Drake Morrison

Karma: 367

Drake Morrison 27 Sep 2025 6:25 UTC
12 points
3
on: CFAR update, and New CFAR workshops
For grounding data, I keep thinking of Shop Class as Soulcraft by Matthew Crawford. Doing some kind of wood-carving or pottery or painting or sketching animals on nature walks, or something like that seems well-advised. Also works as a toy problem to practice new skills on.

Drake Morrison 14 Sep 2025 0:15 UTC
1 point
0
in reply to: soycarts’s comment on: Visionary arrogance and a criticism of LessWrong voting
I agree, but I feel that there is a distinct imbalance where a post can take hours of effort, and be cast aside with a 10-second vibe check and 1 second “downvote click”.
You don’t get points for effort. Just for value.
One way to think of it is like you are selling some food in a market. Your potential buyers don’t care if the food took you 7 hours or 7 minutes to make, they care how good it tastes, and how expensive it is. The equivalent for something like an essay is how useful/insightful/interesting your ideas is, and how difficult/annoying/time-consuming it is to read.
You can decrease the costs (shorter, easy-to-follow, humor), but eventually you can’t decrease them any more and your only option is to increase the value. And well, increasing the value can be hard.

Drake Morrison 13 Sep 2025 17:10 UTC
7 points
3
on: Visionary arrogance and a criticism of LessWrong voting
I want to say something like, you are not owed attention on your post just because it is written with good logic. That’s sort of harsh, but I do think that you have to earn the reader’s trust. People downvote for all sorts of reasons, not all of them are because of some logical mistake you made, sometimes it’s just because the post is not relevant, or seems elementary, or isn’t written well, or doesn’t engage with previous work.
I can understand getting unexplained downvotes being demoralizing, but demanding people spend more of their own effort and time to engage with you is a losing proposition. You have to make it worth their time.
But, I’m feeling generous today and I’ll try and write some of my thoughts anyway.
I found this post confusing to read, and had to go back and re-read the whole thing after reading it the first time to understand what you were even saying. For example one of the first sentences:
On this post I will intentionally try to illustrate how I would see my recommendation playing out:

And yet, I don’t know what your recommendation even is yet. Take some time to explain your recommendation, and why I should care first, then I know what you’re talking about in this section.
There are similar sorts of problems all over the piece with assumptions that aren’t justified, jumping around tonally between sections, and mixing up explaining the problem with your preferred solution. It’s just not a well-written piece, or so I judged it.
Hopefully that helps!

Drake Morrison 20 Aug 2025 2:27 UTC
2 points
2
in reply to: cata’s comment on: Debugging for Mid Coders
One of the most useful things I did as a junior dev was to literally read the entire language spec for javascript. Searching for articles that explained anything I didn’t understand. I think this strategy of actually trying to read all the docs the way you’d read a textbook is underrated for tools you are going to be using often.

Drake Morrison 31 Jul 2025 4:47 UTC
4 points
1
on: My Empathy Is Rarely Kind
Kudos for bravely posting, despite knowing how it makes you look/how people will misunderstand.

Drake Morrison 26 Jul 2025 8:41 UTC
2 points
0
in reply to: aphyer’s comment on: English writes numbers backwards
Good example. This leads me to wonder, if we were starting from scratch, whether the relations between numbers (as you’ve demonstrated here), or the positional notation, would make for a better optimization target for numeral systems.

Drake Morrison 26 Jul 2025 8:20 UTC
2 points
4
in reply to: Said Achmiz’s comment on: English writes numbers backwards
We write numbers left to right in digits the same way we write numbers left to right in words.
This is addressed in the post. You would write the words differently to match the left-right inversion.
Having to look at an entire glyph sequence before knowing what the first glyph means is not unique to numbers. Words are like that, too.
I agree with you here. However, I don’t think it works as an argument against optimizing a numeral system to be different.
This proposal is unmotivated and unnecessary.
Where’s your sense of fun? The post explicitly calls itself out as being an unrealistic proposal. Maybe it feels unnecessary to you (which is totally fine and cool), but I don’t see how a post about optimizing our numeral system is “unnecessary”

Drake Morrison 26 Jul 2025 1:05 UTC
1 point
0
in reply to: sjadler’s comment on: lcmgcd’s Shortform
I would guess something like historical momentum is the reason people keep using it. Nicholas Shackel coined the term in 2005, then it got popularized in 2014 from SSC. 20 years is a long time for people to be using the term.

Drake Morrison 24 Jul 2025 3:09 UTC
3 points
0
in reply to: Viliam’s comment on: Drake Morrison’s Shortform
Seems like that’s easily fixable by having the numerator be most upvotes on a single post/comment, or your total upvotes, whichever is higher.

Drake Morrison 20 Jul 2025 18:48 UTC
13 points
10
in reply to: Said Achmiz’s comment on: “Some Basic Level of Mutual Respect About Whether Other People Deserve to Live”?!
Hmm, seems like I didn’t communicate well enough. Trying again.

I believe you understand and disagree with his point. I also believe you think his analogy is bad. When I first read your reply I thought you were disagreeing because of/due to the disanalogies, and for no other reason. I no longer think this.

Your disagreement of his point, and your critique of his analogy felt very mixed together. Which like, he’s using the analogy to explicate his point for a reason, so fair. But there’s something like a difference between using an analogy as supporting argument, and using an analogy just to point at the thing.
If you desire another analogy, most computer traffic is not malware or exploits, nevertheless it sure really matters a lot whether your specific message is malware or some kind of exploit.
As far as I can tell your comment doesn’t address this point directly? I’m asking for something like a clearer distinction between disagreeing with his point, and critiquing the analogy. Especially in this case where I don’t think the particulars of the analogy where central to his point.

