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Randall Munroe on communicating with humans
Related: When (Not) To Use Probabilities:
For the opposite claim: If It’s Worth Doing, It’s Worth Doing With Made-Up Statistics:
I ... (read more)
Steven Pinker
--Megan McArdle
While I agree with your actual point, I note with amusement that what's worse is the people who claim they do understand: "I understand that you want to own a gun because it's a penis-substitute", "I understand that you don't want me to own a gun because you live in a fantasy world where there's no crime", "I understand that you're talking about my beauty because you think you own me", "I understand that you complain about people talking about your beauty as a way of boasting about how beautiful you are."... None of these explanations are anywhere near true.
It would be a sign of wisdom if someone actually did post "I'm stupid: I can hardly ever understand the viewpoint of anyone who disagrees with me."
Ah, but would it be, though?
it would probably be some kind of weird signalling game, maybe. On the other hand, posting:"I don't understand how etc etc, please, somebody explain to me the reasoning behind it" would be a good strategy to start debating and opening an avenue to "convert" others
I like this and agree that usually or at least often the people making these "I don't understand how anyone could ..." statements aren't interested in actually understanding the people they disagree with. But I also liked Ozy's comment:
Hacker School has a set of "social rules [...] designed to curtail specific behavior we've found to be destructive to a supportive, productive, and fun learning environment." One of them is "no feigning surprise":
I think this is a good rule and when I find out someone doesn't know something that I think they "should" already know, I instead try to react as in xkcd 1053 (or by chalking it up to a momentary maladaptive brain activity change on their part, o... (read more)
I am imagining the following exchange:
"I don't understand how anyone could believe X!"
"Great, the first step to understanding is noticing that you don't understand. Now, let me show you why X is true..."
I suspect that most people saying the first line would not take well to hearing the second.
We could charitably translate "I don't understand how anyone could X" as "I notice that my model of people who X is so bad, that if I tried to explain it, I would probably generate a strawman".
Haven't tried it myself, but it seems to work for Scott Alexander
There no reason to use those nonstandard abbreviations. Neither of them are in Urban dictionary.
NRx is probably neoreactionism but doesn't make it into the first 10 Google results. HBD.er in that spelling seems to be wrong as HBD'er is found when you Google it.
Yogi Berra, on Timeless Decision Theory.
-- Cryptonomicon by Neal Stephenson
Of course I read In the Beginning was the Command Line. The supply of writing from witty bearded men talking to you about cool things isn't infinite, you know.
You say that like it's a bad thing.
-- David Russo
Instead of giving your employees $100 raise, give them $1200 bonus once in a year. It's the same money, but it will make them more happy, because they will keep noticing it for years.
It'll also be easier to reduce a bonus (because of poor performance on the part of the employee or company) than it will be to reduce a salary.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hedonic_treadmill
Basically what Lumifer said.
I speaks to anchoring and evaluating incentives relative to an expected level.
Basically, receiving a raise is seen as a good thing because you are getting more money than a month ago (anchor). But after a while you will be getting the same amount of money as a month ago (the anchor has moved) so there is no cause for joy.
D.C. Dennett, Intuition Pumps and Other Tools for Thinking. Dennett himself is summarising Anatol Rapoport.
I don't see what to do about gaps in arguments. Gaps aren't random. There are little gaps where the original authors have chosen to use their limited word count on other, more delicate, parts of their argument, confident that charitable readers will be happy to fill the small gaps themselves in the obvious ways. There are big gaps where the authors have gone the other way, tip toeing around the weakest points in their argument. Perhaps they hope no-one else will notice. Perhaps they are in denial. Perhaps there are issues with the clarity of the logical structure that make it easy to whiz by the gap without noticing it.
The third perhaps is especially tricky. If you "re-express your target’s position ... clearly" you remove the obfuscation that concealed the gap. Now what? Leaving the gap in clear view creates a strawman. Attempting to fill it draws a certain amount of attention to it; you certainly fail the ideological Turing test because you are making arguments that you opponents don't make. Worse, big gaps are seldom accidental. They are there because they are hard to fill. Indeed it might be the difficulty of filling the gap that made you join the other side of the de... (read more)
A shipowner was about to send to sea an emigrant-ship. He know that she was old, and not over-well built at the first; that she had seen many seas and climes, and often had needed repairs. Doubts had been suggested to him that possibly she was not seaworthy. These doubts preyed upon his mind and made him unhappy; he thought that perhaps he ought to have her thoroughly overhauled and refitted, even though this should put him to great expense. Before the ship sailed, however, he succeeded in overcoming these melancholy reflections. He said to himself that she had gone safely though so many voyages and weathered so many storms, that it was idle to suppose she would not come safely home from this trip also. He would put his trust in Providence, which could hardly fail to protect all these unhappy families that were leaving their fatherland to seek for better times elsewhere. He would dismiss from his mind all ungenerous suspicions about the honesty of builders and contractors. In such a way he acquired a sincere and comfortable conviction that his vessel was thoroughly safe and seaworthy; he watched her depature with a light heart, and benevolent wishes for the success of the exiles in... (read more)
-- The Righteous Mind Ch 3, Jonathan Haidt
I wonder if anyone who needs to make important judgments a lot makes an actual effort to maintain affective hygiene. It seems like a really good idea, but poor signalling.
