Just this guy, you know?
Dagon
Karma: 7,134
I think two mistakes in your friend’s model. The first is simple over-correction—seeing one instance and believing that’s universal. The second is over-simplification, which is what you’re pointing at with this post. People are complex, and most social decisions are heavily context-dependent. Some people get away with things that others don’t. the very concept of “norm” is named for “normal”, and is about the median/center of a set of behaviors. Forgetting that people are actually on many distributions, which can have pretty long tails, is the error.
Thanks. My intent was to dissuade people from taking the post as “these are conditions you should cold-contact people on LW” (which is how I interpreted it), by pointing out that I’d prefer not to be contacted at all, even with the recommended information.
The concept of cost requires alternatives. What do you cost, compared to the same universe with someone else in your place? very little. What do you cost, compared to no universe at all? you cost the universe.
I wonder if the confusion isn’t about implications of consequentialism, but about the implications of independent agents. Related to the (often mentioned, but never really addressed) problem that humans don’t have a CEV, and we have competition built-in to our (inconsistent) utility functions.
I have yet to see a model of multiple agents WRT “alignment”. The ONLY reason that power/resources/self-preservation is instrumental is if there are unaligned agents in competition. If multiple agents agree on the best outcomes and the best way to achieve them, then it doesn’t matter which agent does what, or even which agent(s) exist.
Fully-aligned agents are really just multiple processing cores of one agent.It’s when we talk about partial-alignment that we go off the rails. In this case, we should address competition and tradeoffs as actual things the agent(s) have to consider.
obXKCD already linked, so I don’t need to do that, good. I like that you’re coming to the same conclusion from a different direction: you don’t want to improve their models or “fix” the wrongness on behalf of someone else, you just want to learn and improve your own model (ok, probably all of the above, but focusing on internal knowledge).
> my arguing is a limited resource.This generalizes. Your thinking is a limited resource. Some discussions on the internet (or in person, for that matter) are more valuable than the next-best thing you could do. Many are not.
Of course, there’s a search cost, too—the debate in front of you may “waste” more time than reading a good book or finding a better forum/topic to join, or building a new toy on your rPi or whatever else you could be doing. But it doesn’t “waste” time in figuring out what to do, or where/what the better topics are. I don’t have a good solution for that problem, other than to notice when your current activity is not satisfying and consider the alternatives.
I’m surprised that this is a controversial comment − 8 votes for a net of 0!
Ah, that’s important context. Putting your contact info on your public website is an invitation to be contacted. It’s probably best to specify there (perhaps on a “contact me” page, which has your info AFTER this) under what conditions you’d like to connect.
Only skimmed, because it didn’t seem worth a lot of time at first glance. I didn’t see any acknowledgement or plan for the base purpose of a country: to enforce some level of cooperation within the borders and to keep other nations, criminal groups, or just individuals from taking members’ stuff or lives.
In other words, where does the force come from that defines and preserves property and bodily rights?
The experience on mobile is bad enough (clicking brings up windows that can’t be easily dismissed, wierd bugs where expanding a comment marks others as read, etc.) that this is a site that I just don’t read except on desktop.
Any generalizable rules you can think of about whom better not to cold message at all?
Yes. Contact people you see posting on sites with a norm for individual contact on random topics (I don’t know what those are, but I don’t think it’s LW). Contact people whose profile description asks you to contact them. Contact people if they post or comment that they’d like to be contacted.
Judgement call to contact people you have a comment exchange with that you want to explore further (I’d argue this isn’t “cold”).
Otherwise, leave them alone.
You can, of course, solicit contacts by setting up your profile and posting or shortform-ing that you’d like to be contacted. That’s way better than reaching out yourself to people you don’t have any reason to believe want that.Really, e-mail or DM on a site is ALMOST NEVER the right way to initiate “cold” contact. That’s what posts are for.
A hero is someone who suffers for a sympathetic cause. The suffering can be abstracted to ‘takes risk’ or ‘sacrifices something’, but the sympathy is mandatory. If the audience doesn’t think the cause is “good”, that’s not a hero, it’s a villain.
It doesn’t require success, or even reasonable hope of success, only the suffering and the sympathetic cause.Don’t be a hero. Instead, do what gives you the best world.
For me, I’d add 0: Don’t. A public note or post that something’s available for me to opt into is fine (in related forums), but otherwise leave me alone unless I’ve explicitly asked to be contacted.
