This reminds me that not everyone knows what I know.

If you work with distributed systems, by which I mean any system that must pass information between multiple, tightly integrated subsystems, there is a well understood concept of maximum sustainable load and we know that number to be roughly 60% of maximum possible load for all systems.

I don't have a link handy to show you the math, but the basic idea is that the probability that one subsystem will have to wait on another increases exponentially with the total load on the system and the load level that maximizes throughput (total amount of work done by the system over some period of time) comes in just above 60%. If you do less work you are wasting capacity (in terms of throughput); if you do more work you will gum up the works and waste time waiting even if all the subsystems are always busy.

We normally deal with this in engineering contexts, but as is so often the case this property will hold for basically anything that looks sufficiently like a distributed system. Thus the "operate at 60% capacity" rule of thumb will maximize throughput in lots of scenarios: assembly lines, service-oriented architecture software,

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[-]Raemon7y281

This comment is still real good. Some thoughts I've been reflecting on re: 60% rule:

I've roughly been living my life at 60% for the past year (after a few years of doing a lot of over-extension and burnout). It has... been generally good.

I do notice that, say, at the last NYC Winter Solstice, I was operating at like 105% capacity. And the result was a more polished, better thing than would have existed if I'd been operating at 60%. Locally, you do get more results if you burn your reserves, esp if you are working on something with a small number of moving parts. This is why it's so easy to fall into the trap.

But, like, you can't just burn your reserves all the time. It just doesn't work.

And if you're building a thing that is bigger than you and requires a bunch of people coordinating at once, I think it's especially important to keep yourself _and_ your allies working at 60%. This is what maximizes the awesomeness-under-the-curve.

The main worry I have about my current paradigm, where I think I'm lacking: Most of my 60%-worth of effort I spend these days doesn't really go into _improvement_ of my overall capacity, or in especially building new skills. A year-ish ago, when I dialed back my output to something sustainable, I think I cut into my self-improvement focus. (Before moving to Berkeley, I HAD focused efforts on raising the capacity of people around me, which had a similar effect, but I don't think I've done that _much_ since moving here)

[-]adamShimi3y210

My good action of the day is to have fallen in the rabbit hole of discovering the justification behind your comment.

First, it's more queueing theory than distributed systems theory (slightly pedantic, but I'm more used to the latter, which explained my lack of knowledge of this result).

Second, even if you look through Queueing theory resources, it's not that obvious where to look. I've finally found a helpful blog post which basically explains how under basic models of queues the average latency behaves like $\frac{1}{1 - load}$ , which leads to the following graph (utilization is used instead of load, but AFAIK these are the same things):

This post and a bunch of other places mentions 80% rather than 60%, but that's not that important for the point IMO.

One thing I wonder is how this result changes with more complex queuing models, but I don't have the time to look into it. Maybe this pdf (which also includes the maths for the mentioned derivation) has the answer.

2Ben Pace2y

"helpful blog post" is down, here it is on wayback

[-]revel8y100

This sounds very interesting. I'm curious if anyone has a reference for the 60% number? (a few simple google searches for "maximum sustainable load distributed system" and variants didn't turn up anything)

[-]Conor Moreton8y100

This was a brand-new concept to me, and I suspect it's going to immediately be useful to me. Thank you very much for taking the time to explain clearly.

9[anonymous]8y

I've come across this called Queueing Theory but I suspect it has been discovered many times.

6Benquo8y

Huh. That's for a well-defined concrete goal outside the system that doesn't require substantial revision by the system you're evaluating. This suggests that if you see yourself operating at 60% of capacity, you're at neutral (neither accumulating debt nor making progress) with respect to metacognitive slack. Fortunately, if your metacognition budget is very small, even a very small investment - say, the occasional sabbath - can boost the resources devoted to it by one or more orders of magnitude, which should show substantial results even with diminishing returns.

