matto

Karma: 531

matto 12 Jul 2025 20:30 UTC
4 points
0
on: Navigating burnout
I’ve recently noticed that reading code has become harder for me. I need to stare at a line an sound out, in my mind, what is happening there. Then on the next line, I need to verbalize that too, and switching back and forth between the two lines to get a feel for where this is going. It’s like squeezing water from a rock.

Moreover, I’ve noticed that the feeling that usually came with reading code is absent. It was something like a tactile feeling, almost as if I were handling a mechanism and feeling its different parts, maybe scraping my nail over an edge, or brushing my thumb over a screw. Now reading code feels like reading IRS form instructions: the words go in, but they don’t even touch my mind.

It occurred to me that this might be burnout and I appreciate you writing this piece. I need to read through some of the links, but now I have some threads to pull on.

matto 20 Apr 2024 16:27 UTC
2 points
0
on: Effectively Handling Disagreements—Introducing a New Workshop
This is very interesting work in the Rationalist “I want to be stronger!” sense. Thank you for putting it together and sharing—Ill be on the look out for workshop dates to sign up for!

Also, I just bumped into this game: https://talktomehuman.com/. It’s a simple role playing game that puts you into awkward situations at home or work and has you talk your way out of them. The NPCs are LLM-powered. You have to use your voice and there’s a time limit. I haven’t tried it yet. But it seems similar in spirit to what you want to build, albeit focused on a different problem.

matto 12 Apr 2024 0:23 UTC
1 point
0
in reply to: ChristianKl’s comment on: simeon_c’s Shortform
For sure! It’s a devilishly hard problem. Despite dipping in and out of the topic, I don’t feel confident in even forming a problem statement about it. I feel more like one of the blind men touching different parts of an elephant.

But it seems like having many projects like the Verified Voting Foundation should hedge the risk—if each such project focuses on a small part, then the blast radius of unfortunate mistakes should be limited. I would just hope that, on average, we would be trending in the right direction.

matto 10 Apr 2024 19:48 UTC
5 points
3
in reply to: simeon_c’s comment on: simeon_c’s Shortform
When I last looked a couple of months back, I found very little discussion of this topic in the rationalist communities. The most interesting post was probably this one from 2021: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/8cr7godn8qN9wjQYj/decreasing-populism-and-improving-democracy-evidence-based

I supposed it’s not a popular topic because it rubs up against politics. But I do think that liberal democracy is the operating system for running things like LW, EA, and other communities we all love. It’s worth defending it—though what that means exactly is vague to me.

matto 7 Apr 2024 0:01 UTC
2 points
0
in reply to: trevor’s comment on: The Best Tacit Knowledge Videos on Every Subject
Did you find anything interesting in 2018? Did you use it, and, if yes, how’d it go?

matto 29 Mar 2024 18:40 UTC
4 points
4
in reply to: trevor’s comment on: My Interview With Cade Metz on His Reporting About Slate Star Codex
How would you label Metz’s approach in the dialogue with Zack? To me it’s clear that Zack is engaging in truth-seeking—questioning maps, seeking where they differ, trying to make sense of noisy data.

But Metz is definitely not doing that. Plenty of Dark Arts techniques there, and his immediate goal is pretty clear (defend position & extract information), but I can’t quite put a finger on his larger goal.

If Zack is doing truth-seeking, then Metz is doing...?

matto 29 Jan 2024 23:45 UTC
2 points
0
in reply to: ryan_greenblatt’s comment on: How to write better?
Seconding “Style: Ten Lessons in Clarity and Grace”. Amazing explanation of effective written communication.

I would only add this, for the original poster: when you read what the book suggests, reflect on why it’s doing so.

When I read “Style” the second time around, it occurred to me how hard reading really is, and that all this advice is really for building a sturdy boat to launch your ideas at the distant shores of other minds.

Like, you can have some really bright people working for you, but if you add even a little more nuance, like an “and” and a second clause, you’ve lost. So the trick appears to be finding a shared language with the people you can think together with.

matto 29 Jan 2024 23:34 UTC
5 points
0
on: matto’s Shortform
I felt a jolt of excitement when I overheard a non-Rat (at least looking) person casually drop “Slack” during a conversation.

