“Essayer is the French verb meaning “to try” and an essai is an attempt. An essay is something you write to try to figure something out… In a real essay, you don’t take a position and defend it. You notice a door that’s ajar, and you open it and walk in to see what’s inside.” —Paul Graham
mingyuan
The meeting is actually at 1:00, not at noon as listed. Apologies, I think this was a glitch due to DST.
Important: “If you can read this sentence, you’re invited. If someone told you about it, you’re invited. If someone re-posted it somewhere else and you read it, you’re invited. (Feel free to repost, mention, or link to this announcement anywhere you think people will be interested.) No level of expertise is required. Do not worry if you don’t think you’re interesting enough. You’re much more interesting than you think you are. Even if you’re not, you’re invited anyway.”
(Stolen from the Detroit/Ann Arbor event page)
I stole your ‘you’re much more interesting than you think you are’ spiel for my own SSC meetup announcement; I hope you don’t mind. Such an important message! I was so hesitant about going to my first meetup that I very nearly didn’t go at all, which would have been the hugest mistake of my life, so thank you!
Oh man there are so many things it would be cool to try this with! But in the interest of not getting distracted I’m going to choose only one, so: I’m giving up saying negative things about myself. And also specifically the phrase “I can’t.” Yay, I can succeed! Thanks for the prompt Qiaochu :)
- 2 Apr 2018 4:45 UTC; 13 points) 's comment on Rationalist Lent is over by (
I know this doesn’t square with the CFAR canon, but in my experience changing things about myself, it’s surprisingly often enough for me just to notice that I want the thing to change, and then it just happens without further effort (the two examples that jump to mind are 1. drastically improving my handwriting and 2. transforming myself from a bully into a ray of sunshine). I’ve been doing this one for the last ~20 hours and it feels like it falls in that category—I’ve always noticed when I’m doing it in the past, the only difference is that now I’ve decided to do something about it.
Also, Oli is pretty good at protesting vehemently when I put myself down, so I have a reliable external enforcement mechanism :)
This was me for quite a few years. I’ve noticed that in times when I’m really depressed I’ll read fanfic until I pass out from exhaustion at 4am, but when I feel happy and emotionally fulfilled (e.g. the past few months) my fanfic habit completely disappears and I feel no desire to read it even when I get notifications for it. Strangely, this wasn’t something I easily identified as pica at our CFAR workshop.
Rationalist dating:
“I know this might be a weird analogy, but relationships are like LessWrong”
“Should I date Jaan Tallinn? I’m not attracted to him at all, but it seems high-EV.”
“You’re so cute I just want to invest all my resources in you!”
“I know we should go to sleep, but have you considered hyperbolic discounting?”
“Now that you’ve witnessed my inability to apply instrumental rationality to the problem of going to sleep on time you have to break up with me”
“I don’t have to take care of myself because in twenty years we won’t even have human bodies anymore!”
“Wait don’t go, you’re instrumentally useful to me!”
I’m curious about your claim that low-status playing big is rarely occurring in nature, because it was far easier for me to think of low-big examples than high-small examples. What examples did you think of, if you care to share? Maybe we’re interpreting the thing slightly differently? And I definitely agree that low-big is a dangerous place to be, but it’s not obvious to me that either (a) or (b) will come into play in all or even a majority of cases.
I think a lot of low-big happens when people are relatively socially oblivious, and in those situations I think social pressure is often ineffective at pushing people back down to the low-small state. There is a common problem at rationality meetups (where people skew higher-than-average autistic) where someone takes up far more than their fair share of air in the room and doesn’t pick up on others’ signals of annoyance or discomfort.
Another situation that leads to a lot of low-big is when a person who’s used to being high status comes into a new context and erroneously expects their status to be conserved across domains. A probably-familiar example is a freshman at an elite university who was the smartest person in his hometown and therefore has been trained to think that everything he has to say is really important, who dominates class discussion despite having nothing interesting or insightful to say. In that case I guess I would naïvely expect (a) to push that person to be smaller eventually, but in practice that hasn’t been my experience.
Also, a lot of old people and tenured professors play big no matter what situation they’re in, and (a) is very unlikely to work on them, but (b) also might not work if they’re in a situation where they can’t gain status just by being big and blustery (e.g. the rationality community!).
