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Or you can email me, at [the second letter of the alphabet]@[my username].net
A thing I sort-of hoped to see in the “a few caveats” section:
* People’s boundaries do not emanate purely from their platonic selves, irrespective of the culture they’re in and the boundaries set by that culture. Related to the point about grooming/testing-the-waters, if the cultural boundary is set at a given place, people’s personal boundaries will often expand or retract somewhat, to be nearer to the cultural boundary.
I got 4 out of six people in my group house, plus two others, to apply for a lease in a new and probably-better house! In order to do this I spent probably forty hours in the last month, searching rental listings, reaching out to people, and trying to accommodate people’s often-contradictory preferences.
At one point I wrote a program to determine, given a collection of people larger than the number of rooms, and their maximum prices for each room in a house (which are allowed to be conditional on who else is in the house), whether any subset of that group would be able to afford the house. This script was about a hundred lines of python, and after fixing one typo it ran perfectly on the first try. This happens to me pretty often these days when I write python code, and I’m fucking pleased about it. Like, maybe ten years ago I set out to be a master wizard in one particular specialization (“writing programs to solve practical problems”) and yeah, I can just really do that kind of magic now. It just feels like “part of me” in a really exhilarating way.
I think that neither of your examples is correctly using the reversal test. IMO, two different versions of the reversal test are useful: the marginal reversal test, and the counterfactual reversal test.
Marginal version: “So you don’t think that increasing your body temperature a small amount is good—do you think decreasing it a small amount would be good? If not, can you explain why your current state is optimal?”
Counterfactual version: “So you don’t think that increasing your body temperature by 50 degrees would be good? Would you still think that if your body temperature had always been 50 degrees higher, and we were talking about decreasing it 50 degrees?”
I think in both cases the reversal tester correctly loses the argument. I also think that they both do a good job of helping to decide where to find the interesting bits of argument.
If I got to pick the moral of today’s Petrov day incident, it would be something like “being trustworthy requires that you be more difficult to trick than it would be worth”, and I think very few people reliably live up to this standard.
For contingent evolutionary-psychological reasons, humans are innately biased to prefer “their own” ideas, and in that context, a “principle of charity” can be useful as a corrective heuristic
I claim that the reasons for this bias are, in an important sense, not contingent. i.e. an alien race would almost certainly have similar biases, and the forces in favor of this bias won’t entirely disappear in a world with magically-different discourse norms (at least as long as speakers’ identities are attached to their statements).
As soon as I’ve said “P”, it is the case that my epistemic reputation is bound up with the group’s belief in the truth of P. If people later come to believe P, it means that (a) whatever scoring rule we’re using to incentivize good predictions in the first place will reward me, and (b) people will update more on things I say in the future.
If you wanted to find convincing evidence for P, I’m now a much better candidate to find that evidence than someone who has instead said “eh; maybe P?” And someone who has said “~P” is similarly well-incentivized to find evidence for ~P.
I think it’s pretty rough for me to engage with you here, because you seem to be consistently failing to read the things I’ve written. I did not say it was low-effort. I said that it was possible. Separately, you seem to think that I owe you something that I just definitely do not owe you. For the moment, I don’t care whether you think I’m arguing in bad faith; at least I’m reading what you’ve written.
Recently I tried to use Google to learn about the structure of the human nasal cavity & sinuses, and it seems to me that somehow medical illustrators haven’t talked much to mechanical draftspeople. Just about every medical illustration I could find tried to use colors to indicate structure, and only gave a side-view (or occasionally a front view) of the region. In almost none of the illustrations was it clear which parts of your nasal cavity and sinuses are split down the middle of your head, vs joined together. I still feel pretty in-the-dark about it.
In drafting, you express 3d figures by drawing a set of multiple projections: Typically, you give a top view, a front view, and a side view (though other views, including cross-sections and arbitrary isometric perspective, may be useful or necessary). This lets you give enough detail that a (practiced) viewer can reconstruct a good mental model of the object, so that they can (for example) use their machine shop to produce the object out of raw material.
There’s a pretty fun puzzle game that lets you practice this skill called ”.projekt”; there are probably lots more.
A while ago, Duncan Sabien wrote a Facebook post about a thing he called “aliveness”, and presented it on a single spectrum with something called “chillness”. At the time I felt that aliveness seemed sort of like obviously-the-good-one, and like I was obviously-bad-for-being-more-chill, and I felt sad because I think there were a lot of pressures when I was younger to optimize for chillness.
But recently I’ve been in a couple of scenarios that have changed my views on this. I now think that aliveness and chillness aren’t quite opposite ends of the same axis in person space. It seems instead like they’re anticorrelated features of a given person in a given situation, and many people live their lives with a nearly-fixed level of each. But there are also people who can control their levels of aliveness or chillness, as the situation demands.
And it isn’t the case that chillness is worse. I think it is much, much easier to coordinate large groups of chill people than not-chill people. I think that these people can also definitely be “alive” in the relevant way.
My intuitive feeling is that this ability to control your chillness and aliveness is strongly related to “leadership qualities”. And, at least for me, noticing that these might not be opposite ends of a fixed spectrum makes me feel a lot more hopeful about the possibility to grow in aliveness-capability.
