Three-monkey mind.
Three-Monkey Mind
Karma: 342
A related phenomenon: Right-leaning Supreme Court justices move left as they get older, possibly because they’re in a left-leaning part of the country (DC) and that’s where all their friends are.
A typical justice nominated by a Republican president starts out at age 50 as an Antonin Scalia and retires at age 80 as an Anthony Kennedy. A justice nominated by a Democrat, however, is a lifelong Stephen Breyer.
[…]
The Cocktail Scene. Maybe the justices — human as they are, after all — want to fit in at parties. “Justices may be subject to influences by the Beltway cocktail scene and want to be perceived as reasonable and moderate,” Josh Blackman, a Supreme Court scholar at the South Texas College of Law, told me in an email. That assumes the cocktail set is liberal, what with its law professors and journalists. But that stereotype does exist in D.C. President Richard Nixon, for example, explicitly wondered if his Supreme Court nominee Harry Blackmun could “resist the Washington cocktail party circuit.”
It sounds way more like “raise the sanity waterline of smart people” than “raise the sanity waterline of the population at large”. If they wanted to raise the sanity waterline of the population at large, they’d be writing books for high- and middle-schoolers.
Wouldn’t they need to make right- and left-handed manicules unless they went for, like, a hamsa hand?
And in case “build things” isn’t concrete enough (it might very well be, in at least the case of software development): ship things.
You can spend a lot of time “building” things, only to get mired in choices that likely won’t matter at all, or matter very little, or can be changed easily enough later.
I think this comment would be made way better with the inclusion of a concrete example or two. I know there’s at least one book out there that can get compressed to a sound bite like this, but a concrete example or two would help explain why.
Human color and space perception doesn’t work symmetrically across light and dark contrasts, so a well-designed dark website and a well-designed light website just look very different from each other on many dimensions. You can of course do it with CSS, but we are not talking about just inverting all the colors, we are talking about at the very least hand-picking all the shades, and realistically substantially changing the layout, spacing and structure of your app (so e.g. you don’t end up with large grey areas in a dark mode setting, which stand out vastly more in dark mode than equally high-contrast grey sections in a light mode).
I’m hoping the negative agreement karma for the parent comment isn’t for this — it’s just for “maintaining both a dark mode and a light mode design for a website is very hard” (emphasis added, as distinct from creation).
The above blockquote makes me want to say to the studio audience “Why are you booing — he’s right!”.
I feel like a bunch of forces on the internet nudge everyone towards the same generic site designs […], and while I agree there is a cost, I do feel actively sad about the tradeoff in the other direction.
Mobile-first cuts out a lot of room for self-expression, agreed.
Dark mode, meanwhile, I like too much. Heck, I have a site where one might reasonably ask “where’s the light mode?”.
And again, if you set the setting once on LessWrong it mostly should be stable, I don’t really buy that there are that many people who get the setting lost?
Safari is set to throw out a site’s cookies if it isn’t visited in seven days. I don’t know about other browsers.
This is probably pretty close to a bookkeeping request, but I visited https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/ThoseTwoBadGuys and the page at the bottom says “If a direct wick has led you here, please correct the link so that it points to the corresponding article.”
I could use some sort of correction because there are a bunch of Those Two Bad Guys types listed on the page and I’m not sure which one Eliezer is pointing at.
So, I think we have at least some preference for people’s first experience of it to be on lightmode so that you at least for-a-bit get a sense of what the aesthetic is meant to be.
This makes sense in a vacuum, but…
…if someone’s first visit to Less Wrong is in the evening after the sun goes down, then his first impression of the site will be colored by an unpleasantly bright website that doesn’t work properly in dark mode. Is that really what you want?
I’ve designed sites where the light mode has a nice background flourish, but I never figured out how to make it work nicely in dark mode.
So I just had a solid dark color in dark mode (instead of the background image) and left the image as a light-mode-only thing, which makes it something like an easter egg if one usually browses the site with a dark-mode preference being forwarded on to the site.
This kind of thing happens to me, as well — I have wallpaper that changes with the time of day, and I generally don’t see the sunrise versions of the wallpaper unless I’m at my computer crazy early or crazy late.
My preference, by default, is something I communicate through the browser because the browser forwards on my light/dark preferences to websites.
In general, I want websites to do whatever my OS is set to do by default.
The relevant “auto” setting for browsers just turn on dark mode in the evenings and light mode during the day.
This is what Macs do by near-default, but some people use dark mode on 24⁄7 and some people use light mode 24⁄7. It’s not what all browsers+OS setups do.
Goodness gracious, reading this and the replies in the thread, it looks like you have tried everything.
The only other thing I can think of to suggest is “move to Europe for a month” (although this would massively complicate drug acquisition, among other things). What tipped me over the edge was seeing a Twitter conversation that went something like this:
“I went to [country in Europe] and lost weight”
“Yeah, but you were on vacation and walking everywhere. That says nothing.”
“Nah, bro. I was there for a month working on my laptop and only going downstairs to the local café and gelateria to eat and I still lost weight”
No, I don’t have a good causal theory for why this seems to work for some people.
I have no idea whatsoever, sorry.
Politicians were not understanding the bill as being about extinction threats; they were understanding the bill as being about regulatory capture of a normal budding technology industry.
Whether the bill is about extinction threats is nearly irrelevant; what’s important is what its first- and second-order effects will be. Any sensible politician will know of all kinds of cases where a bill’s (or constitutional amendment’s) full effects were either not known or explicitly disavowed by the bill’s proponents.
