There is correlation between “being highly successful in real life” and “being able to avoid wasting time chattering away on the ’net”.
Quoting this because IMO it’s the most important of the lot. Almost all the people I think of as ‘old guard’ barely post anymore because they’re too busy working at CFAR and/or working on personal projects
Brief data point: I am female and I don’t have a problem with the tone as such. I don’t post much because I am put off by the high standards of thinking and argumentation required, but in general I approve of those standards being there and would hate to read the warm-fuzzy version of LW where bad/boring threads proliferate because people are worried about coming across as cold.
A semi-related point is that I like the general air of emotional detachment around here because in in the real world I often see expression of negative emotional reactions used as a relatively cheap form of manipulation, and I worry that encouraging open expression of emotions here (which is definitely a component of ‘warmness’ as I understand it) would cause a slippery slope effect where that kind of manipulation would become much more common.
Most people want to be sincerely praised. Someone who reads this post and applies it poorly is going to be saying praise while their body language says something else entirely. Or acting out of character for themselves, leading the reinforcee to suspect that the praise is insincere. Or they may go around praising seemingly everything, causing the reinforcee to interpret the praise as meaningless noise.
There are lots of ways for using praise as reinforcement to go wrong, and if someone is in one of those environments for long enough they will end up being conditioned to interpret praise as neutral or negative.
It sounds very much like you’re saying that no one would choose to be part of a minority culture if they weren’t forced into it by non-acceptance. If that is what you meant, wouldn’t that imply that destroying that minority culture is better than forcing people to continue being part of it?
Stolen generation isn’t relevant here since it wasn’t reciprocal—the children were taken, not replaced by white children who were then raised in Aboriginal commmunities.
On my way to work, there’s a random piece of graffiti that says “FREE OMEGA”. Every time I pass it I can’t help but think of a boxed AI trying to get out.
Get off my lawn
I’m not sure your argument of the benefits of this actually works.
Taking myself as an example: I play a lot of card and board games; I am very good at learning new games; I have been that annoying person who picks up a game after a quick five minute explanation and beats everyone else who’s played it multiple times. But I don’t feel like it’s given me any extra insight into situations beyond board games. It could be that the problem is too much compartmentalisation, but my instincts tell me that the problem is that board games are just too tidy compared to real life. In real life there are just too many variables and the rules are often implicit or outright wrong, and without understanding how all the variables interact I have trouble working out how to improve my position.
I will say, however, that your plan sounds like a lot of fun. Just not necessarily that useful
I finally finished all the work to leave grad school with an MA, and am officially graduated in just over a week’s time.
I am getting a visa so that I’ll be able to move to my boyfriend’s country and move in with him. If you’re in doubt about how awesome that is, you should see the mountain of bureaucracy I’ve had to deal with...
Something I have learnt from this series of posts and the comments on them (including mine):
Most people have no real idea what it is that separates good writing from bad, except that we know it when we see it
When we read your posts, most of us get a vague sense of them being long/uninteresting. But the specific criticisms of your writing are virtually all instances of a bias (availability?) where we try to quantify our vague sense of ‘don’t like’ by grabbing something salient out of the post, such as your use of pronouns or the inclusion of unnecessarily specific details. It’s possible that any or all of those things are actually problems, but they’re probably not the sole cause. Most writing advice on the web is also like this. The stuff that’s actually important for good writing is much harder to communicate.
it’s more likely that the actual cause of your posts feeling long/uninteresting is a more systemic issue. My best guess is that you’re not sure which parts of your new improved mindset are actually important, and which were incidental to the instrumental gains, so you feel like it’s all relevant and it all needs to be communicated, when in fact either only a subset is relevant, or else the insights build on each other in a non-obvious way so that they need to be communicated in a much more precise order than you’ve done so far in order to not appear as noise.
Looks potentially over-detailed for something you’re just starting out on—you might have more longterm success by starting out with a smaller number of things to record and then step it up after a month or so.
Also beware journalling turning into either another thing to procrastinate from or a tool to procrastinate from other tasks.
You make a good case for being polite in general, but one of the things I enjoy about this corner of the Internet is that it’s not overflowing with the constant thanking and thanking-for-thanking and dancing around the point that most people apply in real life, and which in my opinion actually undermine attempts to communicate. (there’s a top-level post in there that I’ll make one of these days..)
To paraphrase something I read a while back: “Normal people apply tact to everything they say, while nerds apply tact to everything they hear.”
As long as people are aware that this 10% is unlike the other 90%, I see no strong reason to change those percentages, since it means that here is one of the few places that I can get to the point fairly quickly rather than trying to work out which arcane rituals I need to perform today.
You may also want to link back to Alicorn’s post about why it’s useful to be nice
I found a job. A crappy, low-paying job, but one which will improve my interacting-with-random-people skills and which will give me the financial security to work on my other skills
Google Scholar will automatically let you know if you can get access to the paper directly from the computer you’re using. After that there is going to a library (they often have subscriptions to at least some journals) and visiting author websites.
Also, if you already know which papers you need, you can always ask here on LW
for some minorities implementation of such a policy would produce non-acceptance rates would result in genocidal levels of assimilation
I’m with Alicorn on this one: if your members don’t want to be in your community, sucks to be your community.
what if the minority culture’s values differ on this?
Maybe they should make more of an effort to convince their members that their community is worth being a part of rather than using mechanisms like shunning and mainstream stigmatism to enforce membership.
it would really upset groups like say Haredim Jews
Somehow I can’t bring myself to be bothered by this
That mudblood girl is also the most talented witch of her generation. Maybe Harrymort just wants another Bellatrix and this is the first step towards it. Maybe the debt doesn’t matter because Britain is going to be at war / Lucius will be dead before Harry would graduate. Also, Harry just gained a sworn minion out of it, which is arguably a lot more useful than a large sum of money.
2 weeks ago I realised my current job is making me miserable. I’ve now started doing something about it and have a trial period of a few hours this weekend for a new job.
The forementioned misery was getting projected onto my boyfriend in the form of finding some of his less awesome behaviours incredibly annoying. I eventually realised that I was projecting and had a chat with him involving an apology and a discussion about what the underlying issues are and what we could potentially both do better in the future.
A friend and I have become accountability buddies in the sense of sharing our lists of goals and asking about their progress every now and then.
Have been trying to do the homework set by my therapist, although it’s tough going (which of course is the reason it’s such a major ugh field in the first place)
Perhaps we should have a monthly ‘show off your I-rationaility improvement’ thread, the same way we have rationality quotes? So that people could get the warm glow of LW status from being able to boast about how productive they’ve been recently, while also providing peer pressure to others to be more productive.
What we call consciousness/self-awareness is just a meaningless side-effect of brain processes (55%)