The Best of LessWrong

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Staring into the abyss as a core life skill

Ben observes that all favorite people are great at a skill he's labeled in my head as "staring into the abyss" – thinking reasonably about things that are uncomfortable to contemplate, like arguments against your religious beliefs, or in favor of breaking up with your partner.

#12

Luck based medicine: my resentful story of becoming a medical miracle

Elizabeth Van Nostrand spent literal decades seeing doctors about digestive problems that made her life miserable. She tried everything and nothing worked, until one day a doctor prescribed 5 different random supplements without thinking too hard about it and one of them miraculously cured her. This has led her to believe that sometimes you need to optimize for luck rather than scientific knowledge when it comes to medicine.

#25

Losing the root for the tree

A look at how we can get caught up in the details and lose sight of the bigger picture. By repeatedly asking "what are we really trying to accomplish here?", we can step back and refocus on what's truly important, whether in our careers, health, or life overall.

#33

Butterfly Ideas

Sometimes your brilliant, hyperanalytical friends can accidentally crush your fragile new ideas before they have a chance to develop. Elizabeth shares a strategy she uses to get them to chill out and vibe on new ideas for a bit before dissecting them.

#37

Useful Vices for Wicked Problems

When tackling difficult, open-ended research questions, it's easy to get stuck. In addition to vices like openmindedness and self-criticality, Holden recommends "vices" like laziness, impatience, hubris and self-preservation as antidotes. This post explores the techniques that have worked well for him.

#45

Learning By Writing

Holden shares his step-by-step process for forming opinions on a topic, developing and refining hypotheses, and ultimately arriving at a nuanced view - all while focusing on writing rather than just passively consuming information.

#46

Limerence Messes Up Your Rationality Real Bad, Yo

Limerence (aka "falling in love") wrecks havoc on your rationality. Evolution gave us capacity for reason, but also it built in massive hardcoded overrides for situations where no fuck you your brain is not for building rocketships and new abstract theories, your brain is for producing children and entangling yourself with a partner long enough to raise them.

Forget this at your peril.

#47

The Onion Test for Personal and Institutional Honesty

Do you pass the "onion test" for honesty? If people get to know you better over time, do they find out new things, but not be shocked by the *types* of information that were hidden? A framework for thinking about personal (and institutional) honesty.

26Screwtape

Figuring out the edge cases about honesty and truth seem important to me, both as a matter of personal aesthetics and as a matter for LessWrong to pay attention to. One of the things people have used to describe what makes LessWrong special is that it's a community focused on truth-seeking, which makes "what is truth anyway and how do we talk about it" a worthwhile topic of conversation. This article talks about it, in a way that's clear. (The positive example negative example pattern is a good approach to a topic that can really suffer from illusion of transparency.) Like Eliezer's Meta-Honesty post, the approach suggested does rely on some fast verbal footwork, though the footwork need not be as fast as Meta-Honesty. Passing the Onion Test consistently requires the same kind of comparison to alternate worlds as glomarization, which is a bit of a strike against it but that's hardly unique to the Onion Test. I don't know if people still wind up feeling mislead? For instance, I can imagine someone saying "I usually keep my financial state private" and having their conversation partners walk away with wildly different ideas of how they're doing. Is it so bad they don't want to talk about it? Is it so good they don't want to brag? If I thought it was the former and offered to cover their share of dinner repeatedly, I might be annoyed if it turns out to be the latter. I don't particularly hold myself to the Onion Test, but it did provide another angle on the subject that I appreciated. Nobody has yet used it this way around me, but I could also see Onion Test declared in a similar manner to Crocker's Rules, an opt-in social norm that might be recognized by others if it got popular enough. I'm not sure it's worth the limited conceptual slots a community can have for those, but I wouldn't feel the slot was wasted if Onion Tests made it that far. This might be weird, but I really appreciate people having the conversations about what they think is honest and in what way