I admit I am a bit confused about the thesis here... I get that accurate behavioral accounting is sometimes tightly related to social punishment such that the attempt to give or defend oneself from punishment provides incentive to lie about the behavior (and attempts to describe the behavior have direct implications for punishment). 

But are you further claiming that that all social punishment is identical^[1] to truth-claims about other things (i.e. "reasons for the punishment")? This seems like an ideal that I aspire to, but not how most people relate to social punishment, where social ostracism can sometimes simply be a matter of fashion or personal preference. 

Personally I use phrases like "X is lame" or "X isn't cool" to intentionally and explicitly set the status of things. I endeavor to always have good reasons for why and to provide them (or at least to have them ready if requested), but the move itself does not require justification in order to successfully communicate that something is having its status lowered or is something that I oppose. People would often happily just accept the status-claims without reasons, similar to learning what is currently 'in fashion'.

1. ^{^}

   On reflection I don't quite mean identical to, but something more like "Is a deterministic function of truth-claims about good/bad behavior, taking that-and-only-that as input".

I think of "It seems" as coming from the view from nowhere. I say "It seems to me" to own it, unless I mean to make the active claim that I believe it will seem this way to everyone.

"Arguably" feels super weak to me. I would only use it if I actively wanted to distance myself from a view. Almost anything is 'arguable' in principle.

Probably this isn't the exclusive reason, but typically I use "I think" whenever I want to rule out the interpretation that I am implying we all agree on my claim. If I say "It was a mistake for you to paint this room yellow" this is more natural if you agree with me; if I say "I think it was a mistake for you to paint this room yellow" this is more natural if I'm informing you of my opinion but I expect you to disagree.

This is not a universal rule, and fwiw I do think there's something good about clear and simple writing that cuts out all the probably-unnecessary qualifiers, but I think this is a common case where I find it worth adding it in.

Datapoint: I'm currently setting up a recording studio at Lighthaven, and I am using them all the time to get guides for things like "how to change a setting on this camera" or "how to use this microphone" or "how to use this recording software".

Yes, they confabulate menus and things a lot, but as long as I keep uploading photos of what I actually see, they know the basics much better than me (e.g. what bit rate to set the video vs the audio, where to look to kill the random white noise input I'm getting, etc).

I'd say they confabulate like 50% of the time but that they're still a much more effective search engine for me than google, and can read the manual much faster than me. My guess is I simply couldn't do some of the projects I'm doing without them.

Awesome, thanks so much gustaf! 

I've re-arranged the order a little bit to have some of the more common ones first.

Yeah, I have been thinking about linking it from the reacts menu. Will think about that next time I ship some changes. (I'll be more inclined to do that if there are more explanations and links and culture and stuff.)

Curated. This is a topic that is getting a ton of attention at the minute, and the post does a decent job at laying out relevant considerations and summarizing some prior debate.

(I disagree with the conclusion but it seems positive to me to curate something with a different conclusion than the recent book on the issue.)

Link to Nate's comments.

Further follow-up: Guido Reichstadter wraps up after 30 days. Impressively long! And a bit longer than I'd guessed.

Yeah but "this theory sometimes correctly predicts the economy in a way no other theory has been capable of, and sometimes gets things totally wrong, and this theory says AI will cause extinction" is not unjustly privileging the hypothesis. It's a mistake to say that theory "just isn't very informative" when it's been incredibly informative on lots of issues, even while mistaken on others.