- Don't say false shit omg this one's so basic what are you even doing. And to be perfectly fucking clear "false shit" includes exaggeration for dramatic effect. Exaggeration is just another way for shit to be false.
- You do NOT (necessarily) know what you fucking saw. What you saw and what you thought about it are two different things. Keep them the fuck straight.
- Performative overconfidence can go suck a bag of dicks. Tell us how sure you are, and don't pretend to know shit you don't.
- If you're going to talk unfalsifiable twaddle out of your ass, at least fucking warn us first.
- Try to find the actual factual goddamn truth together with whatever assholes you're talking to. Be a Chad scout, not a Virgin soldier.
- One hypothesis is not e-fucking-nough. You need at least two, AT LEAST, or you'll just end up rehearsing the same dumb shit the whole time instead of actually thinking.
- One great way to fuck shit up fast is to conflate the antecedent, the consequent, and the implication. DO NOT.
- Don't be all like "nuh-UH, nuh-UH, you SAID!" Just let people correct themselves. Fuck.
- That motte-and-bailey bullshit does not fly here.
- Whatever the fuck else you do, for fucksake do not fucking ignore these guidelines when talking about the insides of other people's heads, unless you mainly wanna light some fucking trash fires, in which case GTFO.
finally
Strong downvoted mostly to apply some token resistance in the direction away from "Logan gradient descends into maximal fun-ranty-monkey-engagement-incentives."
😂
but Ray are you really so sure i should not be the one to turn The Sequences into a collection of belligerent tiktoks? i've been covering the same beat for ten years what if it's time for A CHANGE?
I mean it's not obviously wrong, just seemed like someone should put some token effort of resistance.
Counter-argument: only 699 more karma till this is the most upvoted post on LW
not unless I go out of my way to take actions that the LW team has agreed not to do unless there is a specific vote-abuse-moderation reason to consider taking.
why does lesswrong suddenly feel good and homey
I've been impressed lately by how, while the EA forum has become basically overrun with useless scandal discussion, LessWrong has stayed virtually unafflicted. I think I'm the only person who ever commented about the Bostrom fiasco (in a shortform), and I feel bad about that and won't do suchwise again. We must preserve our garden of autistic truth seeking and alignmentposts.
Combination of technical success, social success, and PR success, I assume.
(This is a parody post of Basics of Rationalist Discourse by Duncan Sabien.)
Hot take: this is not a parody; this is the actual message of the other post, just not trying to be cautious/reserved/gentle/pragmatically persuasive. My heart sings.
Since my disagreement with your post is about the general practice of turning advice into norms, not as much about the advice itself, I think this post is superior on object level, ignoring the style gloss.
Another point in favor of this post is that nuance is poison, it introduces costs all around that are often not worth the benefits of nuance, which could be obtained in other ways, such as with modular abstractions. So it's like technical debt, a temporary solution in search for an opportunity for refactoring, not something to celebrate for its own sake.
"Nuance is poison"? Come on
I'm not sure what you mean by modular abstractions but I expect to agree that it's the way to go
Nuance is lines of code, it's complexity of implementing communication. It is cost that comes with value of clarifying ideas, but it's still a cost, both for the writer and for all the readers. It's feasible to achieve unnecessary levels of clarity with additional nuance.
Clarity can be improved in other ways. It's possible to simplify the intended message itself, by choosing to communicate something different, letting go of most aspects of the underlying issue for purposes of communication, making use of more central meanings of relevant concepts. This goes in hand with creating/popularizing unfamiliar concepts that can then be used as building blocks for communicated ideas. Modular code with short functions, each meaningful on its own, built on good libraries. And refactoring of that nuanced spaghetti code that works very well in most cases.
I agree that defensive writing exists, is usually worse than non-defensive writing, and that you can frame some of the defenses as nuance (although I don't think that's the only place nuance comes from). But I feel like this comment frames defensive writing as a flaw of the author, and I don't think that's fair. LessWrong can be an absolutely miserable place to post, defensive writing happens because authors have a justified fear of being ~attacked. I think if you want posters to write less defensively the intervention point should be calming down the comments and otherwise providing psychological safety.
You could argue that defensive writing by and large doesn't work. I used to think this, and I still think it does a bad job at preventing bad top level comments. But it makes it more likely another commenter gets your point and corrects the bad commenter without your involvement, which is very valuable.
I agree that is a potential takeaway from my comment. I also agree that it's not fair to overly criticize authors when that reaction toward defensiveness may be because they're correctly anticipating a harsh PONDS response from their readership. I do have empathy for the problem.
When I read the blog posts I really enjoy, it seems to me those authors manage to write in ways that come across as non-defensive, with exaggerations and humor and "you know what I mean" implications. They rely on me to fill in some of the blanks, and that's part of the fun of their posts and part of what keeps my attention.
When I write defensively, I feel like way too much of my mental energy is going into combatting phanom future commenters and not enough to the object-level of the post. And when that gets overwhelming I just delete it or leave it in drafts. I have a large graveyard of dead posts.
I used to have a lot more fun writing, enjoying the vividness of language, and while I thank LessWrong for improving many aspects of my thinking, it has also stripped away almost all my verve for language. I think that's coming from the defensiveness-nuance complex I'm describing, and since the internet is what it is, I guess I'd like to start by changing myself. But my own self-advice may not be right for others.
Flagging I also disagree with this (also seems to obviously be failing rule #10).
I'm a bit confused about this, because, like, I'm sure you know that time is short, there are lots of (true) things to talk about, going infinitely deep on precisely specifying any given thing is clearly unworkable even if you pick the specific sub-hill of "be LessWrong" to die on rather than the broader hill of "maximize truthseeking.". I assume you pick some point on the curve where you're like "okay, practically, that was enough precision", which is just higher than mine.
