On my personal website I have a link to my posts here, with the sentences, "Want to read about my HowTruthful project? I post in a community whose goals overlap HowTruthful's." The "I post" in present tense is has been false for 2 years. Since I got a job, rewriting HowTruthful has occupied whatever free time I can scrounge up, and I haven't posted. I've barely even lurked. Until lately. Lately, I've been lurking a lot, watching what people post about, and thinking about the overlapping goals.
For LessWrong regulars
For LessWrong regulars, probably the best description of HowTruthful (www.howtruthful.com) is that it tracks current epistemic status of individual thoughts, and connects individual thoughts as evidence for and against other thoughts. But I never would have used the words "epistemic status" when I started the project in my spare time in 2018. I was unaware of LessWrong's existence at that time. How I found out about it is a whole other story, but y'all seem to really like long-form writing, so I'll go ahead and tell it. People who want to cut to the chase should skip to the next section.
In January, 2023 I was a Google employee thanks to the acquisition of Fitbit by Google. Fitbit Boston employees had been in a Boston building far separated from the main Cambridge campus, but we just moved in that month to the newly rebuilt 3 Cambridge Center building. Then the emails came out, "Notice regarding your employment." Almost my whole department was impacted. We would be kept on for a limited time, 9 months for most of us, to finish critical work, at which point we would be laid off with severance, an allowance for insurance, and an "assignment bonus" if we stayed to the very end.
I was startled by the email, and it at first seemed like bad news. However, after looking at the package they were offering, it looked more like a great opportunity. I had never previously had a significant break between jobs, but this package would take the financial pressure off so that I could work on what was important to me. Even better, they were laying off at that same time a bunch of people I liked working with. I organized a weekday standup where several of us got onto Google Meet and talked about independent projects we were working on.
When I described HowTruthful, one of my former coworkers told me about LessWrong. I had previously seen the "overcoming bias" website which I liked. I came here and saw on the about page, "dedicated to improving human reasoning and decision-making". Wow! This is my place! I dutifully read the new user's guide, and Is LessWrong for you? got me even more convinced. However, my initial version of HowTruthful was proving not to be sufficiently engaging, and I slunk back into the darkness to do a rewrite. This happened slowly due to other life distractions.
The rewrite is here
With helpful feedback from my former coworkers, I wrote a new version of HowTruthful from scratch, with much improved aesthetics and UX. Most notably, drag to reorder makes organizing evidence easier. I made a clearer separation between private opinions (free, stored only on your device) vs public ($10/year) to ensure nobody mistakenly puts one in the wrong category. I intend to keep adding features, especially social features for public opinions. Particularly, I want to enable seeing what other opinions are out there regarding the same statement.
I'm back on LessWrong
I've been lurking. The dominant topic here is AI risk. It's so dominant that I began to question whether general truth and reasoning was still of interest to this community, but I found several interesting posts on those topics and concluded that yes, our goals do overlap.
On my personal website I have a link to my posts here, with the sentences, "Want to read about my HowTruthful project? I post in a community whose goals overlap HowTruthful's." The "I post" in present tense is has been false for 2 years. Since I got a job, rewriting HowTruthful has occupied whatever free time I can scrounge up, and I haven't posted. I've barely even lurked. Until lately. Lately, I've been lurking a lot, watching what people post about, and thinking about the overlapping goals.
For LessWrong regulars
For LessWrong regulars, probably the best description of HowTruthful (www.howtruthful.com) is that it tracks current epistemic status of individual thoughts, and connects individual thoughts as evidence for and against other thoughts. But I never would have used the words "epistemic status" when I started the project in my spare time in 2018. I was unaware of LessWrong's existence at that time. How I found out about it is a whole other story, but y'all seem to really like long-form writing, so I'll go ahead and tell it. People who want to cut to the chase should skip to the next section.
In January, 2023 I was a Google employee thanks to the acquisition of Fitbit by Google. Fitbit Boston employees had been in a Boston building far separated from the main Cambridge campus, but we just moved in that month to the newly rebuilt 3 Cambridge Center building. Then the emails came out, "Notice regarding your employment." Almost my whole department was impacted. We would be kept on for a limited time, 9 months for most of us, to finish critical work, at which point we would be laid off with severance, an allowance for insurance, and an "assignment bonus" if we stayed to the very end.
I was startled by the email, and it at first seemed like bad news. However, after looking at the package they were offering, it looked more like a great opportunity. I had never previously had a significant break between jobs, but this package would take the financial pressure off so that I could work on what was important to me. Even better, they were laying off at that same time a bunch of people I liked working with. I organized a weekday standup where several of us got onto Google Meet and talked about independent projects we were working on.
When I described HowTruthful, one of my former coworkers told me about LessWrong. I had previously seen the "overcoming bias" website which I liked. I came here and saw on the about page, "dedicated to improving human reasoning and decision-making". Wow! This is my place! I dutifully read the new user's guide, and Is LessWrong for you? got me even more convinced. However, my initial version of HowTruthful was proving not to be sufficiently engaging, and I slunk back into the darkness to do a rewrite. This happened slowly due to other life distractions.
The rewrite is here
With helpful feedback from my former coworkers, I wrote a new version of HowTruthful from scratch, with much improved aesthetics and UX. Most notably, drag to reorder makes organizing evidence easier. I made a clearer separation between private opinions (free, stored only on your device) vs public ($10/year) to ensure nobody mistakenly puts one in the wrong category. I intend to keep adding features, especially social features for public opinions. Particularly, I want to enable seeing what other opinions are out there regarding the same statement.
I'm back on LessWrong
I've been lurking. The dominant topic here is AI risk. It's so dominant that I began to question whether general truth and reasoning was still of interest to this community, but I found several interesting posts on those topics and concluded that yes, our goals do overlap.