I think it depends on the relationship. My girlfriend sometimes asks me things that are obvious to me and easily searchable, but I enjoy the opportunity to flex my knowledge with her. My good friend who is an excellent conversationalist asks, I’m happy to answer, because he usually has interesting follow-up thoughts. My past coworker who I don’t think is very intelligent and I wonder if we should have even hired and hasn’t improved much - I am not terribly interested in answering such a question.

I like this better!

It’s odd - a friend messaged me after reading to say he did the same thing, yet Dickinson analysts are either mystified or in denial that the caps mean anything at all; and the only articles I could find on Trump’s casing found it very odd indeed and were similarly mystified (though they were low-effort output articles at major news organizations, not analysis). So I am hearing only that it’s super weird or that it’s quite typical, nothing in-between!

I took a year of French in college yet had no idea - this is great, I like this.

Scott Alexander uses this style sometimes, and I like it. However, he tends to do it once per essay. I think that can work very well. Here, though, after I hit the “that’s wrong” multiple times, it started to feel like nothing in the essay was worth trying to understand, since I expected what I was reading to later be proclaimed wrong. (Just my own feeling.)

Yeah... so one of my problems with the post is that it presents itself as an exhortation to apply ironclad rationalist thought:

>when the tribal flags come out, you suit up. Operational definitions. Base rates. 48-hour restraint on attribution. Public updates when you're wrong. The whole apparatus of rationalist epistemics applied to the domain where motivated reasoning runs hottest.

but when I present the data I did in my original comment, you show yourself to be overfocused on what's possible, at the expense of what is likely.

I think the essence of rationalist practice is to be good at reasoning under uncertainty, and part of that is integrating multiple pieces of evidence. One can attack any single datum: certainly there is a possibility "Bella Ciao" was written in with a niche meme in mind, rather than an Anti-Facist idea. But "Catch, Facist!" was also written. 
Certainly anyone can date a trans person; but it's more likely for a left-aligned person to than a right-aligned one, due to the right's clear distaste for the trans movement, and the left's clear support. 
These items, in conjunction with what Robinson's mother said about his shift to the left, together, are really quite suggestive.

Against these data, there is the hypothesis that actually Robinson is on the far Right. This hypothesis requires the FBI to have fabricated or edited the messages, and further, for them to make it so the roommate does not ever say "hey, that's not what he sent me". It also requires Robinson's mother to be badly wrong, lying, or for the quote from her to be misattributed or made up. I don't think these things are likely.

This overfocus of yours on what is possible, instead of what's likely, is partisan-driven, not "the whole apparatus of rationalist epistemics" you frame the post as.

You write:
>Utah officials arrest Tyler James Robinson, 22, after a manhunt. Motive still being investigated, but the instant certainty about "the left" doesn't get walked back—it just fades to silence.

But the certainty about the left being culpable has not faded to silence; see, for example, Stephen Miller's speech at Charlie Kirk's funeral yesterday. In my part of X, the certainty about the ideology of the assassin has been consistent.

Given the evidence so far revealed - the text messages sent to the roommate:

>"I had enough of his hatred," Tyler Robinson wrote back. "Some hate can't be negotiated out." 

the Anti-Facist inscription on the unfired bullet casing -

>Another casing was inscribed with lyrics from the song Bella Ciao, which honours World War Two-era partisans of the Italian resistance who fought Nazi Germany.

and the impression his mother had of his motive - 

>According to an indictment, Robinson's mother told police that over the last year or so, Robinson had become more political and left-wing, "more pro-gay and trans-rights oriented". And in family conversations before the shooting, Robinson allegedly accused Kirk of spreading hate.

the weight of evidence leans strongly toward Robinson having strongly-felt Left politics.


And yet you write:
>The Kirk case was a perfect demonstration... when the facts arrive and don't fit the narrative—just silence. No retractions, no apologies, no "we updated our beliefs based on new information." Just on to the next outrage.

I find this line... hard to wrap my head around. What facts arrived that did not fit the "Left assassin" hypothesis, and why do you think they outweigh the data points listed above?


[Quotes are from The BBC, "The motive behind Charlie Kirk's killing: What we know and don't know", published September 19, https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c7v1rle0598o]

That’s… a pretty good theory! Whenever I do achieve an early wake-up time, I have trouble holding on to it, quickly waking later until I run up against the “unacceptably late time to wake up” barrier. This is maybe consistent with an ever-advancing internal sleep-wake rhythm. It isn’t periodic in the way you describe your experience though.

This is not my experience, and I don’t know why. I am not more intelligent than the average LessWrong user, but when I play Go, I’m one of the strongest at the Go club; when I go running outside, I pass many more people than I am passed by; I started poker in February but rank in the top of the free bar league I’ve been going to. I am not trying to brag but there is no other way to describe how strange this post reads to me.


Maybe it’s because these things I do are niche? Go might be like this, but chess wouldn’t be? free bar tournament poker might be like this, but the casino isn’t? running around a neighborhood lake might be like this, but a marathon isn’t? Hm.

I say thanks. In person, or with someone I know well, maybe I'll kind of say "well you should ask such things too!". But this so far as I can tell has never been convincing. One close coworker said "it is good, and I am glad that there are people like you in the world, but there shouldn't be too many of you", which I found oddly convincing.