Don't go before a hungry judge.
Steve Sailer
This Amazon.com review.
~Jennifer Diane "Chatoyance" Reitz, Friendship Is Optimal: Caelum Est Conterrens
J.S. Mill
A conversation between me and my 7-year-old cousin:
Her: "do you believe in God?"
Me: "I don't, do you?"
Her: "I used to but, then I never really saw any proof, like miracles or good people getting saved from mean people and stuff. But I do believe in the Tooth Fairy, because ever time I put a tooth under my pillow, I get money out in the morning."
-- Scott Lynch, "The Lies of Locke Lamora", page 150.
Andrew Gelman
-- Max Tegmark, Our Mathematical Universe, Chapter 8. The Level III Multiverse, "The Joys of Getting Scooped"
Skeletor is Love
-- David Malki !
I know that. People are so lame. Not me though. I am one of the genius ones.
People who often misunderstand others: 6% of geniuses, 94% of garden-variety nonsense-spouters.
Nassim N. Taleb
True, but not as easy to follow as Taleb's advice. In the extreme we could replace every piece of advice with "maximize your utility".
Yes, but my point is that this is also true for, say, leaving the house to have fun.
That's not self-evident to me at all.
Thomas Babington Macaulay, History of England
Frankly, the whole passage Steve Sailer quotes at the link is worth reading.
Katara: Do you think we'll really find airbenders?
Sokka: You want me to be like you, or totally honest?
Katara: Are you saying I'm a liar?
Sokka: I'm saying you're an optimist. Same thing, basically.
-Avatar: The Last Airbender
-- Cryptonomicon by Neal Stephenson
Jane Austen, Sense and Sensibility.
-- Freeman Dyson
Airplanes may not work on fusion or weigh millions of tons, but still, substituting a few words in I could say similar things about airplanes. Or electrical grids. Or smallpox vaccination. But nobody does.
Hypothesis: he has an emotional reaction to the way nuclear weapons are used--he thinks that is arrogant--and he's letting those emotions bleed into his reaction to nuclear weapons themselves.
Reminds me of Expecting Short Inferential Distances.
Penny Arcade takes on the question of the economic value of a sacred thing. Script:
Gabe: Can you believe Notch is gonna sell Minecraft to MS?
Tycho: Yes! I can!
Gabe: Minecraft is, like, his baby though!
Tycho: I would sell an actual baby for two billion dollars.
Tycho: I would sell my baby to the Devil. Then, I would enter my Golden Sarcophagus and begin the ritual.
The View from Hell from an article recommended by asd.
The easy way to make a convincing simulation is to disable the inner critic.
Contrast:
-- Feynman
One might even FTFY the first quote as:
"We see what we see for adaptive reasons, because it is the truth."
This part:
is contradicted by the context of the whole article. The article is in praise of insight porn (the writer's own words for it) as the cognitive experience of choice for nerds (the writer's word for them, in whom he includes himself and for whom he is writing) while explicitly considering its actual truth to be of little importance. He praises the experience of reading Julian Jaynes and in the same breath dismisses Jaynes' actual claims as "batshit insane and obviously wrong".
In other words, "Nerds ... want to see what's really going on" is, like the whole article, a statement of insight porn, uttered for the feeling of truthy insight it gives, "not because it is the truth".
How useful is this to someone who actually wants "to see what's really going on"?
Gordon Freeman, Freeman's Mind
-- CornChowdah, on reddit
In the Great Learning (大學) by Confucius, translated by James Legge
Interestingly I found this in a piece about cancer treatment. An possibly underused well-application of Fluid Analogies.
The way giving someone a fish is fishing skill-enhancing, I'd guess...
Well, not quite. This particular mistake has a general lesson of ‘what you know about what foods are healthy may be wrong’ and an even more general one ‘beware the affect heuristic’, but there probably are more effective ways to teach the latter.
One of the key concepts in Common Law is that of the reasonable man. Re-reading A.P. Herbert, it struck me how his famously insulting description of the reasonable man bears a deep resemblance to that of the ideal rationalist:
... (read more)I'm not convinced. I know a few folks who know about LW and actively dislike it; when I try to find out what it is they dislike about it, I've heard things like —
Steve Sailer
Dates are a very convenient way of specifying the temporal order of many different events.
Perceiving magic is precisely the same thing as perceiving the limits of your own understanding.
-Jaron Lanier, Who Owns the Future?, (e-reader does not provide page number)
From a surprisingly insightful comic commenting on the whole notion of "saving the planet".
-- C. S. Lewis, A Grief Observed
"... Is it wrong to hold on to that kind of hope?"
[having poisoned her] "I have not come for what you hoped to do. I've come for what you did."
Nassim Taleb
Scott Adams
-AC Grayling