I work at a mid-sized software company based in the SF Bay area. The person talking was a director in my organization. The context was about setting aside time for chewing over problems—not trying to solve them, but just looking at them to see the broader context in which the problem exists.

matto 21 Jan 2024 3:03 UTC
4 points
0
in reply to: Algon’s comment on: Why Improving Dialogue Feels So Hard
I experienced it firsthand not too long ago at the NYC Megameetup: dialogues where both (or more) parties actively tried to explore each others’ maps, seeking points where there was overlap and where there were gaps. More concretely, everyone was asking a lot more questions then usual. These questions were relevant and clarifying. They helped make the discussion feel speedy, as in, like we were running from room to room, trying to find interesting bits of knowledge, especially where views diverged.

The best way I can describe it is that it felt like thinking together—like having more people in your head.

I don’t think this was because of a large amount of shared references, like in a subculture. I think it was because the culture of LW and LW-adjacent emphasizes curiosity, openness, and respect.

Or a world in which the median dialogue is much more productive?

For me, it would be a world where much less time is wasted producing arguments-as-soldiers. Whether it’s in small, day-to-day interactions or in bigger discussions, like around geopolitical conflicts.

Does this explain it better? It still feels a little airy.

matto 17 Jan 2024 19:13 UTC
1 point
0
in reply to: sweenesm’s comment on: How to Promote More Productive Dialogue Outside of LessWrong

I’m still hopeful that there’s some way to make progress if we get enough good minds churning out ideas on how to enroll people into their own personal development.

Me too! I hope my comment didn’t come through as cynical or thought-stopping. I think this is one of the highest goods people can produce. It just seems like this is one of those problems where even defining the problem is a wicked problem in the first place—but falling into analysis-paralysis is bad too.

Please do write more on this topic. Ill try to make a post around the same themes this weekend :)

matto 15 Jan 2024 19:43 UTC
1 point
0
on: How to Promote More Productive Dialogue Outside of LessWrong
The ending hints at the true problem: how do we go about implementing such change?

We already have more than enough tools: de Bono’s thinking hats, 5-whys, CBT & a dozen other forms of therapy (+ drugs!), CFAR, gratitude journaling, meditation, anger management, post-mortems, pre-mortems, legitimate self-help, etc.

But the problem in deploying them are legion:
- Can we truly make “the Masses” do anything? Doesn’t that defeat the spirit of such an undertaking?
- How do we know which tools to deploy to whom? In my own experience, people and even skilled practioners often guess at underlying issues, so multiple approaches are often necessary. To your own point about anger trigger elimination, what about the millions of people with the opposite problem who could actually use more anger to obtain more agency?
- How do you deal with cultural taboos? One would imagine that Guess cultures would be more opposed to the more explicit forms of communication champion in circles such as this one.
- There are many established power structures that would lose power because of this. Mafias, religious groups, political fanatics all stand to lose pretty much everything.
(I’ll stop for the sake of time).

This is something I’m personally interested too. However, I’ve dialed down my dreams, so to say, and focus on two very local activities that blend in with my personal life:
- Serve as an example of clear, thoughtful communication. Whenever I deal with neighbors, coworkers, family members, or even strangers, I deploy all I’ve learned from LW in a low-key way to get us toward a win-win situation. If someone is especially responsive, I nudge them toward LW or HPMoR.
- Practice by hanging out with rationalists. I recently attended the NYC Megameetup and had so many amazing talks that I felt inspired to meet others more often and improve my own thinking. This also works to replenish my mental energy.
Now that I think of it, it seems like The Guild of the Rose is a good vehicle for spreading good thinking techniques because it ties them directly with gain in the sense of this Adam Smith quote:

It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own self-interest.

matto 16 Dec 2023 15:01 UTC
5 points
0
in reply to: Viliam’s comment on: Viliam’s Shortform
My own version of this is over-trying to introduce a topic. I’ll zoom out until I hit a generally relatable idea like, “one day I was at a bookstore and...”, then I’ll retrace my steps until I finally introduce what I originally wanted to talk about. That makes for a lot of confusing filler.

