I found that section SO hard to answer without wishful thinking getting in the way. So I just left them all blank. I WANT smart alien friends! =/
jooyous
At some point I started feeling like my bf is more interested in telling me things than having a conversation with me. So I started trying to flag the instances where he did it and the instances where he didn’t, and it kinda felt like it matched my feeling since I had several more examples of one than the other. But I didn’t document then carefully or anything, so how do I know I’m not falling into the confirmation bias trap? Or is this just the wrong way to handle something that started out as a … feeling?
Hello! I am procrastinating on writing the NSF fellowship! High five!
My current subproblem consists of filling in all the instances of “INSPIRATIONAL STUFF” with actual inspirational stuff, so this particular subproblem is looking pretty difficult. :(
Yeah, I think this is the hardest part because in some cases, examining the actual facts does make me feel better. But in this case, if it does turn out to be 10% but the bad feeling doesn’t go away, I’m going to feel like a jerk. Also, it’s impossible to compare to the past at this point, which is when it felt like we had more real conversations, but I have no data from it because back then I didn’t have any reason to track it.
It’s easy to fool yourself into thinking that a given idea makes sense; it’s harder to fool someone else. Writing down an idea automatically engages the mechanisms we use to communicate to others, helping you hold your self-analysis to a higher standard.
I have definitely seen the benefits of dumping out my thoughts to look at them but I have a problem with the part of the process: if I’m writing down my thoughts, I feel Iike I need to choose an audience that I’m writing for, which brings about this weird dichotomy between … “arrogance” and … confidentiality?
If I’m writing for myself, then my writing won’t make any sense to other people. Like, I’ll write “but then I saw that the blue civic was there, so I decided to not leave my apartment that whole evening.” This makes perfect sense to me because the significance of the blue civic is pretty accessible in my memory right now. But another person reading it won’t be able to follow the causal links. So instead I can write in a way that another person would understand. But then I just start feeling weird explaining something that I don’t need an explanation for and other people aren’t going to see it and might not even care about it if they did and etc etc. (Like people with personal blogs—why do they assume they have readers?) Or is it a good idea to unpack those weird causal things that are non-obvious to other people each time I encounter them?
But also, writing for yourself—with the assumption that no one is going to see your writing—brings up the issue of being too open? Like, if I’m writing for myself and I have weird, sketchy thoughts about my friend that I want to document, I’m going to write “Joe” because I think of that person as Joe. But if Joe ever finds my writing, he might be horribly upset to find out that I think something bad about him that I haven’t talked to him directly about, etc. Confidentiality! So I need to censor names. But then I’m already no longer writing for myself, but writing for an audience that I’m trying to hide information from. Which brings up all those other audience-related considerations.
I suppose I have some issues. =P
Help! How should I write things?
Sometimes, I am extremely unconvinced in the utility of “knowing stuff” or “understanding stuff” when confronted with the inability to explain it to suffering people who seem like they want to stop suffering but refuse to consider the stuff that has potential to help them stop suffering. =/
Well, it’s not that I’m not confident that they’re useful to me. They are! They help me make choices that make me happy. I’m just not confident in how useful pursuing them is in comparison to various utilitarian considerations of helping other people be not miserable.
For example, suppose I could learn some more rationality tricks and start saving an extra $100 each month by some means, while in the meantime someone I know is depressed and miserable and seemingly asking for help. Instead of going to learn those rationality tricks to make an extra $100, I am tempted to sit with them and tell them all the ways I learned to manage my thoughts in order to not make myself miserable and depressed. And when this fails spectacularly, eating my time and energy, I am left inclined to do neither because that person is miserable and depressed and I’m powerless to help them so how useful is $100 really? Blah! So, to answer the question, this is the mood in which I question my belief in the usefulness of knowing and doing useful things.
I am also a computer science/math person! high five
I will just pop in here to say that I used to be this huge snob who would look down at people my age who said that Ender’s Game is one of their favorite books. I was like “Clearly, they have not read any fancy literature since middle school. Silly noobs!”