When I imagine bringing this up my Duncan-sim says "yes I know that and can pass your ITT and integrated it", but, I don't really know why you're making the tradeoffs you do.
There's a hell of a lot of stuff I want to learn, and it honestly seems anti-helpful to me, on truthseeking terms, to spend the amount you do on nuance, when there is so much other stuff I need to think about, learn, discuss and reason about.
I agree that this is a natural way you could, and I see did, respond to my original comment. I apologize for that.
My intention was different. I'll explain what it was in the hopes that it will decrease the tension.
I don't think the bit I quoted from your original post was all that unusually (by my lights "overly") nuanced by LW standards, and I tried to gesture in that direction by prefacing with "not to complain about a good post." But obviously that did not correct for the unfriendly tone that I managed to project anyway.
The only reason I picked it out was because the topic of the commend thread was comparing the style of this post with the style of yours. When I said that the writing had a CYA feel, I meant that empathetically, strange as that may sound. I perceive that LW writers write anxious, and I experience this myself.
That may be me typical-minding, but I have also heard other writers talk about feeling defensive about the... (read more)
I think it'd be great if the first sentence in every point here would link to the corresponding elaboration in Duncan's post.
Working on translation into Russian ;)
EDIT: Done
This has a mighty It’s Decorative Gourd Season, Motherfuckers energy.
Parody is great!
These are my favorites, because you don't even have to go looking at the other suggestions to find suggestions they violate. Performative overconfidence about performative overconfidence is a perfect little closed loop of self contradiction, and there's no warning about "talking unfalisifiable twaddle out of your ass" in the course of spouting twaddle out of your ass <3
(And least presumably it is twaddle... I have to admit I'm not sure how exactly I'd falsify a claim that something is "twaddle" or not.)
More seriously, I like how, despite being a dumpster fire of self contradiction, there's still something to admire here in a humanistic sense. The small clean contrast between the semantic content and the way the rules are instantly violated by exhortations to follow them seems educationally valuable.
Like the story about the logical positivists is that they somehow collapsed under the weight of their own scorn for bullshit, because their tools, taken seriously, and aimed at their tools, found their tools to... (read more)
I sometimes enjoy a good rant, but this feels a little too intentionally-confrontational-without-actually-identifying-a-target. Not quite passive-aggressive, as there's no passive. More aggressive-but-safe. 3/10, would not like to see more of it.
That said, I REALLY am looking forward to the future uses, where it becomes a norm to comment on posts with a link to this (rather than Duncan's) and a number. Take your damned upvote.
At last, a readable translation into the prestige dialect.
Excellent rant, 10/10. My instinctive pushback:
- Ugh, you mean, don't say things you believe to be false in the moment you say it. It's okay to fib a bit for effect.
- You don't know what you saw, and you don't remember what you thought about it in the moment. All you have is slowly fading and constantly reprocessed memories. There is no way to keep it all straight, though you might as well try, subject to acknowledging above caveats.
- Unless you are you (Logan), or Scott or Eliezer, and maybe a few other people, you tend to feel very sure of something when you s
... (read more)Should we have a rewrite the Rationalist Basics Discourse contest?
Not that I think anything is gonna beat this. But still :D
Ps: can be both content and/or style
(Porting and translating comment here, because this post is great):
Goddamn I wish people would just tell me when the fuck they're not willing to fucking budge. It's a fucking waste of time for all parties if we just play ourselves to exhaustion. Fuck, it's okay to not update all at once, goddamn Rome wasn't built in a day.
This is not Reddit. I don't think posts solely for the sake of humor deserve this many upvotes, particularly not when they're full of inappropriate, unprofessional language like this. I strong downvoted and I'd rather never see anything like this on LessWrong again.
Upvoted for quality parody. I read this as a probably much-needed rebuke of some internal community drama somewhere (just an initial impression that might well be uninformed), but taken purely at face-value, I'm not sure I agree with the overall thrust of the post and associated commentary, at least when presented as basics of rationalist discourse (although I might be biased, as I am in favour of turning the Sequences into a series of belligerent TikToks myself, which I noticed a reference to in the comments; I can only assume this has been a recurring su... (read more)
Sorry, this is cringy.
I would find this simply unfunny if it was the basics of black nationalist or nazi bodybuilder discourse, but lets face it, lesswrongers are not black nationalists or nazi bodybuilders. The aesthetics of an object should ideally reflect its true nature; the minimalistic and monochromatic design of this website reflects the nature of this movement well. This post, not so much.
i downvoted Jensen's comment because i think "this is cringy" is a super extra mind-killy sort of concept and i want less of it around.
Yeah, I think "cringing" is something a person does, and is not a property of a thing itself, and to impart it as a property of the thing itself is to commit the mind-projection fallacy.
I think the interrater reliability of "cringyness" would be surprisingly high.
Not a crux for me! What's "fashionable" amongst a group also has strong reliability, yet what's "fashionable" is something that radically changes very quickly and is primarily a fact about what the people have currently determined is fashionable, and not a fact about the piece of creative work that they're looking at.
The best part about this post is that you get to see how quickly everyone devolves into serious, rational discourse.
Who's the intended audience of this post?
If it's for "internal" consumption, summary of things we already knew in the form of list of sazens, but perhaps need a refresher, then it's great.
But if it's meant to actually educate anyone, or worse, become some kind of manifesto cited by New Your Times to show what's going on in this community, then I predict this is not going to end well.
The problem, as I see it, is that in the current way this website is setup, it's not up to author to decide who's the audience.