3twentythree8y

I saw this explained well in a book called The Phoenix Project. The book talks about what software development can learn from decades of manufacturing process improvements. This blog post shows the graph presented by the book, which makes a similar but more general point to yours and further formalizes the Slack concept. Seems it's hard to pin down the source of this concept, but it apparently follows from Little's Law.

1Neuroff8y

Could you elaborate on this bit? Or maybe give an example of what you mean?

6Gordon Seidoh Worley8y

I don't know of a great way to phrase this so it doesn't get mixed up with notions of personal productivity, but the basic idea here is that you are yourself a complex system made of many distributed parts that pass information around and so you should expect if you try to operate above 60% of your maximum capacity you'll experience problems. Take physical exercise, for example. If you are doing about 60% of what you are capable of doing you'll probably be able to do it for a long time because you are staying safely below the point of exhausting energy reserves and damaging cells/fibers faster than they can be repaired. Of course this is a bit of a simplification, because different subsystems have different limits and you'll run into problems if you work any subsystem over 60% capacity, so your limiting factor is probably not respiration but something related to repair and replacement, thus you may have to operate overall at less than 60% capacity to keep the constraining subsystem from being overworked. Thus you can, say, walk 20 miles at a slow pace no problem and no need to rest but will tire out and need to rest after running 5 miles at top speed. Same sort of thing happens with mental activities, like if you concentrate too hard for too long you lose the ability to concentrate for a while but if you concentrate lightly you can do it for a long time (think trying to read in a noisy room vs. trying to read in a quiet room). It doesn't really matter how this happens (ego depletion? homeostatic regulation encouraging you to meet other needs?), the point is there is something getting overworked that needs time to clear and recover. To sneak in an extra observation here, it's notable where this doesn't happen or only rarely happens. Systems that need high uptime tend to be highly integrated such that information doesn't have to be shared but instead contain a lot of mutual information. For example, the respiration system doesn't share information between its parts

4bfinn3y

Comparing peak to sustainable running speeds: the world marathon record's average speed is 55% of the world 100m sprint record. And for the Olympic men's qualifying times, the ratio is 54%. Both quite close to 60%

[-]Elizabeth8y251

I find it interesting that some of the things that give slack also take it away. The obvious example is cell phones. Especially at first they gave slack by letting you leave the house while you were waiting for an important phone call, but eventually ate it by creating an expectation that you'd always be available.

[-]redlizard8y172

I think what we are looking at here is Moloch eating all slack out of the system. I think that is a summary of about 75% of what Moloch does.

[-]mako yass8y112

Soylent gives me slack by saving time during lunch, until shorter lunch breaks become the norm. No, it's not really the new technology that's eating your slack, your manager is doing it. Those people who decided they aught to be able to call you on a whim. All we have to do is tell them no and they'll find a way to live with it. Sometimes it can be hard to tell them no, and that's why we have unions.

5ialdabaoth8y

This is because social structures strive to keep slack homeostatic at your level. As soon as you have more slack than you need to service your superiors in the social hierarchy, they will take that slack for themselves.

1ohAitch8y

I think that's a matter of the slack being pulled in by the remote end you had estabolished slack towards, much like wage increases push cost of living in affected areas up accordingly.

[-]Chris_Leong8y190

I clicked +1, but in way of feedback I would suggest trying to be more precise with your definitions. "The absence of binding constraints on behavior" sounds just like a synonym for freedom. If that was the concept that this article identified, it would be kind of pointless, but you've actually identified a new and useful concept.

This has a few advantages:

Firstly, it makes the article easier to understand. Someone people learn better by example, others better by explicit definition.
Secondly, it helps you make sure that what you have identified is indeed a single concept and not a few closely related ideas rolled into one.
Third, it allows you clarify the concept in your own head and pick more central examples to illustrate it.
Fourth, it helps set social norms by encouraging other people to carefully define their terms.

