(I have signed no contracts or agreements whose existence I cannot mention, which I am mentioning here as a canary)
Drake Morrison
Karma: 826
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name three examples.
(You’ve said you didn’t want to get into this, so I’d consider it understandable if you don’t. Maybe that’s a later post you intend to write, or have already written? I just want to push back a bit on the implicit consensus of “community elites” without examples)
Immediate taxonomy of subskills that came to mind:
designing for consumers vs designing for producers
technical breadth vs technical depth
managing up vs managing down
Physical strength vs physical dexterity
Dang it, now I wanna read/write posts for all of these
You’re referring to the Vickrey-Clarke-Groves mechanism?
I ended up here in desperation after trying a couple of other ways to write up my thoughts as posts. I tried narrating, stream-of-consciousness style, into Claude hoping it would help me, but then it wrote a whole essay itself. It was too much Claude, and not enough me. I didn’t like it. I did find the structuring work that Claude did useful, so I asked it to do this instead. I found it much easier to respond to questions that are already structured than to extemporize right out of my head the heap of chaotic thoughts about a topic.
The original, best interface for using a computer. The terminal! Let’s go back to when computers were good, and you didn’t have to bother with that stupid mouse accessory.
I agree it seems bad for a quick take to immediately collapse if as few as five people downvote, but I do think the downvotes mean something important.
I don’t want to hesitate to downvote a quick take that I think should be downvoted.
Would it make sense to have the auto-collapse happen after 24 hours? Or perhaps a time-discounted thing based on number of votes?
I like the collapse feature in general, and think it’s great for hiding bad comments/not drowning bad comments in downvotes.
Here’s my vote for Epistemic Roguelikes. It seems like a riskier path, but with a lot more upside.
I really like A Crisper Explanation of Simulacrum Levels as another way to explain simulacrum levels.
I found this to be the most concrete post from the feedbackloop-first rationality sequence. I really appreciated the empiricist sort of frame of actually going out and trying to do a simple toy experiment to test some assumptions. Hope is blinding, and I remember more often to double-check my thinking for it after reading this post.
I consider this idea essential social technology on the level of “the map is not the territory.” super basic, but it’s everywhere once you learn to see it. I think about and make use of this concept on a weekly basis. Definitely seems worthy of consideration for Best Of to me.
I think Inkhaven is aiming at quality via the pathway of quantity. See the experiment by Jerry Uelsmann[1]
Seem like ripe opportunities for posts
Nitter thread (don’t need to sign in to Twitter)
https://nitter.tiekoetter.com/DKokotajlo/status/1992316608073847201
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.
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.
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!
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.
jeweler’s loupe
small tape-measurer
monocular
lifting straps for moving furniture