Drake Morrison 20 Jul 2025 17:26 UTC
11 points
−8
in reply to: Said Achmiz’s comment on: “Some Basic Level of Mutual Respect About Whether Other People Deserve to Live”?!
I agree that norms around physical touch are different from norms around speech. I think it’s a decent but not perfect analogy, intended primarily to convey the structure of my argument, not as a social precedent in support of it. Feel free to choose from any other domain with asymmetricly large costs where much value is lost and costly differential signaling is required, even without the domain consisting “predominantly” of the costs.
Er, you’re the one making the analogy, so surely it’s up to you to choose a better example, not your interlocutor…
I agree he could have chosen a better example. But like, are you trying to understand Habryka? Or are you just trying to litigate proper use of analogies? Your comment reads to me as 20% responding to his point, and 80% litigation. This sort of thing feels like an advanced version of arguing about definitions instead of just tabooing the word and talking about the underlying point each person is trying to make.

Drake Morrison 18 Jul 2025 20:36 UTC
3 points
0
in reply to: Viliam’s comment on: Drake Morrison’s Shortform
I think that acts as a slight incentive against demon threads, which seems good to me.
I do think it would be valuable if you could easily get the ratio of people upvoting to people seeing a comment and not upvoting. But you are also not counting against it the ratio of people downvoting to people seeing a comment and not downvoting, so maybe it balances out?

Drake Morrison 18 Jul 2025 20:23 UTC
0 points
−2
on: “Some Basic Level of Mutual Respect About Whether Other People Deserve to Live”?!
Downvoted because title felt too much like clickbait

Drake Morrison 18 Jul 2025 2:12 UTC
1 point
0
on: Drake Morrison’s Shortform
When I think of high quality, I tend to think of a high signal to noise ratio. This got me thinking, why isn’t karma [net upvotes / number of posts and comments]? Upvotes are relatively good measure of signal, but I don’t only care about lots of signal, I also care about an absence of noise to wade through.

Thoughts?

Drake Morrison 11 Jul 2025 1:19 UTC
3 points
0
in reply to: Buck’s comment on: Buck’s Shortform
I have long thought that I should focus on learning history with a recency bias, since knowing about the approximate present screens off events of the past.

Drake Morrison 9 Jul 2025 2:44 UTC
6 points
4
on: Subway Particle Levels Aren’t That High
Kudos for going through the effort of replicating!

Drake Morrison 4 Jul 2025 17:35 UTC
3 points
0
on: Open Thread—Summer 2025
I put together a little song that feels fitting for july 4th in america: https://suno.com/s/6EuRMXbG0on8vGIX
Bonus points to those who recognize where the lyrics came from.

Drake Morrison 2 Jul 2025 3:51 UTC
10 points
0
on: “What’s my goal?”
I really like this! A lot of the value I got out of the Sequences and related writings was written similarly, e.g., Hold Off On Proposing Solutions, The Map Is Not The Territory, Hug the Query.
This also reminds me of glowfic!Bella’s three questions (what do I want? What do I have? How can I use the latter to get the former?) when orienting in new situations.

Drake Morrison 20 Jun 2025 17:28 UTC
3 points
0
in reply to: habryka’s comment on: [Meta] New moderation tools and moderation guidelines
Agreed. I was trying to point out how refusing to be friendly, even from a cynical point of view, is counterproductive.

Drake Morrison 20 Jun 2025 16:38 UTC
9 points
0
in reply to: Said Achmiz’s comment on: [Meta] New moderation tools and moderation guidelines
First: no, it absolutely is a “major weakness in people” that they prefer to avoid engaging with relevant criticism merely on the basis of the “tone”, “valence”, etc., of the critics’ words. It is, in fact, a huge weakness. Overcoming this particular bias is one of the single biggest personal advances in epistemic rationality that one can make.
Or put another way, “Your strength as a rationalist is the extent to which it takes more Charisma to persuade you of false things, and less Charisma to persuade you of true things”

I do think many people could be served by trying to find the truth in harsh criticisms, to wonder if part of the sting is the recognition the critic was right. You’re example of ArsDigita was quite helpful in getting a concrete demonstration of the value of that kind of critique.

The thing is, Greenspun failed.
People are not empty-machines of perfect reasoning. There’s an elephant in our brains. If the critique is to land, if it is to change someone’s mind or behavior, it has to get through to the elephant.
Second: you imply a false dichotomy between the “improv session” sort of faux-criticism I describe, and “exuding disgust and contempt”. Those are not the only options! It is entirely possible to criticize someone’s ideas, very harshly, while exhibiting (and experiencing) no significant emotionally-valenced judgment of the person themselves.
Indeed. It is also possible (I claim) to give pointed criticism while remaining friendly. The elephant doesn’t like it when words look like they come from an enemy. If you fail to factor in the elephant, and your critique doesn’t land, that is your own mistake. Just as they have failed to see the value of the critique, you have failed to see the weight of the elephant.
The executives and other board members of ArsDigita failed, but if Greenspun could have kept their ear by being friendlier, and thereby increased the chances of changing their minds or behavior, Greenspun also failed at rationality.
If it is rational to seek the truth of criticism even when it hurts, then it is also rational to deliver your criticism in a friendly way that will actually land. Or put another way, your strength as a rationalist is the extent to which it takes less Wisdom to notice your plans will fail.