One additional point in favor of using editing macros to do lots of work at once is that it reduces the odds you might make a mistake. Hand-editing dozens of the the lines of code, especially if it's very tedious, could mean a typo or two slips in, which could be annoying to go back and fix and can hide in plain sight; an automated macro will either get them all right, or get them all wrong in a similar way, hopefully sticking out.
It's worth it to learn to sell your own ideas, not in a bullshitting or kissing-up sort of way, but just in learning to present what you believe in your ideas honestly. Then you can be the presenter and the inventor.
Strong upvoted, these guides on what to expect for situation X are very useful, especially when detailed nuts-and-bolts like this. There's a lot of good stuff here that anyone who has a pneumothorax can use to at least set a baseline of what to expect. I find that too many people stop at "eh, well, everyone kind of knows this" and thus few ever write about it.
Glad you're okay and that you have such an awesome wife!
"Imagine there's a child drowning in a shallow pond. You're wearing a swimsuit and could easily save them. Sounds impausible? No, really, you can just save the kid. Don't trust it? Okay, let me make it more believable: imagine there's also a cute puppy guarding the pond that you'd have to kill to reach the child. Would you do it?"
My gut reaction to reading this might illuminate why people don't take stories about utopia or easily-accomplished things seriously: there doesn't seem to be much benefit to be gained by telling a story where everything goes well, there's no dilemma or moral problem, and nothing salient to latch on to.
Imagine there was a TV show about a starship. It is run well, the ship functions normally, the crew go about their days, there's plenty of power and supplies, the journey is vast and not very notable, their mission of moving cargo between two planets back and forth goes fine with no complaints. Once you got past the 2- or 3-episode explanation and tour of the ship and her crew, there wouldn't really be much else different on episode 105 as there was on episode 5.
What would it take to make this show better? Conflict of some sort, perhaps between the crew, or with the environment, or the government, or maybe the suppliers/buyers of the cargo, or maybe with the isolating environment of space and the ennui of staring out a mostly-black window 24/7.
I also posit that we see this pattern in our own lives; we need something to do with our time, even if that something is just a hobby project or reading a few books. Consider fresh retirees in good shape: home paid off, kids in their own careers and doing well, spouse happy. Many such retirees may choose to take it easy, resting and watching TV, and this often either makes them miserable enough to reconsider or saddles them with health problems from their sedentary lifestyle, sometimes leading to death. Contrast with retirees who still make and keep plans, still go traveling, work on projects.
So that's my guess. People don't take stories about happy worlds where nothing goes wrong very seriously because there just isn't much to say about such worlds, so why write stories about them?
Okay, this is definitely true, too. I also do enjoy a more consistent ability to justify my actions and beliefs, which is far from nothing and not worth writing off. I guess, for me, the missing ingredient is that the other person gets it once I make a logical and reasonable justification; if that happens, I think it's fine to be friends with a very critical person.
I'm not a regular user of LW, but I wanted to weigh in anyway. The style of endless asymmetric-effort criticism can be very wearing on people with perfectionist or OCD-like tendencies. I am, sadly, one of those people. In my head is a multi-faced voice of rage and criticism that constantly second guesses my decisions and thoughts and says many of the same things about anyone else's work or life or decisions. This kind of thing is one of the faces, able to find fault in anything and treat it all with importance both high and invariant over any sort of context. I think the voice is something like an IFS firefighter. In fact, here he is now:
wow. You come to LessWrong (stop abbreviating) and you can't even be bothered to put five seconds into reading Kaj's Unlocking the Emotional Brain summary to see if it really is a firefighter and not a protector?
It's exhausting and demoralizing. This is far from the only component, to be fair, and I actually don't doubt that Said is honestly trying to make the world a better place... but this particular flavor of criticism is not making things better. It can be done well, but this isn't it. This makes people, over time and without really noticing it at first, get a submodule installed in their heads that constantly criticizes, second guesses, attempts to justify, apologizes for, pre-emptively clarifies, and talks itself out of things in every domain of life.
...though I guess that may be a natural attractor state for minds like this. Still, while the circumstances for the ban are unfortunate, I think it was correct. For anyone who wants to do anything, having enough energy to do it is key, and things like this just drain it. It's like fighting a wall of molasses.
3Small note that is probably pretty simple by the standards of this excellent comment section, but strong emotion is, itself a problem that needs to be solved, often first. It's like snowfall on the driveway. Some people get a little with the vagaries of life, others get a lot. Sometimes it melts quickly, sometimes you have to shovel it.
To be less metaphorical, people need to feel believed, cared for, and like they'd be listened to. Nail-in-head woman might be a bit silly to not take the nail out of her head, and I used to believe something closer to that in the general case. These days, though, when someone is having trouble with something and their head is clouded to obvious solutions, I might like to:
- Hug them if they're willing
- Listen for awhile, and hold in mind that my initial advice might be wrong, insufficient, and that they've probably already tried some of my ideas early on
- Ask questions and iterate to try to find what the underlying problems is (LessWrong and Rationality helped me a ton in trying to debug my own mind and find better ways to formulate the problems I face)
Feeling seen, feeling heard, believed - it seems pretty important for a lot of people in ways that I may not fully understand yet. I know politics is the mindkiller, so I won't dive too deep, but I will say that it seems a lot of online political discussion doesn't get past the "this issue is real and mostly like we say it is, your lack of belief hurts" stage.
That first, and then we can talk solutions.
Oh, definitely, I truly think this is most of the explanation, but was curious how much the other direction contributed.
Small hypothesis that I'm not very confident of at all but is worth mentioning because I've seen it surfaced by others:
"We live in the safest era in human history, yet we're more terrified of death than ever before."
What if these things are related? Everyone talks about kids being kept in smaller and smaller ranges despite child safety never higher, but what if keeping kids in a smaller range is what causes their greater safety?
Like I said, I don't fully believe this. One counterargument is that survivorship bias shouldn't apply here - even if people in the past died much more often from preventable safety-related things like accidents or kidnappings, their friends and family would remain to report their demise to the world. In other words, if free-roaming was really as risky as we think it is, there should be tons of stories of it from the past, and I don't tend to see as many.
(although maybe comment threads I read on the matter select for happy stories on free-roaming as a kid in the 80s and select against sad ones, I dunno)
Oh, yeah, AI can definitely introduce subtle errors, but maybe at a lower rate? I think the main value is seeing a big change at once, i.e.:
highlights the error immediately, whatever method is used to perform the quick or instant change.