Do you think there are other forces that act to repel people from low-big besides (a) and (b)? If not, are there other reasons why you think low-big is not a stable equilibrium? I ask because it definitely doesn’t look like a stable equilibrium, but I haven’t thought of things other than (a) or (b) that would make that the case.
I also agree that “both noticing and moving in the social game are in themselves predictive of high status,” but I don’t think it necessarily follows that “on the high status side it’s very easy to play both big and small as the situation demands.” I think there are plenty of people (probably particularly females, because of how we’re explicitly socialized to not take up space) who have definitely acquired status but play small far more often than is warranted. Imperfect examples that come to mind are Lauren Lee and Scott Alexander (and me, but you don’t know me) - although I’m concerned I might be equivocating here between ‘being small’ and ‘playing low status.’ I definitely always am both small and playing low status and trying to wrench myself out of that is painful and confusing, but I don’t know if the same is true of Lauren or Scott.
I think all I’m really saying here is that ‘being good at the social game’ implies ‘high status’, but ‘high status’ does not imply ‘being good at the social game’ - which maybe makes the axes more orthogonal than you think.
Agree. Something the old LessWrong did that the LW2 community page doesn’t currently do, was that it displayed upcoming meetups on the side of every page, and in my experience as an organizer sometimes people would just stumble across the site for the first time, immediately see there was a meetup in my city, and show up. From a design perspective I know there’s no way Oliver will go for having meetups display on the side of every page, but maybe we can do something to make nearby meetups comparably visible, because that does seem really important.
Please don’t upvote me I don’t want anyone to hear me
[I don’t feel like this comment is done, but better to post incomplete things than to not post at all]
As you predicted, my thing was hard. As I predicted, my thing was an interesting experiment and gave me a lot to think about. I think that’s not really in the spirit of Lent, but it was useful for me (she said, demonstrating her perpetual need to justify herself in the face of imagined criticism). Thoughts:
For the most part the thing wasn’t hard because I didn’t notice it happening, it was hard because every time I did it, it felt like in that particular instance the thing I was saying really was true.
One contributing factor to this was that the thing was poorly defined: e.g., does excessive apologizing count as putting myself down? (There were dozens of other edge cases like this that aren’t immediately springing to mind.)
There were situations in which it felt disingenuous to be positive about myself, e.g. meetings with my manager. But maybe the thing is about framing and not objective facts—e.g. I could frame things as opportunities for improvement rather than as ‘shortcomings’, which sounds more like a reflection on my intrinsic worth.
I am pretty confused about to what extent the things that come out of my mouth correspond to actual beliefs I have about myself. They’re more reflexive than reflective.
Something about signaling contributes here, probably. I’m pretty confident that I don’t put myself down in an attempt to get compliments from others, because compliments make me uncomfortable and annoyed and I’d be quite confused if I were subconsciously fishing for them. A more likely source of this is that I really hate disappointing (or otherwise inconveniencing) people and sort of design my entire life to avoid ever doing that. So if I set expectations low (by putting myself down), it means I need to reach a lower bar in order to not disappoint people, which means there’s less pressure on me.
I’m concerned that I failed with abandon, in such a way that I actually made the thing worse by trying. This was a failure mode I didn’t foresee (but should have), where I was like, “well, I failed at my goal of being more positive about myself, I guess I’m a failure.”
Some other notes I wrote at the ~halfway point (7 March):
Not saying negative things about myself (insofar as I’ve actually been doing it) hasn’t had any apparent effect on my sense of self efficacy or self worth. I think some of this is that I’m not vocalizing the negativity but I’m still thinking it. Maybe it would be better to explicitly say positive things rather than avoiding negative ones.
I’m less prone to start messages with “sorry I’m stupid” or things to that effect, but that might just be basic professionalism and not wanting to put other people in a position where they feel like they have to refute the negative things I say about myself.
I still feel like I should be allowed to say things when I feel like they’re objectively true, but of course that defeats the whole purpose.
I think sometimes Oli mistakes me being exhausted for me just having low self-efficacy in general (e.g. I say I “can’t” go do something when what I mean is I’m too tired to do it right now). I think I should be more careful to draw a distinction between those, so I don’t reinforce an image of me as helpless.
