Associate yourself with people whom you can confidently and cheerfully outperform the Nash Equilibrium with.
lionhearted (Sebastian Marshall)
Karma: 2,361
Defecting by Accident—A Flaw Common to Analytical People
“Win First” vs “Chill First”
“Nahh, that wouldn’t work”
“Just Suffer Until It Passes”
A “Failure to Evaluate Return-on-Time” Fallacy
Explicit and Implicit Communication
A Short Celebratory / Appreciation Post
Crossing the History-Lessons Threshold
The Cognitive Costs to Doing Things
Oh this is wild. This generated a strange emotion.
Anyone here know the word “Angespannt”? One of my team members taught, German word with no exact English equivalent. We talked about it —
https://www.ultraworking.com/podcast/big-project-angespannt
“It’s a mix of tense and alert in a way. It’s like the feeling you get before you go on stage.”
Like, why should I care? I’m obviously not going to press the damn thing. And yet, simply knowing the button is there generates some tension and alertness.
Fascinating. Thank you for doing this.
(Well, sort of thank you, to be more precise...)
Flashes of Nondecisionmaking
Hi Agnes, I just wanted to say — much respect and regards for logging on to discuss and debate your views.
Regardless if we agree or not (personally, I’m in partial agreement with you) — regardless, if more people would create accounts and engage thoughtfully in different spaces after sharing a viewpoint, the world would be a much better place.
Salutations and welcome.
Reference Points
Activation Costs
This has been some heroic work. This place is back to one of my favorite places to read for inspiration and learning. Huge congrats and thanks to the whole team.
Running the Stack
Hey, first just wanted to say thanks and love and respect. The moderation team did such an amazing job bringing LW back from nearly defunct into the thriving place it is now. I’m not so active in posting now, but check the site logged out probably 3-5 times a week and my life is much better for it.
After that, a few ideas:
(1) While I don’t 100% agree with every point he made, I think Duncan Sabien did an incredible job with “Basics of Rationalist Discourse”—https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/XPv4sYrKnPzeJASuk/basics-of-rationalist-discourse-1 - perhaps a boiled-down canonical version of that could be created. Obviously the pressure to get something like that perfect would be high, so maybe something like “Our rough thoughts on how to be a good a contributor here, which might get updated from time to time”. Or just link Duncan’s piece as “non-canonical for rules but a great starting place.” I’d hazard a guess that 90% of regular users here agree with at least 70% of it? If everyone followed all of Sabien’s guidelines, there’d be a rather high quality standard.
(2) I wonder if there’s some reasonably precise questions you could ask new users to check for understanding and could be there as a friendly-ish guidepost if a new user is going wayward. Your example—“(for example: “beliefs are probabilistic, not binary, and you should update them incrementally”)”—seems like a really good one. Obviously those should be incredibly non-contentious, but something that would demonstrate a core understanding. Perhaps 3-5 of those, maybe something that a person formally writes up some commentary on their personal blog before posting?
(3) It’s fallen from its peak glory years, but sonsofsamhorn.net might be an interesting reference case to look at — it was one of the top analytical sports discussion forums for quite a while. At the height of its popularity, many users wanted to join but wouldn’t understand the basics—for instance, that a poorly-positioned player on defense making a flashy “diving play” to get the baseball wasn’t a sign of good defense, but rather a sign that that player has a fundamental weakness in their game, which could be investigated more deeply with statistics—and we can’t just trust flashy replay videos to be accurate indicators of defensive skill. (Defense in American baseball is particularly hard to measure and sometimes contentious.) What SOSH did was create an area called “The Sandbox” which was relatively unrestricted — spam and abuse still weren’t permitted of course, but the standard of rigor was a lot lower. Regular members would engage in Sandbox threads from time to time, and users who made excellent posts and comments in The Sandbox would get invited to full membership. Probably not needed at the current scale level, but might be worth starting to think about for a long-term solution if LW keeps growing.
Thanks so much for everything you and the team do.
Perhaps the most insightful comment I ever read on Hacker News went something like,
I can’t find the exact comment but I found that very insightful.