerns I suppose.
The first solution that came to mind was to try Soylent/Mealsquares/Huel for a month and cross my fingers, 50⁄50 it just goes well and solves the problem. I posted to see if there were any obvious considerations I was missing, or clear standout options to try first.
Pre-made frozen meals and protein bars are also plausibly acceptable meal replacement options.
On a first pass frozen meals register as bulky and hard to store a month of at a time, and not something I’d bring to work. I’ve also never had an item I can imagine stomaching every day.
Protein bars seem mostly fine, but my vibe check is that meal replacements are basically enlightened protein bars? Like, maybe the nutrition profile is better and they are packaged in sizes more suitable for full meals?
[Question] Meal Replacements in 2025?
I don’t disagree with what you’re saying about theoretically rational agents. I think the content of my post was [there are a bunch of circumstances in which humans are systematically irrational, sunk cost fallacy is on net a useful corrective heuristic in those circumstances. Attempting to make rational decisions via explicit legible calculations will in practice underperform just following the heuristic.]
To spell out a bit more, imagine my mood swings cause a large random error term to be added to all explicit calculations. Then if the decision process is to drop a project altogether at any point where my calculations say the project is doomed, then I will drop a lot of projects that are not actually doomed.
I still don’t understand. Your valuation of the project will still change over time as information actually gets revealed though. The probability the project will turn out worthwhile can fluctuate.
I don’t follow. As a project progresses it seems common to acquire new information and continuously update your valuation of the project.
I taught game theory at Princeton and wish I’d seen this explanation beforehand, excellent framing.
This is a point against the analogy, I agree.