Final thought:
Holy **** what’s wrong with me why am I so bad at being positive about myself get it the **** together. I know personal progress is a long and difficult road but sometimes I wonder if just getting a good slap in the face and having someone shout “GET IT TOGETHER” would fix me. Probably not. I guess I have to do the hard thing. Boo.
Great submission! I especially like Emotion Propagation – it’s something I’ve thought about specific cases of, but hadn’t conceptualized as a cognitive defect, and I think it might be surprisingly pervasive. I’m definitely going to try looking at my bugs from an emotion propagation angle. Thanks for that :)
First of all, I’m really sorry you’ve had this discouraging experience in your first few weeks on LessWrong. It does seem unfair that you’ve received a lot of negative votes while receiving very little feedback on why that is. I think there’s something real in all of the interpretations you listed, and my guess would be that each one was an opinion held by at least one person who read at least one of your posts (presuming high traffic on Frontpage posts).
For now, I think it makes most sense for you to continue to post regularly, just on your personal blog. Given what you’ve said here I definitely don’t want to discourage you from writing, but I think there are certain expectations of Frontpage posts that you’re unlikely to meet since you’re a newcomer both to writing and to the ideas of the community.
I strongly encourage you to read more of the rationality canon and become familiar with the discussion around various ideas before writing too much about those ideas. From what I remember of surveys of prominent users of the old LessWrong, most of them, upon discovering the site, spent several months just reading the Sequences without posting or commenting, then spent several months or years just commenting, and only then began writing their own top-level posts. Obviously times have changed in a lot of ways; I just want to emphasize that familiarity with the canon is a quite important prerequisite for writing well-received posts.
I also agree with Elo that you might want to wait before addressing sensitive topics—if you are a newcomer to the community and an inexperienced writer, it will be difficult for you to write about controversial or sensitive things in a way that is:
interesting to long-time readers of the site—in that it provides novel insight and is framed in a way that makes it relevant to their interests
comprehensible—it can be really difficult to convey your thoughts on complex topics to strangers through only the written word, and I think this just takes a lot of practice (hopefully with fast feedback loops)
nuanced, not clumsy—the thing about writing about sensitive topics is that people can be really, well, sensitive about them (surprise!); there are a myriad of ways you can end up putting your foot in your mouth and you need to know your audience well and write clearly and carefully to be able to avoid all those failure modes
Some other, more concrete things:
I found your post on effective altruism difficult to follow; I didn’t actually understand it until reading Ixakas’ comment. On a first (uncomprehending) read, it kind of comes off as a naïve attack on something that is really important to a lot of people here, which may be where a lot of the downvotes came from. You also seemed to present things as novel insights when pretty much every premise in the post is something that’s been discussed in this community for years. That said, now that I’ve read Ixakas’ top-level comment, I do find the post pretty interesting.
As for your post on dating: I’m a young female and it didn’t make me personally uncomfortable, but the framing is a bit rude, as Elo said—even just the title, ‘Finding a Girlfriend’, feels to me like it elides a lot of what a romantic relationship actually is. I had a friend who thought in these terms, trying to find The One using a search algorithm that involved dating apps and spreadsheets, and he was wildly unsuccessful at dating. Actually, my main thought when reading your post was that it might be pretty helpful to someone like him. So, that general way of looking at the problem may not be the best, but as long as a lot of people are going to do it anyway your post seems like it could be valuable.
To look at an example of someone managing to successfully navigate discussing this sensitive topic—when lukeprog wrote about rational romantic relationships, he included personal anecdotes, but he also looked at what was going on from other points of view (including a lot of female POV), and mostly framed the problem as one that humans in general have, rather than one specific to any group. It also helped that he included a whole bunch of scientific evidence.
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In conclusion, this was a very long comment but I hope you find at least parts of it useful. Good luck, Michaël.
I recently cancelled my recurring Patreon donation due to financial insecurity, but with the new developments both at REACH and in my life, I’m happy to say I’ve reinstated and increased my donation. Best of luck <3
Yes, that is the original version of the parable; gworley is playing on the original here and suggesting that maybe it misses something important about why someone might do something as apparently fruitless as looking for his keys where the light is rather than where he dropped them.
Thanks for the resources! Fair warning though, I used Reflect and it matched me with you. Beware!