I would make an alternative definition as follows:

Firstly, we start off by assuming some kind of resource (ie. time, energy, money, social capital)
Now we can define Slack as keeping some of a resource spare so that you can spend it when opportunities come up (ie. to do things ethically/properly/just for fun/for personal growth, ect).

This is a more specif

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[-]Zvi8y100

Thank you. I agree that the definition isn't perfect and can likely be improved. "Freedom provided by having spare resources" isn't a bad second attempt but I sense we can do better; I will continue to think about the best way to pin this down concisely. Suggestions welcome!

5ialdabaoth8y

"Freedom by having spare tolerances in your action -> utility map". Resources are just one set of inputs to the function that maps actions to utility. Slack is what happens when your utility map has a plateau rather than a sharp peak. I.e., arrange all your available actions on an N-dimensional field, separated by distinguishable salience. Then create an N+1 dimensional graph, where each such action is mapped to the total utility that results from that action. You have lots of slack if your region of maximum utility look like plateaus - that is, noticeable adjustments to your input don't pertub you out of your 'win' - and you have no slack if your region of maximum utility looks like a sharp peak - that is, noticeable adjustments to your input almost instantly perturb you out of your 'win' and into a significantly lower-utility part of your action space.

1AyN8y

How about the following definition: slack is the range where a quantitative change in behavior does not result in a qualitative change in outcome?

-11DragonGod8y

[-]ialdabaoth8y170

I assert that this is also about Slack, but possibly a different kind of Slack:

https://frustrateddemiurge.tumblr.com/post/144927712238/affordance-widths

5Zvi8y

Strongly agree that this is about Slack.

3Raemon8y

I'd forgotten that this specifically included the "strategize about how to increase your affordance widths" part, which brings it more in line with this post.

[-]ialdabaoth8y100

The thing is, Zvi's post here is about *not losing your affordance width*; it says nothing about how to increase it. Such a post would be highly appreciated.

[-]Czynski5y*90

I think this is a valuable concept to have, but despite thinking about it on and off ever since this was first posted (and reading the Book of the Subgenius) I still don't really understand it well enough to act on it.

[-]moridinamael8y80

I found this post immediately valuable. i appreciated your conciseness. These ideas are simple but not obvious; spending too many words explaining a simple thing makes it seem complicated.

I don't feel that Maya Millennial describes me or anybody I know. People may be in thrall to various different traps of the superego, but by no means is the only common manifestation "social media astroturfing, FOMO, 'premium mediocre something something', thinly veiled middle class trap anxiety". A rich guy becomes slave to his airplane refu

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[-]Thomas Ambrose8y60

Reminds me of Meditations on Moloch. "Slack" is anything that you have/want/enjoy that you would not need/want/care about if you were optimized for competition. Which is to say, Slack is any resource you could sacrifice to Moloch for an advantage.

Thanks for sharing. I've been thinking about this sort of thing a lot the past few years, and it's nice to have a concept handle that broadly encompasses buffer money/free time/focused attention/etc, instead of referring to each individually.

[-]Brandon_Reinhart8y60

Maya has adopted the goal of Appearing-to-Achieve and competition in that race burns slack as a kind of currency. She's going all-in in an attempt to purchase a shot at Actually-Achieving. Many of us might read this and consider ourselves exempt from that outcome. We have either achieved a hard goal or are playing on hard mode to get there. Be wary.

The risk for the hard mode achiever is that they unknowingly transform Lesser Goals into Greater. The slackful hobby becomes a consuming passion or a competitive attractor and then sets into a binding const

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[-]Gunnar_Zarncke8y50

On management you write

Slack in project management is the time a task can be delayed without causing a delay to either subsequent tasks or project completion time. The amount of time before a constraint binds.