The opposite of this l, and what I use to correct myself, is how Scott Alexander starts his posts with the specific question or statement he wants to talk about.

matto 7 Dec 2023 13:02 UTC
3 points
0
in reply to: jasoncrawford’s comment on: Progress links digest, 2023-11-07: Techno-optimism and more
Very much! Apart from enjoying it myself, I usually pick some things out and share them with friends and family as a way to offset some of the unagentic doom and gloom present in mainstream media :)

matto 5 Dec 2023 23:41 UTC
3 points
2
in reply to: Dagon’s comment on: How do you do post mortems?
Thanks! It seems I’ve been practicing most of these, but:
- “why do we care”—this has always been implied. I found it valuable to actually state this explicitly.
- “5 whys”—I’ve done this before, but something prompted me to revisit my understanding, so I ended up on a LessWrong post about Five Whys, where I bumped into Ben Pace’s comment about how it’s valuable to solve the problem(s) at each level of Why, not just the root cause.

matto 30 Nov 2023 20:00 UTC
4 points
1
in reply to: AnthonyC’s comment on: Buy Nothing Day is a great idea with a terrible app— why has nobody built a killer app for crowdsourced ‘effective communism’ yet?
I came here to say exactly this! It’s one thing to build an app, but quite another to built the institution that makes it work.

So apart from having members exchange physical goods, and someone to take care of the technical machine, someone has to invest time to tackle all the moderation work to limit bad actors’ effects on the series of trades.

There was a flourishing of apps like this around the ’10s with stuff like couch surfing and tool trading apps etc but most have died off, leaving bigger players like Facebook marketplace or Craigslist precisely because, as I believe, they didn’t have a plan to tackle the institutional work—instead just believing strangers will sort things out between themselves.

matto 17 Nov 2023 0:07 UTC
5 points
0
on: Progress links digest, 2023-11-07: Techno-optimism and more
Some really good stuff here.

I’ve been reading these digests for about a year now. I look forward to each one. Thanks Jason!

matto 5 Nov 2023 21:40 UTC
5 points
−1
on: Techno-humanism is techno-optimism for the 21st century
Excellent post. I wholeheartedly agree that progress should be driven by humanistic values as that appears to be the only viable way of steering it toward a future in which humanity can flourish.

I’m somewhat confused though. The techno-optimist space seems to be largely and strongly already permeated with humanist values. For example, Jason Crawford’s Roots of Progress regularly posts/links things like a startup using technology to decrease the costs of beautiful sculpture, a venture to use bacteria to eradicate cavities, or a newsletter about producing high quality policy (amongst other things like small scale nuclear energy, vaccine technology, and interesting histories of technology). Even Andreessen’s manifesto cites people like Percy, Fuller, Nietzsche, all of who had rather humanistic and positive visions of humanity.

I think that a rather stark contrast to transhumanism or accelerationism, which I’ve never found alluring precisely because they seemed to lack a grounded focus on humans and humanity.

I do find Andreessen’s mention of Nick Land troubling for precisely that reasons you wrote about, but I wonder how much of that is him making use of Land’s idea to explain the economics, rather then subscribing to Land’s human-less vision.

I’m not trying to argue about definitions. I guess what I’m trying to say is that techno-optimism seems and has for a long time to already possess a strong humanistic spirit, marking it very different from competing technology-focused communities of thought. Perhaps it makes more sense to fuel the humanist side of techno-optimism rather than forking it into its own thing?

Either way, looking forward to more posts! Especially curious about deeper takes on AI.

matto 23 Oct 2023 17:42 UTC
1 point
0
in reply to: Quinn’s comment on: Quinn’s Shortform
What’s different there compared to the first book?

I read the first one and found it to resonate strongly, but also found my mental models to not fit well with the general thrust. Since then I’ve been studying stats and thinking more about measurement with the intent to reread the first book. Curious if the cybersecurity one adds something more though

matto 24 Sep 2023 20:27 UTC
1 point
0
in reply to: Elizabeth’s comment on: How did you make your way back from meta?
Thank you for sharing that. Parts of it resonate very strongly, like being unable to know how much fuel I have left, or practicing making choices, or the need for strategy (which is just dawning on me). It’s helpful to know that someone else has walked this path, at least the common part of it, and made it farther along.

matto 13 Sep 2023 15:46 UTC
1 point
0
in reply to: Elizabeth’s comment on: How did you make your way back from meta?
Funny/uncanny to read this. This is something I’ve just started working on (+improving sleep) maybe two weeks ago.

How does this work for you if you don’t mind me asking?