One friend pointed out that you might be able to avoid some of the pitfalls by releasing something like an open source desktop application that requires you to feed it a database of information. Then you could build databases like this in lots of different ways, including anonymous ones or crowdsourced ones. And in this case it might become a lot harder to claim that the creator of the application is liable for anything. I might actually want to talk to a lawyer about this kind of thing, if the lawyer was willing to put on a sort of “engineering” mindset to help me figure out how you might make this happen without getting sued. So if you know anyone like that, I’d be pretty interested
As long as I’m using shortform posts to make feature requests, it would be really useful to me to have access to a feed (of shortform posts, normal posts, or both) where I could select which users I see. Right now I come to LessWrong and have a hard time deciding which posts I care about—lots of people here have lots of interests and lots of different standards for content quality, some of which I find actively annoying. Allowing me to build feeds from custom lists of selected users would let me filter by both shared interests and how valuable I typically find those users’ posts. I don’t think “who is in my custom feed” should be public like it is on Facebook, but Facebook circa 2012 gave me a lot of control over this via friend lists, and I miss the days when that feature was prioritized.
I also like the way lobste.rs solves this problem for some users, although I think the solution above would be better for me personally: every post comes with a selection from a group of site-wide tags, and users can filter their home page based on which tags they want to see.
Great survey!
However, when you save your progress and are asked to save a password, there’s no indication that it will be sent to you in an email or saved at all in recoverable form. I used my least-secure password generation algorithm anyway, but: Do you think you could add a note to the effect that users should not use passwords that they use elsewhere?
Nor should I, unless I believe that someone somewhere might honestly reconsider their position based on such an attempt. So far my guess is that you’re not saying that you expect to honestly reconsider your position, and Said certainly isn’t. If that’s wrong then let me know! I don’t make a habit of starting doomed projects.
My guess is that you believe it’s impossible because the content of your comment implies a negative fact about the person you’re responding to. But insofar as you communicated a thing to me, it was in fact a thing about your own failure to comprehend, and your own experience of bizarreness. These are not unflattering facts about Duncan, except insofar as I already believe your ability to comprehend is vast enough to contain all “reasonable” thought processes.
I really think LessWrong would benefit by giving users avatars. I think this would make the site much more visually appealing, but I also think it would vastly decrease the cognitive load required to read threaded conversations.
There should really be a system that does what WebMD tried to do, but actually does it well.
You’d put in your symptoms and background info (e.g. what country you live in, your age), it would ask you clarifying questions (“how bad is the pain from 1 to 10?” “which of these patterns is most like the rash?” “Do you have a family history of heart disease?”) and then it would give you a posterior distribution over possible conditions, and a guess about whether you should go to the emergency room or whatever.
Is this just much harder than I’m imagining it would be? It seems like the kind of thing where you could harvest likelihood ratios and put them all into a big database. Is there some regulatory thing where you can’t practically offer this service because it’s illegal to give medical advice or something?
By that measure, my comment does not qualify as an insult. (And indeed, as it happens, I wouldn’t call it “an insult”; but “insulting” is slightly different in connotation, I think. Either way, I don’t think that my comment may fairly be said to have these qualities which you list.
I think I disagree that your comment does not have these qualities in some measure, and they are roughly what I’m objecting to when I ask that people not be insulting. I don’t think I want you to never say anything with an unflattering implication, though I do think this is usually best avoided as well. I’m hopeful that this is a crux, as it might explain some of the other conversation I’ve seen about the extent to which you can predict people’s perception of rudeness.
There are of course more insulting ways you could have conveyed the same meaning. But there are also less insulting ways (when considering the extent to which the comment emphasizes the unflatteringness and the call to action that I’m suggesting readers will infer).
Certainly there’s no “call to non-belief-based action”…!)
I believe that none was intended, but I also expect that people (mostly subconsciously!) interpret (a very small) one from the particular choice of words and phrasing. Where the action is something like “you should scorn this person”, and not just “this person has unflattering quality X”. The latter does not imply the former.
For what it’s worth, I don’t think that one should never say insulting things. I think that people should avoid saying insulting things in certain contexts, and that LessWrong comments are one such context.
I find it hard to square your claim that insultingness was not the comment’s purpose with the claim that it cannot be rewritten to elide the insult.
An insult is not simply a statement with a meaning that is unflattering to its target—it involves using words in a way that aggressively emphasizes the unflatteringness and suggests, to some extent, a call to non-belief-based action on the part of the reader.
If I write a comment entirely in bold, in some sense I cannot un-bold it without changing its effect on the reader. But I think it would be pretty frustrating to most people if I then claimed that I could not un-bold it without changing its meaning.
Hm. On doing exactly as you suggest, I feel confused; it looks to me like the 25-44 cohort has really substantially more deaths than in recent years: https://www.dropbox.com/s/hcipg7yiuiai8m2/Screen Shot 2022-01-16 at 2.12.44 PM.png?dl=0 I don’t know what your threshold for “significance” is, but 103 / 104 weeks spent above the preceding 208 weeks definitely meets my bar.
Am I missing something here?
This nicely explains why I feel so embarrassed when I learn that someone I’m talking with is more knowledgeable than I thought. I wonder how to avoid subconscious overconfidence- / humility-projecting.
It might work to add a TAP for thinking “if this person were much more/less knowledgeable than me, would I have the same presentation in this conversation?”
I want to register that I don’t believe you that you cannot, if we’re using the ordinary meaning of “cannot”. I believe that it would be more costly for you, but it seems to me that people are very often able to express content like that in your comment, without being insulting.
I’m tempted to try to rephrase your comment in a non-insulting way, but I would only be able to convey its meaning-to-me, and I predict that this is different enough from its meaning-to-you that you would object on those grounds. However, insofar as you communicated a thing to me, you could have said that thing in a non-insulting way.