I think this is a nice short reference, but a lot lurks behind, because slack in project or process management has a long history and a lot of theory behind it. I think slack in this context can be equated with buffer capacity, at least mostly. Buffers can be good or bad. Toyota saw buffers as bad and invented Just in Time to deal with the consequence

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7Benquo8y

Note that the production analogy assumes a level of value-alignment (or easiness of value alignment) that's not necessarily present in just living your life. If I recall correctly, Toyota is the company that installed the pull-cord anyone on the assembly line could pull to halt the process, which seems like quite a lot of slack in some sense, without being a buffer in the sense I take you to mean. There's a sense in which buffer that's not being used productively is more like clutter than slack. These seem worth distinguishing between, since they're very different kinds of having more than enough.

7Gunnar_Zarncke8y

I like this specific observation and totally agree. Buffers can be slack, but there are definitely other ways. The key seems to be granting options - like with the pull-cord.

[-]Matt Goldenberg8y50

The opposite of slack would be... deliberate constraints? Which I find very valuable. In addition to the value of deliberate constraints- Parkinson's law is a real thing, as are search costs, analysis paralysis, eustress (distress's motivating cousin). I find when I'm structured and extremely busy, I'm productive and happy, but when I have slack, I'm not.

Could this be a case of Reversing the advice you get?

6JacekLach8y

Yes, this post was very useful as advice to reverse to me. I think it possible now that one of the biggest problems with how I'm living my life today is optimising too hard for slack. Low-confidence comment disclaimer; while I've had the concept pretty much nailed down before, I never before thought about it as something you might have too much off. After reading this post I realised that some people do not have enough slack in their life, implying you can choose to have less or more slack, implying it's possible too have too much slack. I don't have abstract 'this is what too much slack looks like' clearly defined right now, but one thing resonates from my own experience. I often find myself with free time, and 'waste it away'. I don't really do anything on most weekends. Having more constraints as guidance for behaviour in free time could likely remediate that; but I seem to be very good at talking myself out of any recurrent commitments, saying that they would reduce my freedom/flexibility/slack. At the same time, it seems to me that I'm happiest, most 'alive', most in the 'flow', in situations with exactly the kind of binding constraints this post talks of avoiding. The constraints focus you on the present, on the very moment, on being. For me this is clearest in sailing regattas - a clear purpose that acts as a binding constraint (to go as fast as possible while staying safe - a safety margin does not for slack make, since you are not willing to ignore crossing it), consuming all your attention (at least during the time you're responsible for the ship, and often more). I suppose one can stretch the metaphor and say that having no slack on too many dimensions is likely to squash you; but having slack everywhere leaves you floating around aimlessly. Keeping most constraints slack and choosing only a couple aligned ones to bind against is possibly a way to find purpose.

3Gunnar_Zarncke8y

I think we have to distinguish slack from freedom or indeed total absence of constraints. When I was younger I was fond of saying that freedom is overrated, because all this striving for freedom comes at significant costs of its own. Deliberately limiting oneself can indeed create some slack. For example, I don't have a driver's license (initially for environmental reasons), which might look like a lack of freedom to go where I want. But I noticed that this doesn't take notable options away (I live in a big city with good public transportation). I and my environment adapt and if I really need a car I can take a taxi from all the saved car costs. Maybe not the best example to illustrate this, but the best I currently have on offer :-)

[-]Dr_Manhattan8y50

Related (I think): if you're early in your career, use some of the government-mandated slack (aka weekends) to differentiate yourself and build up human capital. If you're "a programmer" and are perceived as a generic resource, the system will often drive you to compete on few visible dimensions - like hours. If you have unique and scarce skills you have bargaining power to have more Slack and your employer might even pay for you to gain more human capital. (I still continue to reinvest part of my slack time into my career, though I a)

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8tristanm8y

Maya Millenial almost certainly already believes this. Instagram would be replaced by Github, of course, and maybe a technical blog. The main thing being that she is basically *required* to spend nearly all of her extra time on developing these external markers of expertise. But also that she is driven by the belief that these things make her more likely to acquire Slack in the future.

