I really like A Crisper Explanation of Simulacrum Levels as another way to explain simulacrum levels.

I found this to be the most concrete post from the feedbackloop-first rationality sequence. I really appreciated the empiricist sort of frame of actually going out and trying to do a simple toy experiment to test some assumptions. Hope is blinding, and I remember more often to double-check my thinking for it after reading this post. 

I consider this idea essential social technology on the level of "the map is not the territory." super basic, but it's everywhere once you learn to see it. I think about and make use of this concept on a weekly basis. Definitely seems worthy of consideration for Best Of to me. 

I think Inkhaven is aiming at quality via the pathway of quantity. See the experiment by Jerry Uelsmann^[1]

1. ^{^}

   https://austinkleon.com/2020/12/10/quantity-leads-to-quality-the-origin-of-a-parable/

Seem like ripe opportunities for posts

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.