It wouldn’t be useful to me, but might allow me to finally get my sister into rationality, since she’s basically incapable of reading :)
No, not that I know of.
Thanks for writing this; it’s so cool to finally hear what’s going on with Kocherga!
I know some of the people at CFAR are very interested in talking with you about your curriculum. It’s too late to apply now, but CFAR is running a workshop in Prague next month and would be super interested to see someone there who was familiar with Kocherga-style applied rationality. So if any of your alumni are able to get to Prague easily and would be interested in meeting up with people from CFAR, have them email contact@rationality.org to see if they can set something up! Note though that I don’t work for CFAR, so take this all with a grain of salt.
Separately, I’d be interested to know if you’ve pursued any of the larger-scale funding options such as CEA. Kocherga seems like it plausibly could have gotten funded via the EA Community Building grants (although that’s not for sure due to its focus on rationality rather than EA). Note that a comparison to the Berkeley REACH would not be appropriate here because REACH did not exist yet when Stardust applied for the community building grant, whereas Kocherga has a long track record. In any case, it seems worth it for you guys to apply for grants. You’re clearly doing something valuable :)
Anyway, I’ve pledged $30/month. Best of luck!!
Anecdotal data time! We tried this at last week’s Chicago rationality meetup, with moderate success. Here’s a rundown of how we approached the activity, and some difficulties and confusion we encountered.
Approach:
Before the meeting, some of us came up with lists of possibly contentious topics and/or strongly held opinions, and we used those as starting points by just listing them off to the group and seeing if anyone held the opposite view. Some of the assertions on which we disagreed were:
Cryonic preservation should be standard medical procedure upon death, on an opt-out basis
For the average person, reading the news has no practical value beyond social signalling
Public schools should focus on providing some minimum quality of education to all students before allocating resources to programs for gifted students
The rationality movement focuses too much of its energy on AI safety
We should expend more effort to make rationality more accessible to ‘normal people’
We paired off, with each pair in front of a blackboard, and spent about 15 minutes on our first double crux, after the resolution of which the conversations mostly devolved. We then came together, gave feedback, switched partners, and tried again.
Difficulties/confusion:
For the purposes of practice, we had trouble finding points of genuine disagreement – in some cases we found that the argument dissolved after we clarified minor semantic points in the assertion, and in other cases a pair would just sit there and agree on assertion after assertion (though the latter is more a flaw in the way I designed the activity than in the actual technique). However, we all agree that this technique will be useful when we encounter disagreements in future meetings, and even in the absence of disagreement, the activity of finding cruxes was a useful way of examining the structure of our beliefs.
We were a little confused as to whether coming up with an empirical test to resolve the issue was a satisfactory endpoint, or if we actually needed to seek out the results in order to consider the disagreement resolved.
In one case, when we were debating the cryonics assertion, my interlocutor managed to convince me of all the factual questions on which I thought my disagreement rested, but I still had some lingering doubt – even though I was convinced of the conclusion on an intellectual level, I didn’t grok it. When we learned goal factoring, we were taught not dismiss fuzzy, difficult-to-define feelings; that they could be genuinely important reasons for our thoughts and behavior. Given its reliance on empiricism, how does Double Crux deal with these feelings, if at all? (Disclaimer: it’s been two years since we learned goal factoring, so maybe we were taught how to deal with this and I just forgot.)
In another case, my interlocutor changed his mind on the question of public schools, but when asked to explain the line of argument that led him to change his mind, he wasn’t able to construct an argument that sounded convincing to him. I’m not sure what happened here, but in the future I would place more emphasis on writing down the key points of the discussion as it unfolds. We did make some use of the blackboards, but it wasn’t very systematic.
Overall it wasn’t as structured as I expected it to be. People didn’t reference the write-up when immersed in their discussions, and didn’t make use of any of the tips you gave. I know you said we shouldn’t be preoccupied with executing “the ideal double crux,” but I somehow still have the feeling that we didn’t quite do it right. For example, I don’t think we focused enough on falsifiability and we didn’t resonate after reaching our conclusions, which seem like key points. But ultimately the model was still useful, no matter how loosely we adhered to it.
I hope some of that was helpful to you! Also, tell Eli Tyre we miss him!