3Dr_Manhattan8y

Agree, this could be a trap, e.g. people feel Github is a required resume item now. I think the strong indicator variable here is whether the thing you're doing is the generally socially acceptable thing (possibly a trap) vs something differentiated. I personally got into the ML wave before it was cool and everyone in the world wants to be a Data Scientist. Back then it was called "Data Mining" and I decided to do it because I saw being a SWE was intellectually a dead end and wanted to do more mathy things in my job. The generalizable part of this is following your curiosity towards things make sense but are not yet another step on the treadmill.

1tristanm8y

It may be tough to know what the next stepping stone is, in the sense of investing in skills that will be important in the future but aren't super hyped today. And also skills that will be relevant for a long time. I have a Generation X friend who essentially has this problem - despite having over a decade of ogramming experience, he essentially has to start over from scratch if he wants to be competitive in the job market again. While financially stable I'm sure he's still looking for something that is intellectually stimulating and fulfilling. But he also believes (rightly in my opinion) that he's earned a lot of Slack over the many years of his career. Therefore he's basically forced into Maya's situation, but at a serious disadvantage due to where he's invested his Slack already (like having a family).

[-]the gears to ascension8y50

Whoa this is like The Problem In My Life Right Now (tm)

[-]NancyLebovitz4y20

Slack: Getting Past Burnout, Busywork, and the Myth of Total Efficiency by Tom DeMarco

Another book: Slack (unallocated time) is essential for change, learning, and even doing things well.

I'm pretty sure this is the book with the description of what happens when two companies that don't do the work to write good contracts attempt to deal with each other.

[-]habryka8y20

Our latest font changes made this post a bit harder to read, so I cleaned it up and converted it to our editor.

[-][anonymous]8y20

For some reason I remembered "In praise of Idleness" by Bertrand Russell. Seems relevant, although not entirely the same. Some choice quotes.

Another disadvantage is that in universities studies are organized, and the man who thinks of some original line of research is likely to be discouraged. Academic institutions, therefore, useful as they are, are not adequate guardians of the interests of civilization in a world where everyone outside their walls is too busy for unutilitarian pursuits.

In a world where no one is compelled to work more than f

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[-]tristanm8y20

I think a nice, short definition of Slack would be, "A small gradient of the cost function in the vicinity of the optimum." In other words, the penalty for making sub-optimal decisions is not very high, because the region of acceptable behaviors around the best one is fairly large.

And yet here we are, where the penalties for sub-optimal decisions are indeed quite high. The obvious question is, "How did it get to be this way?" Well, typically non-smooth cost functions indicate more complexity, so in some sense the decision landscape has

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[-]Zvi8y200

My model of this problem is that firms cannot pay the hyper-talented what they are worth because the other employees would not stand for it. We have constructed norms whereby hyper-productive CEOs and other executives can get pay that is many times that of their employees, and still this causes massive resentment and even calls for government intervention. If programmers that were 100x as valuable as the average got even 10x the pay, the other employees would strike or riot. Equity does seem to be one way around this trap in some circumstances.

I have personal experience with this. I got [company I used to work for] to hire a very good programmer for a contract, he got the job done ahead of schedule and made us tons of money, and we couldn't renew for another project, because other programmers found out what he was paid and threatened to quit. So he took a higher-paying job elsewhere.

1tristanm8y

Implicitly I've been assuming that we're talking about tech workers here, but that may not be totally fair. I should probably extend this model to include most millenials that are highly career-focused, probably based in major coastal cities. In which case, you could probably extend this to sales/marketing and finance people as well. I think if we do this, then it may be true that the "hyper-talented" people are still the issue here, but it could also be due to more general labor surplus issues as well. Then you get a lot of highly educated, highly motivated young people crowding into major hubs into a few high paying fields, under the belief that these are the primary, if not the only pathways to success. Then the question becomes, is this actually true? Are they correctly identifying where their best chance at happiness lies, and it just happens that there truly are fewer opportunities for financial stability for most people these days? If yes, then I think we could probably reduce the "slack" problem to general economic problems, but I'm not sure if that's the direction you were intending to go with these posts. One thing I don't know is whether or not Maya is essentially acting rationally under her incentive structures, and the incentive structures are the main culprit, or whether she is valuing certain things too highly, such as prestige and social approval.