Why are you specifying 100 or 0 value, and using fuzzy language like “acceptably small” for disvalue?
Is this based on “value” and “disvalue” being different dimensions, and thus incomparable? Wouldn’t you just include both in your prediction, and run it through your (best guess of) utility function and pick highest expectation, weighted by your probability estimate of which universe you’ll find yourself in?
I’m not actually sure where you would go if you were looking for the latter type of conversation. Anything come to mind for you?
Nope, but then I’m not looking for this, and I can’t quite identify WHY someone would look for this (with no geographic or in-person possibilities).
I was thinking that you can ballpark it and assume that something like 50% of the matches end up having a video call, and 1% of those end up being friends
This is the principal thing in an early-stage business plan / sketch. Write down your assumptions and unknowns, and figure out how to validate your beliefs. For most of these kinds of ideas, you should be optimizing for 5-10 attempts, and getting as much information from each. “Fail fast” is how this is often stated, but that’s not complete. “Fail legibly” would be better advice. Generate hypotheses about why people aren’t loving it, and find ways to test those ideas.
The app feels extremely side-project-y, so I wouldn’t expect people to be worried about data harvesting.
You don’t just need to assert that you’re not misusing data, you need to overcome the expectations that have been set by all the crappy chat/discussion/etc. sites in the world.
My prior is pretty high that SOMEONE is harvesting any data I give out. Whether it’s you, or the stalkers who’ve created an account and filled out every possible profile on your survey, or just the fact that I don’t like most people, and people is who your site attracts, I would only try it with burner info. And most people won’t bother with that.
Upvote for the post-mortem, and great happiness and congratulations for “did a thing”!
I think the “write a business plan already” is absolutely key here. And really, you often only need a business sketch, not a plan. What customers/developers have this need to connect, and why is this method any better than the hundreds of other community and discussion sites that exist?
What IS success for this? Number of surveys taken? Number of initial messages sent? Actual calls made? Long-term friendships formed that still stay in contact after 10 years? It’s easy to tell if it’s not successful if you don’t get many page views or initial uses. It’s not easy to tell if part of it is successful and needs expansion, or if it just doesn’t have as big an audience as you think,.Some people are really averse to talking to strangers on the internet. Other people are very eager to do so. Most are somewhere in between. But since there are so many developers out there, I only need that light blue group
That light blue group may be a VERY thin tail. I think “chatting with strangers over the internet” is probably NOT attractive to the vast majority of people, and software developers even less likely to want that. You also have the problem that this thing is poisoned by a few bad actors, and that happens SO frequently in other domains that it’s a fair assumption that if I give any contact information to a stranger, I’ll regret it.
I may be wrong, and there’s a significant market for this. But I’d expect you have to solve the problem of initial anonymous/blockable contact and reputation before your target market will even try it.
I think the biggest cause of societal decay is the fact that we’ve lost the ability to play to win on any game that can be criticized easily.
Why is that not Bayesian? The decision to bet is going to include a term for your counterparty’s willingness to bet, which is some evidence.
One way to overcome this in thought experiments is to frame it as a line with no spread, and no neutral option. At, say, 150k:1, which side would you bet? Then adjust to where you’d SET a line where you had to accept a wager on either side.
A few things that can help (which I do sometimes, but sometimes do just “waste” the interstitial periods).
Keep multiple task lists by granularity, or keep entries on your task list that can be done (or worked on) in short time periods with low cost to switch in or out of.
ABR: Always. Be. Reading/Researching. 15 minutes is enough to remove 1-5 browser “read later” bookmarks. Or enough to read a few more pages of my current novel or lightweight non-fiction.
I remember this confusion from Jr. High, many decades ago. I was lucky enough to have an approachable teacher who pointed me to books with more complete explanations, including the Strong Nuclear force and some details about why inverse-square doesn’t apply, making it able to overcome EM at very small distances, when you’d think EM is strongest.
I’m not sure how to use this advice/observation. I think the purposes for discussion, style and knowledge of participants, and social expectations of that particular setting vary pretty widely, and other than “make the implicit explicit” in terms of getting what you want from the interaction, there’s too much existing nuance to generalize advice like this.
I think this exemplifies my point. Except I think it’s the majority of conversations, and in my experience, the default. The exceptions are conversations explicitly trying to establish agreement on some topic or some other agreed purpose.