I agree that the highlights shouldn’t be highlighted by default, and I am not asking for a way to make them highlighted by default, or all highlighted, or all highlighted when all the comments are expanded, or any such thing. (Maybe someone else wants that, but not me.)
I just want to have the option (which can be off by default, and toggled in user settings) all the side comments expanded by default (or with one click). (I don’t want this to result in all the highlights being visible at once!)
This is very cool. Lining up with the text by matching blockquotes is very clever!
Is there some way to make the side comments start out expanded, or expand them all?
Brave browser offers feature to block cookie notifications. Tempting.
Another way to block such things is (because they’re invariably sticky elements, after all) to use the AlwaysKillSticky extension (works for Chrome, Firefox, Opera, Brave…).
Edit: I also like how both our comments are correctness-strong-downvoted by a single person, yet we more or less contradict each other. Oh, well.
Well, while it’s unlikely that we’re both right, so long as our views are not literally logical negations of each other it is surely possible for us to both be wrong…
This sounds like it would be “natural” to use, but it would not be, because translating intention into language is cognitively effortful, and very unnatural for a very wide array of action types.
I often do not think in words about what I want to do, or want done. Indeed I often don’t think about doing the thing at all, I just do it, and insofar as there’s cognition to be done, it’s done as part of the action, transparently.
Having to translate everything into words would dramatically narrow the cognitive bandwidth between me and the effects I can accomplish with my various technological tools.
Another commenter mentions DuckDuckGo, and I think that’s a good example of a product where just mentioning lack-of-antifeatures is enough to advertise it successfully. The reason for this is that the advertisement actually goes like this:
“It’s a <X (a product category)> which doesn’t have <Y (an antifeature)>!”
Now, if X is “game” (and Y is “mana flood” or whatever), then certainly this won’t cut it, because “a game” can be any of a vast, highly differentiated field of possible things. But if X is “search engine”, then it’s a different story—because everyone knows what a search engine is (and, absent qualifiers, it really is more or less one specific sort of thing), and so just the fact of your product belonging to this category is already highly informative about what it can reasonably be expected to do, have, and be like!
So “a search engine that doesn’t track your data” is a perfectly reasonable description. What does it do? It searches the internet, and probably has various search-related auxiliary features (maybe more of these, maybe fewer, but these are details). Why would you want to use it? Because you want to search the internet, duh. Oh, and it doesn’t track your data?! Well, heck, sign me up!
And so with many things.
That passengers don’t have the legal right to recline is quite an extraordinary claim. (I do not recall seeing it previously in this discussion, nor in similar ones.) I should like to see some very solid evidence for it. I definitely don’t think there needs to be any positive defense of legality, absent some evidence of illegality. I have never heard anything about reclining being illegal before.
The seat is reclinable and the airline does not communicate to the passengers any rule against reclining it. That means that the passengers have indeed bought the right to recline. The “social conventions” are of no importance whatsoever to that point.
If it is common knowledge that you will be socially punished for reclining, you are no longer being deceived when you buy the seat. The deception only takes place if you buy the seat thinking there will be no social punishment but actually there is.
I am not buying “freedom from social punishment”, I am buying “the airline provides me the benefit they advertise”. If they allow this “social punishment” to deprive me of that benefit, then now it’s not “social punishment” anymore, but action by the airline.
And if the “social punishment” does not in fact prevent me from reclining, then what you wrote is just irrelevant.
Yes, but did the airline punish the employee? Did they publicly announce a clear and unambiguous change to their policy that would ensure no such thing would happen again? Of course not. (Also—vouchers, hah! The vouchers were for $50, which is what? One-tenth the cost of a plane ticket? Less? Pocket change. A triviality.)
As for “allowed to reboard after he deleted his tweet”—you say this as if it makes it better, but in fact it’s totally outrageous. For an airline to police a customer’s—not an employee’s, but a customer’s!—speech like this is an egregious abuse. The man apparently plans never to fly with that airline again, which is completely understandable. That airline deserves to go out of business entirely for this sort of behavior.
The message they send, after all, is clear: if you behave in a way that an airline employee even slightly dislikes, you can be kicked off a flight you paid for. Yes, they might later give you some irrelevant vouchers for trivial amounts of money. That changes nothing.
This is all very well as a general heuristic, and certainly being considerate of other people is a good thing.
But when we find ourselves in a situation where we have paid for some good or service, but then, having done so, are informed that if we actually gain possession of the good / enjoy the service—which we have already paid for!—then we’re bad people… then we should immediately be very suspicious. Because what this indicates, quite reliably, is that this is a situation which has either been deliberately engineered, or deliberately prevented from being resolved, by parties that benefit from this outcome—most obviously, of course, that would be the provider of the good/service, which certainly very much prefers to receive money, but provide nothing.