4Zvi8y

My model says that Maya is acting the way humans react to things in similar situations, so whether or not her actions are "rational" the system is still the problem. Maya's actions seem like they could be rational for certain utility functions, and you can't play such games by halves (hence the lack of Slack) but my guess is that most Mayas are making a mistake playing the game at all. She should probably quit. It does seem like financial stability is in practice much harder to achieve than it used to be, for most people. Especially when student loans and health care get involved. There's less margin for error even with a "good" job and good jobs are harder to find in a pinch for most people. It is unclear to me how much of that is increased needs (letting consumerism, signaling and positional goods eat all your Slack, general high standards, and not putting up with boring or physically demanding work like people used to) versus how much is a real crisis (student loans, health insurance, child care and other forced expenses, lack of jobs with good pay and job security, being treated like dirt due to that, and taking of Slack in order to control people). For programmers, especially top programmers, this isn't an excuse. If I'm a superstar programmer who is worth 100x normal programmer, I can't get 100x or even 10x, but I can get a new job any time I want and likely earn 1.5x with good perks. That really should be good enough to have Slack.

2[anonymous]8y

I like to look at energy usage per capita over time as an indicator of whether we can do more stuff than we could before. E.g. can people own cars. Technology changes this a bit, it makes cars more efficient/cheaper to make so more people can have cars. But looking at money etc makes things too easy to fudge. So getting energy and people , the energy consumption per capita in 1980 it was 64 million BTU per person. In ~2014 it was 73 million BTU per person. So things are getting better energy wise for the globe. I won't try to break down per country to see if things are getting better for the US, things get complicated via global trade (exporting energy consumption etc). You could expect that the majority of the increase in energy consumption has happened other places than the US (Asia had 300% energy consumption growth) during that time period though so that there might be a net negative in the US. It is late, so I'm not going to continue. I think we have a rising inequality from various things, so even if there was an increased energy usage over all, people may feel worse off.

1bfinn3y

Or if you’re paid by results not the hour, as a contractor, you can earn the same in less time. Or even as an employee, you can just be paid to waste most of your time (though this is fairly unsatisfactory). Eg a friend of mine worked with an excellent programmer who would do nothing for months - literally spend most of the time in the pub or messing around with things that interested him - and occasionally spend a weekend programming furiously to produce what was presented to the (crappy) management as what the entire team had been working on for months.

4[anonymous]8y

There was some furore a while back about wage fixing between the big tech companies. Whether it has been fixed or not is another matter. I think that that sort of fixing is possible because a programmers value is based on the scale they work at. If you fix a bug that effects 1 million people per year and leads to 10 cents more per transaction, you have earned the company 100k per year. If your company only has 10k customers, then the same bug in the same time is only 1k per year. So you are worth different amounts to different businesses. As there are only so many very high scale businesses, they can collude. Similar things might apply to lawyers, getting an X% better deal? I wonder at the social factors involved though.

1the gears to ascension8y

This doesn't seem right to me. I think you could describe slack formally in terms of machine learning, but I don't think this is a correct description of it. I was going to propose a better one, but I don't know what I think it is yet.

[-]alxdytn2y10

This reminds me of reading Walden. Thoreau's lifestyle during that period feels like the opposite of the description of Maya's position here.

[-]bfinn3y10

Re ‘Slack is life’, cf the phrase ‘work-life balance’, where life implicitly means non-working time, i.e. (roughly speaking) slack.

