I have an old post on the scare quotes question: https://messymatters.com/scarequotes/

In short, I have the following cases where I claim you should not use quotes:

(0) of course no quotes for emphasis, (1) don't use quotes to indicate that you're not going to explain a word, (2) don't try to distance yourself from a phrase by putting it in quotes, (3) use italics instead of quotes for introducing a term, unless it's also a mention as opposed to a use of the term, in which case either is ok.

And that leaves the following as the remaining acceptable uses:

1. Quoting someone or otherwise referring to the literal string of characters
2. To indicate you don't mean something literally — like adding a parenthetical "not really"

Layers of further irony: (1) I actually started this post around 6pm, honestly believing it would take a couple hours and I could take the rest of the evening off for a change. Of course I ended up hitting publish right before midnight. (2) I fell into a quintessential Wikipedia rabbit hole along the way, uncovering a case of citogenesis (see footnote).

Ha! I'm embarrassed to have missed this reference without neuroprosthetic assistance.

https://www.gnu.org/fun/jokes/ed-msg.en.html

Maybe I should give ed a try??

Ooh, thank you! I can't get it to work though. I have it in my bookmarks but when I click it, nothing happens anywhere that I can see -- not in the textarea or elsewhere. I've tried it on lots of websites and, nothing.

PS: I tried one more time and suddenly it's working in GitHub Issues comments at least!

Does it work for you for LessWrong posts?

Good point! I'm noticing that in VS Code, the autocomplete is getting scary smart. You'll start doing some tedious edit and the AI is immediately like "so... continue for the rest of this block like this?" and you can just hit tab. For a while I would hit escape in annoyance when it did that. Why would I trust the AI not to introduce subtle errors? But (a) that doesn't seem to happen, and (b) it does a good job of highlighting the parts that will actually change so you can vet it pretty easily. It's pretty freaking magical (modulo the part where it's possibly a harbinger of dooooooom).

One more update. I'm thinking more about the "permanent DST" idea and what the logical extreme of that would be. I think it would mean that whatever time dawn is on summer solstice, that's what we call "8am", year round. No sleeping past dawn ever! (Unless you want to; we're just talking about the standard "when things happen during the day" range, aka business hours.)

Then the downside is that it's dark till like lunch time in the winter. Maybe that's ok!

I made a tool to experiment with such questions: dreeves.github.io/daylight

I made this annoying meme after thinking about how most of the anti-DST arguments involve wishful thinking about how we could get the best of all worlds if "everyone would just". Of course everyone will never just.

I think the following are valid ways to argue against DST:

1. Estimate the value people get from the additional summer evening daylight. Like what would people collectively pay to hit snooze on the sun setting for an hour during the summer. Then compare that with the many costs, like sleep disruption and software bugs. And of course the lost morning daylight.
2. Propose a realistic scheme by which business hours could be shifted without changing the clocks.

I think the nay-sayers have a visceral feeling that changing Time is just deeply, fundamentally stupid. Maybe even wrong in a very literal way. Time is what it is. Changing our clocks does nothing but sow confusion. Can everyone not just do what they want to do when they want to do it, regardless of what numbers are displayed on clocks? I think people really can't. We are social creatures and those numbers are critical infrastructure for our ability to coordinate.

I'm getting into lots of fun arguments since posting this. I think a lot of people are hung up on how they personally aren't beholden to 9-to-5 so it's all cost and no benefit to them and they suspect that it's probably a minority of people who are really beholden to 9-to-5.

I think even if it's a huge majority of people who are perfectly flexible in when they wake up and how they use the day's daylight, my argument works. It's about Schelling points.

Also, to be clearer about my model, in winter we wake up at dawn and use all the daylight -- little that there is -- efficiently. Then the days lengthen and we keep walking up at the same clock time. So we're sleeping through a lot of daylight, which is inefficient. We want to shift to starting the day earlier in the summer. Changing TIME ITSELF is the only realistic way to do so.

Note that this only applies to a certain range of latitudes. Closer to the equator the length of the day doesn't change enough for this to be an issue. And close enough to the poles you either have so much or so little daylight that there's little room to optimize.

In between those latitudes there's a pretty huge upside to shifting the standard hours when group activities happen to align with when the sun is shining.

And I'm not saying there aren't big downsides. Mostly I want the debate to acknowledge the tradeoffs!

It's been two years and I'm wondering if "epilogenics" ever got any traction. I got in an interesting debate about it in an ACX subscribers-only comment thread and the worry was -- due to typographic similarity (or even the existence of this call-to-action?) -- that "epilogenics" was too easy to be spun, for political or culture-war purposes, as "rebranding eugenics". If so, maybe a bland acronym like "human genetic augmentation (HGA)" would be better? (Also, it may be obvious but articulating the case for having a hypernym at all may be helpful.)

Ah, thank you! Sounds like Obsidian users will find this more convenient than eat-the-richtext. Maybe we could start a list of other editors or tools that solve this problem...