And so it is in this case. The airline benefits from this situation, as I have noted above. This entire problem could be fixed! It doesn’t have to exist at all. But it does, and the reason why it continues to exist is, in large part, the public perception of it as a moral problem, rather than an economic problem.
And so the bottom line is this: when we are told that reclining our seat on an airplane possibly makes us bad people, we are being cheated out of something that we paid for. The beneficiaries of this fraud are the airlines. And the people who make the moral claim are the airlines’ accomplices.
I, for one, do not care to comply with a moral demand, made by accomplices to a fraud of which I am the victim, that calls for me to participate in my own defrauding. Such a demand calls not for acquiescence, but for spite. Reclining one’s seat and thereby inconveniencing someone who believes that reclining makes you a bad person, is not only not morally blameworthy—on the contrary, it is a positive good. You are thereby doing your part to punish defectors (a prosocial act, without question), and helping to move society toward a state where everyone agrees that reclining a reclinable airplane seat is your right. That is, it seems clear to me, a good thing.
Reply to comment on post Creating a truly formidable Art, deleted on 2021-10-23 by user:Valentine (post author):
In short: status.
Valentine perceived, in the top-level comment, a threat to the “status revenue” that was to accrue to him on account of his post. He responded by posting a very crude attempt at lowering the status of the offending commenter (and elevating his own status in the process).
The sense of condescension we perceive in Valentine’s comment comes from the very crudeness of the attempt—which crudeness, ironically, is what makes us perceive it as a low-status action (and thus the juxtaposition of attempted strong status grab done in a low-status way generates the perception of a condescending manner).
(One doesn’t normally say such things explicitly, of course. But I think that in this case it makes a good illustrative example for several useful concepts.)
Reason for deletion, given on the Less Wrong moderation log:
reasonable question from a person with a history of asking reasonable questions that lead to costly, unproductive discussions. Deleting because I don’t want to engage with this person in particular, but don’t want people to view that as evidence on my opinion of the question.
Top-level comment on post Impact Shares For Speculative Projects, deleted on 2022-09-06 by user:Elizabeth (post author):
What does one do with “impact shares”? What are they good for? (If I missed the part of the post that explains this, apologies; just point me to the explanation, in that case.)
That man was removed from the plane because he Tweeted about the gate agent he was arguing with, publicly mentioning her name and the gate she was working at. Duff Watson, the man in that article you linked, mentioned the staff person’s name and location.
Yes? And? Why should that result in expulsion from the flight?
You have totally missed the point of my link/example, which is that airlines can and do kick you off a flight for things that seem like very innocuous, harmless things—things that you never imagine would result in your expulsion. Can you predict with any great certainty that you won’t get kicked off a plane for harassing a fellow passenger? You absolutely cannot.
(Are you tempted to claim that your proposed actions don’t constitute harassment? And you’re probably right: your actual actions, as perceived by you, probably can’t be called harassment by a reasonable person. What about your actions as reported by the other passenger, as those actions are perceived by said other passenger? Are those actions harassment? Sure they are, once the other person says “the person behind me angrily demanded that I not recline; they spoke to me in a very threatening tone of voice; I feel very unsafe sharing a flight with this person”. Then the flight attendant asks you: “sir/madam, did you speak to the passenger in front of you about not reclining their seat?”; you say “yes”; now you’ve admitted to doing what you’re accused of. Would an airline kick you off for that? Easily, and don’t even doubt it.)
Also, they can complain to the airline as well. There you go. The two are not mutually exclusive
As well? As well as what? The recliner complaining is what I was talking about.
(Or do you mean that the person behind the recliner should complain? But what would be the complaint? “The person in front of me reclined their seat”? They have a right to do that. The flight attendant would judge you to be the troublemaker, for that complaint. In other words, you lose if you complain, and you also lose if the other person complains about your attempted resolution.)
Regarding the flight attendant comment, you have nothing to loose here but a short moment’s embarrassment, if that.
On the contrary, you can be kicked off the flight. Airlines have done it for less.
Hmm, but seat reclining is enabled… and yet not everyone agrees. So if everyone agreed… what would change, exactly…?
I’m not actually sure why it would change in any event. Let’s say that everyone agreed that the disutility of not reclining exceeded the disutility of sitting behind a reclined seat. But… that wouldn’t make everyone into utilitarians. Despite agreeing on the result of that comparison, people would still prefer not to sit behind a reclined seat, while also preferring to recline when they wanted to do so.
So… it doesn’t seem to me like universal agreement, in the way you say, would change… anything, really?
And who decides when it’s “working” time? Does nobody ever work on planes when other people around them are sleeping?
I agree with you re: defaults; see my reply to Ben for the feature I think would be good.
As far as v-sizing and overlap issues, I certainly know what you mean. Take a look at the sidenotes layout algorithm in sidenotes.js; you may find it useful to adapt or as inspiration.