And then I read the book again and I realized that actually that book is super-important because it basically captures the contents of this article in a book for children when most books for children are all about taking out the evil bad guy and sorta imply that violence is no big deal.
I think I’d be sad to turn into orgasmium without having been a whale first. :(
There’s a question in OkCupid that asks “In some sense, wouldn’t nuclear war be exciting?” which [I immediately answered no and rated everyone who said yes as completely undateable] I think falls into this same class of bug, but I can’t quite put my finger on how to describe it.
I agree, but I’m really confused about the how the creators of that website intended for the question to help in deciding whether a user should date a certain individual. I wouldn’t be able to tell if they answered “yes” because “Yay! Explosions!” and completely disregarded human deaths, or if they were saying “Indeed, there exists a sense in which nuclear war would create more excitement than a lack of one.”
I feel like “excitement” carries a positive connotation, particularly in American culture, which makes me uneasy about any “yes” answers. :(
You’re saying a lot of technically correct things that don’t seem to be engaging what I’m saying. =/
Yes, I agree that there is some value in entertaining a “yes, during a nuclear war, there will be may be some more (positively) exciting things than in peacetime.” This is something to take into account when deciding whether or not you should go to nuclear war.
Meanwhile, if you’re trying to use the question to gauge the moral compass of the answering person, the “nuclear war is great and fun thing!” answer is not readily distinguishable from the “I am carefully entertaining the argument for a horrible thing” answer. Which is similar to the way “awesomeness” sometimes leads to … awesome starvation schemes?
So they have a mechanism for you to write an explanatory comment, right? But they don’t allow you to filter on the existence of an explanatory comment, which would allow someone to explain their thought process—which I think is really necessary because “exciting” does strongly connote “good idea” the way “awesome” does. In which case, I would expect a person trying to avoid the horns effect to just refuse to answer the question on the grounds that it’s misleading as a moral compass gauge because answering “yes” might cause them to get filtered out because you can’t condition on the existence of an explanation. So I expected most “yes” answers to be generally unaware people. I don’t think that question was intended for rational arguments for or against nuclear war; I think it was intended for … morality. I admit “completely undateable” is an exaggeration, but I think I decided engaging that question was a red flag for immaturity.
But that’s why I’m really confused why that question was there in the first place because it doesn’t distinguish those two groups of people—the ones that are thinking really really carefully and the ones that aren’t thinking at all. It’s bad for morality!
I think
a community in which people have a good idea but err on the side of not writing it up will tend toward a community in which people err on the of side of not bothering to flesh out their ideas?
fun and clarity are good starting points for structure, seriousness and watertightness? Picking out the bugs feels like a useful exercise for me, having just read the bit of the sequence talking about the impact of language.
I thought it was fun and clear and I liked the cute whale, but also it made me think. ^_^
I thought the question was “Does this post have value?” or “Can you quantify the extent to which these here upvotes correlate with value?” and not “How did I get upvotes?”
It’s definitely pertinent, but it seems a bit one-sided? As an upvoter, I was trying really hard confess my love for whale and quantify it alongside my appreciation for fun and clarity. So I’m concerned that the above reads more like “it was probably all nyans and noms” as opposed to “nyans and noms were a factor.”
That’s why I thought it was a useless question. Because it’s not asking for the overall total excitingness of nuclear war. It’s asking if there exists a type of excitingness that nuclear war does have a net positive in. Which, probably yes, but it’s so not very relevant to anything. =P
Unfortunately, I think I would prefer not to go on dates with people who spend too much time imagining that they are Movie Heroes. A little bit is okay! =P
Yep, that’s the reasoning I followed in the earlier comment. A person who saw all six possible chains would decide the question wasn’t useful and would refuse to answer it, hopefully. ^_^
I also de-lurked for the first time to take the survey!
I’m too intimidated to post anything else. :(