(PS heading ‘The Slackless Like of Maya Millennial’ presumably should read ‘The Slackless Life…)

[-]michael_vassar28y10

My guess is that 'Slack' reads differently in social and material reality. Maya is, in a sense, signaling infinite slack, but in a manner which actually consumes any possible reserve of slack. I think a careful reading of Rao shows that sacrificing the thing for the representation of the thing is what he refers to as 'creating social capital'.

[-]habryka8y10

Featured (nominated by Elizabeth): well-written, interesting, useful concept

[-]Conor Moreton8y180

Just a data point: I've yet to find a Zvi post enjoyable to actually read. When I make myself slog through them, there's always valuable and interesting concepts, and I'm usually better off for having put forth the effort, and so I upvote and am grateful to Zvi for sharing. But at the same time, the experience is one of trying to make sense of postmodernist slam poetry, or having to consciously sort out which words are jargon and which words are filler and which words just mean what they say, or trying to parse the statements of someone on a half-dose of mushrooms. It always feels like things could've been 50% more straightforward while still being aesthetically unique and interesting. It sort of feels like the writing doesn't try to optimize for limited working memory, maybe?

(All of this really truly just meant for data/feedback; I have no desire to communicate any sort of a demand-for-change and don't claim that it's "wrong" in any way except for me personally. It's just that, in Zvi's shoes, I would want to know if I were imposing a cost on some readers. Doesn't mean I wouldn't continue to impose it, if that were the right move.)

[-]Zvi8y140

Thank you for saying it. Feedback of this type is hard to get and quite valuable, especially given you grok the posts after doing the work. The concept that I might not be accounting for limited working memory is especially new and interesting. I've been making an effort to make the jargon/non-jargon distinction clear, but it's a known issue and I don't love my solutions so far. There's tension with brevity; I'm trying hard to keep things short.

I don't think you're the only person who has this issue, so I need to fix it. Tsuyoku Naritai. If you're willing I'd love to hear more (here or elsewhere), the more detailed and concrete the better.

9Neuroff8y

I have nearly the opposite experience, FWIW. The posts are intuitive; I flow through the text without any jarring. I think the trick might be (I'm making this up, I don't know what anyone is actually doing) to not try to analyze each line or try to make sure you've understood each sentence. But to let yourself read all the words and then at the end, try to notice if you feel any different about certain concepts, situations, or beliefs. My guess is people have different default methods of absorbing or processing text. If Zvi exists on one end of a spectrum, it would be nice to have whatever is at the opposite end. But I don't want to lose the benefits of having, what to me is a very enjoyable and easy reading experience. (But I also want to accommodate other processing types.) For an example of a similar writing style (which I posit is worse than Zvi's but has similar properties), the book Finite & Infinite Games by James Carse.

6Raemon8y

Heh. I'm able to understand Zvi's posts just fine and find them entertaining, but I think this is largely because I've spent a lot of time talking to him in person. I hear them in his voice with a particular cadence which comes with a sense of familiarity and in-jokiness. It is interesting how different rationalist bloggers compare in terms of writing vs speaking. Scott and Eliezer both feel very different in essay form than in person. Zvi and Anna Salamon pretty much write exactly the same way they talk.

1Chris_Leong8y

Hmm, I thought that Out to Get You was relatively clear, but I suppose that was because it was describing a concept that was easy to grok, not that it was written any differently. For that article there wasn't any need for a precisely specified definition, but for more difficult concepts definition by examples has its limits. But even more than that, if someone can write down an explicit definition it is more likely that they will also be able to pick good definitions to illustrate their point.

[-]benjaminikuta3y00

Does anyone have a link to the LessWrong slack?

[+]glennonymous6y-50

LESSWRONG
LW

LESSWRONG
LW

293

Slack

293

293

Definition: Slack. The absence of binding constraints on behavior.

Related Slackness

Out to Get You and the Attack on Slack

You Can Afford It

The Slackless Like of Maya Millennial

“Give Me Slack or Kill Me” – J.R. “Bob” Dobbs

A Final Note