meedstrom

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So if a Rationality Quotient (RQ) became famous for only measuring skills that everyone can build regardless of where they start, rather than innate ability, it'd be less infected than the discourse around IQ?

Paraphrasing from How to Take Smart Notes by Sönke Ahrens: we easily get away with unfounded claims when we speak orally. We can distract from argumentative gaps with a "you know what I mean", even if on introspection we would find that we don't know what we mean. Writing permanent notes will make these gaps obvious.

Thank you for writing this out. Don't lose heart if the response isn't what you'd hoped--some future post could even be curated into the featured section. Why I say that? The bits about ineffective self-talk:

He notices that he made a mistake by not trusting his gut instinct earlier enough, and then decides once again that he made another mistake. This is not, actually, the only reaction one could have. One could instead react in the following way: “Oops, I guess I didn’t make a mistake after all.” These two different reactions calibrate the mind in two different directions.

For me, it's been important to change my self-talk towards compassion and acceptance, and this presents an interesting new dimension. If it helps us experience life (including our rationalist journey) as more fun, that's so important. Ties in with what Nate was saying about stoking genuine enthusiasm, in his sequence Replacing Guilt.

(To clarify, that's 6% RDI, not 6% by volume, which would be worrying.)

I'm confused. Are you saying 1 cup of organic peas is "half a day's intake of vegetables" for you?

It happens, but you can't exchange complex ideas this way. You know when someone's talking and you nod or say "Yeah" to show you get it without interrupting? There's a number of other short phrases you could say if you wanted, like "I know" or "Impossible" or "Dunno", and that's mostly what we deafies in Sweden do IME. It's rare that hearing people do this, breaks a norm I guess, but it's in principle you could do it. With sign you can also say a bit more complicated things without breaking flow like "That's a misunderstanding" or "You're lying" or sometimes drop in a whole sentence like "Actually no she didn't "... but at that point the conversation is getting heated and starting to break down.

I guess if you wanted to construct a fulltime full-duplex mode of conversation it would be a bit easier with hands than voices. Or to let one speaker use hands and the other use voice, so as to use different parts of the brain.

As a deaf person, I'm always teaching people to sign, like when I move into a new house, and I do see a difference between learners. Some people don't know what to do with their hands and end up "tangling their elbows together", as you so vividly describe, while others have a talent as if they'd been waiting to sign all their lives. But this gap mostly closes after 3-5 months of living together. Even people who were pretty bad at the beginning end up being able to interpret a group conversation for me.

Not to diminish the difficulty -- to do anything like interpret a group conversation, the whole group needs to put in some effort to slow down and speak only one at a time, and it's still exhausting for an interpreter who's only been learning for a few months. Not to mention the food on their plate goes cold.

I'm just saying. I don't think a lack of progress necessarily something to scare you, but then again, I don't know what it's like to learn sign without someone to sign with. Pretty sure it's usually a lot faster to become a productive conversator in any sign language than any spoken natural lang -- the only thing you really need is the hand alphabet, and then the person you're talking to can show you the signs for every new word you spell out.

I might have legible argumentation, but I don’t expect it to be understandable without a bunch careful explanation and backtracking to prerequisites

That fits great with my definition of illegibility. This case sounds like you've clarified it enough to make it legible to yourself but not yet enough to cross inferential gaps, thus it remains illegible to other people.

Not knocking your idea, but usually when you want to complain that "no one has upvoted me" it's good to think again whether you really want to blame other people.

I can guess at a reason why people may not have read that post you linked. I found it long-winded, like a page out of your diary where you're still developing the idea, thinking aloud by writing -- which is excellent to do, but it doesn't seem like something you wrote from the start for other people to read, so it's hard to follow. At least, I'm still puzzled about what you wanted to put forward in it.

I’m a pretty slow reader and I really get frustrated and distracted with not-correctly written text, so I see the subsequent editing of the text as something really threatening and time-consuming for me.

I've become a fast reader in recent years, but like you, I also get disturbed by incorrectly written text.

To me it sounds like you will get used to these issues in time. You know it's (1) your own words, (2) dictated by an imperfect program, and (3) mostly meant to be deleted. 1 would help me read faster, and 2 and 3 would help me tolerate the "writing flaws".

Reading fast is fundamentally about skipping, and being okay with skipping. I think that should be easy if you remember saying the sentence that the words on screen refer to. If you remember the sentence, you're reminded of the general concept you were getting at. Your job is after all only to figure out whether this whole sentence or section is worth keeping, and you only need to read the first few words to know that, probably.

You could also do a second dictation, to summarize what you're reading. That one'll be much shorter.

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