Nitter thread (don't need to sign in to Twitter)

https://nitter.tiekoetter.com/DKokotajlo/status/1992316608073847201

For grounding data, I keep thinking of Shop Class as Soulcraft by Matthew Crawford. Doing some kind of wood-carving or pottery or painting or sketching animals on nature walks, or something like that seems well-advised. Also works as a toy problem to practice new skills on. 

I agree, but I feel that there is a distinct imbalance where a post can take hours of effort, and be cast aside with a 10-second vibe check and 1 second "downvote click".

You don't get points for effort. Just for value. 

One way to think of it is like you are selling some food in a market. Your potential buyers don't care if the food took you 7 hours or 7 minutes to make, they care how good it tastes, and how expensive it is. The equivalent for something like an essay is how useful/insightful/interesting your ideas is, and how difficult/annoying/time-consuming it is to read. 

You can decrease the costs (shorter, easy-to-follow, humor), but eventually you can't decrease them any more and your only option is to increase the value. And well, increasing the value can be hard.

I want to say something like, you are not owed attention on your post just because it is written with good logic. That's sort of harsh, but I do think that you have to earn the reader's trust. People downvote for all sorts of reasons, not all of them are because of some logical mistake you made, sometimes it's just because the post is not relevant, or seems elementary, or isn't written well, or doesn't engage with previous work. 

I can understand getting unexplained downvotes being demoralizing, but demanding people spend more of their own effort and time to engage with you is a losing proposition. You have to make it worth their time.

But, I'm feeling generous today and I'll try and write some of my thoughts anyway.

I found this post confusing to read, and had to go back and re-read the whole thing after reading it the first time to understand what you were even saying. For example one of the first sentences: 

On this post I will intentionally try to illustrate how I would see my recommendation playing out:
 

And yet, I don't know what your recommendation even is yet. Take some time to explain your recommendation, and why I should care first, then I know what you're talking about in this section. 

There are similar sorts of problems all over the piece with assumptions that aren't justified, jumping around tonally between sections, and mixing up explaining the problem with your preferred solution. It's just not a well-written piece, or so I judged it.

Hopefully that helps!

One of the most useful things I did as a junior dev was to literally read the entire language spec for javascript. Searching for articles that explained anything I didn't understand. I think this strategy of actually trying to read all the docs the way you'd read a textbook is underrated for tools you are going to be using often. 

Kudos for bravely posting, despite knowing how it makes you look/how people will misunderstand. 

Good example. This leads me to wonder, if we were starting from scratch, whether the relations between numbers (as you've demonstrated here), or the positional notation, would make for a better optimization target for numeral systems.

We write numbers left to right in digits the same way we write numbers left to right in words.

This is addressed in the post. You would write the words differently to match the left-right inversion. 

Having to look at an entire glyph sequence before knowing what the first glyph means is not unique to numbers. Words are like that, too.

I agree with you here. However, I don't think it works as an argument against optimizing a numeral system to be different.

This proposal is unmotivated and unnecessary.

Where's your sense of fun? The post explicitly calls itself out as being an unrealistic proposal. Maybe it feels unnecessary to you (which is totally fine and cool), but I don't see how a post about optimizing our numeral system is "unnecessary"

I would guess something like historical momentum is the reason people keep using it. Nicholas Shackel coined the term in 2005, then it got popularized in 2014 from SSC. 20 years is a long time for people to be using the term.

Seems like that's easily fixable by having the numerator be most upvotes on a single post/comment, or your total upvotes, whichever is higher.