If you want to quell China fears here, you need to make the in-PRC push for this book a peer to the push for the American English one. Of course, the PRC takes a dim view of foreigners trying to bolster social movements, so — and I’m trying to not say this flippantly — good luck with that.
(I also think pushing this book’s pile of memes in China is a good idea because they’re probably about as capable of making AGI as we are, but that’s a separate issue.)
I wasn’t 100% sure what you meant by “the problem is fixed” when I saw your comment in isolation, but this post is way longer than it was when I downvoted. Downvote rescinded.
Strong downvote for linking the free part of a paywalled article here.
(Edit: AFAICT the whole thing was posted, so downvote rescinded.)
A black hole like Discord provides no way to ‘graduate’ from Discord; it wants you to be trapped there forever, writing short comments destined to be forgotten as soon as the screen scrolls past them, emoting and upvoting, and never going anywhere, and using Discord 10 years from now just like you use it today...)
I generally agree with any and all criticisms of Discord, but its search is pretty good. If you know what to search for, you can dig out that old post. Of course, leaving memorable breadcrumbs you can search for three years later is, at best, an art, and in my case seems like something that’s purely luck-of-the-draw when it comes to improbable phrases that you’ve mentioned only once or a handful of times.
On the other hand, Discord users do tend to have a lower threshold of reading stamina; “I ain’t reading all that — I’m happy for you, or sorry that happened” seems to happen more often in Discord unless you’re in a Discord guild that’s pre-selected for people who can read long things — a Gaming Lawyers guild, perhaps.
Why alarming?
Because it used to be the obvious place to post something rationality-related where one could get good critical feedback, up to and including “you’re totally wrong, here’s why” or “have you considered…?” (where considering the thing totally invalidates or falsifies the idea I was trying to put forward).
The big question for me is where I should post (LW, or somewhere else) if I want Said-style feedback on something I think is rationality-related. Sure, I could just e-mail him directly, but I’d rather have that kind of feedback from more than one person.
The answer is not obviously “Less Wrong”, which is alarming.
And yet…
I’m not sure that all of this kind of wandering-away is something that could reasonably be prevented, though.
I think it’s a combination of:
Many of the Old Greats™ are moderately tapped out.
Many of the Old Greats™ have other, more appealing places to post, and there’s basically nothing LW could do to bait them back.
Gwern likes his own site. I don’t think his site was that attractive to him ten years ago.
Scott now has a Substack that gets him megabucks, and he’s much more of a conventional thinker now than he was ten years ago. For him, posting here basically means leaving money on the table.
Eliezer has his book that he’s finishing up. I’m not sure if he’s still posting a lot on Facebook.
I was going to say Roko has an active Twitter account, but apparently he’s nuked all his tweets. At any rate, he has a Substack (latest post: 12/12/2024), so he has an obvious other place to post things, and quite possibly a financial disincentive to POSSE them here. Plus, it’s not like his current publicly-stated political preferences are anywhere near the Bay Area Overton Window, so AFAICT he has a total lack of incentive to have people with Bay Area political preferences get better at systematized winning.
Now, you (i.e. anyone who might be reading this) might be wondering “well, where’re your current and future contributions, hotshot?”
A fair question!
I have roughly an order (or two) of magnitude fewer rationality-relevant ideas (compared to anything else) that I can post on the Internet. I have a “Rationalist-adjacent” folder in my Drafts folder, and it has 13 things in it. A few of them aren’t all that really rationalist-adjacent, a few of them I’m never going to publish because for reasons, and a few of them I can’t really get the politics out of, and I don’t want to be a political poster on the Internet.
So there are a couple good ones in there, but polishing any of them to the point where they’re explained at enough length to win someone over (as opposed to the people who will see a one-line summary of my idea and say “oh yeah, he’s right; I just never thought of it that way before”) sounds like pulling teeth (or maybe polishing turds) for not much extra benefit to me, or anyone else.
Sure, I could post on my Shortform, but I figure the odds of them getting picked up by a better writer who then polishes them into something good that advances the cause of rationality is…slim to none.
Some days it’s hard to not start rooting for the paperclip maximizers.
Some days I actually do start rooting for the paperclip maximizers, but so far I’ve returned to not rooting for them in an hour or a day or two.
I’ve been chewing on the contents of this post for a week+ now.
I think the decision behind this post lurched my set point permanently towards, but not totally in, “root for the paperclip maximizers”, assuming habryka isn’t overridden or removed for this.
When a site that’s supposed to be humanity at its most rational removes one of its backstops against unimpeded woomongering in an attempt to get back authors who honestly seem happier and better-compensated writing on their Substacks, I’m tempted to cancel my pre-order of IABIED and shelve that one post that’s been rattling around in my head that amounts to “Given that CCP cooperation is essential for notkilleveryoneism to win, have any of you Bay Areans really thought about how an NGO push in the PRC is going to look to them, in light of all the other NGO/quango pushes that the US has been pushing that the CCP actively defends against because they obviously are bad for the CCP and/or PRC as a whole?”.
I change my mind too frequently on the paperclip-maximizer question to deactivate my account or let the domain registration for https://www.threemonkeymind.com/ lapse, but I’m updating strongly towards LW not being a place where I want to help raise the local sanity waterline, since this sort of work is actively being thwarted by the moderation team.