I've been quiet for the past 2 months about what's going on with HowTruthful. The reasons for this connect to my personal life. The easiest way for me to explain is to take you through the series of events that got me here. In early October, while still employed at...
This is the script for a video I made about my current full-time project. I think the LW community will understand its value better than the average person I talk to does. Hi, I'm Bruce Lewis. I'm a computer programmer. For a long time, I've been fascinated by how computers...
The best path forward might be for @DPiepgrass to make a prototype or mockup, borrowing ideas from HowTruthful and then discussing from there.
I've been quiet for the past 2 months about what's going on with HowTruthful. The reasons for this connect to my personal life. The easiest way for me to explain is to take you through the series of events that got me here.
In early October, while still employed at Google, I went to Missouri to visit my elderly parents. My dad was in poor health in rehab, but he was fighting hard to recover. He did improve his mobility and, after I left, was released back to their independent-living apartment on October 19.
October 27 was the last day at Google for myself, my director, and almost all the engineers under my director.... (read 644 more words →)
This comment is a level 1 lie! (I'm replying to it now with a level 5 lie.)
I don't think 11 needs to be a community value. If someone comes in believing in the supernatural, in cryptozoology, UFOs, P = NP, or other ideas that haven't been scientifically verified, who cares as long as they're interested in changing their way of modeling the world to be more evidence-based?
Sympathize with them, but also with those affected by them.
I strongly upvoted this post because I believe epistemic empathy is important.
The word "irrational" has too many meanings, and I try to avoid it. And I try to direct criticism at arguments rather than people. But I do want to answer your final question as best I can. I'll just phrase it as problems with arguments rather than people's irrationality.
In my experience, the problem with arguments against COVID-19 vaccines is that they mainly consist of evidence that there's risk involved in getting vaccinated. To usefully argue against getting vaccinated, one needs evidence not only that vaccine risks exist, but that they're worse risks than those of remaining unvaccinated.
Similarly, arguments against masks are usually arguing against the wrong statement. They argue against "Masks always prevent transmission", when to be useful, they should be arguing against "Masks reduce transmission".
Good points are made in other comments about the significance of weakest bonds, but mostly I want to say that I like this post because it's making a clear point with clear reasoning, and was very readable.
Are you really insulating from reality, or from recency bias?
At the beginning of 2023 I thought Google was a good place to work. I changed my mind after receiving new evidence.
Agreed there's a lot of work ahead in making it engaging.
I define "pro" as anything one might say in defense of a statement, and that includes decomposing it. It can also include disambiguating it. Or citing a source.
Thanks for the well-wishes. Only two paid users so far, but I'm getting very useful feedback and will have a second iteration with key improvements.
I liked the xkcd on empiricism: https://xkcd.com/2855/
I got a paying customer on https://en.howtruthful.com/ yesterday. Hopefully more to come.
I made this video HowTruthful and the COVID-19 vaccine that illustrates my line of reasoning from a few years ago.
This is the script for a video I made about my current full-time project. I think the LW community will understand its value better than the average person I talk to does.
Hi, I'm Bruce Lewis. I'm a computer programmer. For a long time, I've been fascinated by how computers can help people process information. Lately I've been thinking about and experimenting with ways that computers help people process lines of reasoning. This video will catch you up on the series of thoughts and experiments that led me to HowTruthful, and tell you why I'm excited about it. This is going to be a long video, but if you're interested in how people... (read 1296 more words →)
The project I've been quietly working on now has its second iteration, better than ever: https://www.howtruthful.com/
I'm eager to talk about it, but won't be able to during the workday today. Try it out. Comment and I'll answer tonight.
The video linked from the link above can be watched at 2x speed if you only want to get the gist. If you do that and stop at the how-to-use part, it's only 4 minutes. Watching the entire video at regular speed is 12 minutes, but since this is different from things you've already seen, that might be 12 minutes well spent.