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 so...
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...
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...
It was a perfect analogy for me. One carves up new concepts the same way one always does. A decoupler will carve up a concept differently from a contextualizer. Similar analogy: If someone's knowledge can be seen as a massive mind-map, a feminist will structure a hierarchy in that mind-map quite differently from a Mormon, even if the leaf nodes are the same in the end. When you have a hierarchy in place, more knowledge added will tend to follow that hierarchy and thus subtly influence understanding.
But I've had experiences with people who interpret things ...
Exactly twelve years later--did you ever come up with an example?
To steelman it, maybe he's thinking of how it's commonly seen as a tragedy for a chicken to be alive for only one week, but killing it after some X years is not as much of a tragedy.
Initially, this implied to me that the curve of "value of remaining alive' is higher in the beginning of a lifespan. But thinking about it, that's not the same curve as the curve of "value of being alive", which is lowest in the beginning.
(If that's confusing, it helps to think of the one curve as the mirror image of the other, i.e. if value of being alive is high later, it mea...
Rereading your comment, I think you're saying that legibility will arise by itself well enough so long as someone is on Simulacrum level 1, caring only about the truth, and if their writing is not legible, they probably have an agenda and you'd better focus on finding out what that is, or just ignore what they said.
But
As someone who wants to do systematic review (meta-analysis with a certain rigidly prescribed structure), I will love to hear about the mistakes to watch out for!
First off, I like the compilation you made and I'm tempted to memorize it despite all I'm saying.
This 'pluralism' solution does not feel meaty -- your last sentence "Hence the value of pluralism" sounds to me like an applause light. I mean yeah, ultimately you and I build a lot of what we know on trust in the whole collective of scientists. But it's not directly relevant/useful to say so; there should be a halfway good solution for yourself as a solo rationalist, and calibrating yourself against others' beliefs is an extra measure you may apply later. Beca...
Now I'm glad I recently ordered the older version. (my motivation was that it can run Parabola GNU/Linux + Emacs)
Today, dynomight made an interesting nuance in Observations about writing and commenting on the internet. It seems that just optimizing epistemic legibility may cause people to fail to listen altogether:
...Technically, the complaints were wrong. How could I “fix” the problem of not citing any papers when I had already cited dozens? That’s what I thought for months, during which people continued to read the post and have the same damned reaction. Eventually, I had to confront that even if they were “wrong”, something about my post was causing them to be wron
What's your opinion of wet-erase boards? No accidental erasure as with dry-erase boards.
I'm concerned that getting well-versed in statistics mistakes has the same issues as doing so for biases and fallacies (Knowing about Biases Can Hurt People). When you're analyzing others' studies, you'll find that basically every study has at least one flaw of some kind. So this opens the door for unconsciously applying harsher criticism against studies you disagree with.
The reMarkable has a surprisingly paperlike writing experience, according to every review I've read.
Typo: "it's short comings" -> "its shortcomings"
What if the future generations just stop thinking about it because they made a safe enough world that they stop worrying about such things? That's not a doomsday.
On the analogy with fasting,
Even if sleep works the way you suppose, this analogy looks like apples and oranges, so I don't like it.
With fasting, you can infer that it's harmless just by knowing that (1) the average lean human has fat reserves to last three months, (2) total fasters don't go through some calamity like losing lots of muscle protein (if they did, there'd be unambiguous results everyone knew) and (3) in the EEA it was probably common to have periods of scarcity such that you go several days without finding food. In other words, fasting was ab...
I'm like Alicorn, with the addition that I love disruption at random periods, because it lets me fall asleep again: pure pleasure.
On the issue of flying insects, the people who do "cowboy camping" (sleeping without a tent) have relevant experience. They recommend finding high ground far away from any lake, because still bodies of water attract bugs.
I'm sorry, I did not mean to be clever.
If they will come into existence later, they have moral weight now. If I may butcher the concept of time, they already exist in some sense, being part of the weave of spacetime. But if they will never exist, it is an error to leap to their defense -- there are no rights being denied. Does that make more sense?
There's no need for rhetorical devices like "I'll go out there and say it". Please.
Also the force of norms looks weak to me in this place, it's a herd of cats, so that explanation makes little sense. Also, it's fine to state your understanding of a topic without describing everyone else as "nerd sniped", no one will needle you for your conclusion. Also, there's little point to commenting if you only state your conclusion -- the conclusion is uninteresting, we're looking to learn from the thought process behind it.
I vote for changing the post title, it is clickbait. OP: it may be a factor behind the low upvotes. Also that the body is not well structured. Impossible to skim to get an idea what it's about.
Any decision involves alternative futures involving billions of people who haven’t been born yet. We have to consider their welfare.
This logic holds if it is an unassailable given that they will be born. If you remove that presupposition and make it optional, then these people can be counted as imaginary as jbash says. They become a real part of the future, and thus of reality, only once we decide they shall be. We might not. Maybe we opt for the alternative of just allowing the currently alive human beings to live forever, and decline to make more.
PS: ...
I see that you use/used Roam Research. It must have influenced you into developing the concept? I'm doing something similar with my own zettelkasten, trying to make it help me propagate belief changes and build gears-level understanding, so I started to identify exactly why I believe things. That means maximize Epistemic Legibility.
For example, I used to make the bald statement "carbohydrates cause oxidation". In a Zettel note on carbohydrates, I either expand with a mechanism ("by way of sugar combustion leaving behind reactive oxygen species"), or when I...
It's true that motivated cognition and such issues are at work; they always are! But this is no ding on demanding epistemic legibility.
Even if the author never was interested in transmitting truth (like the CDC in your example), now you know how to detect a message that's hard to critique / spot check.
Then, please edit! :-) People come back to LW comments years and even decades after the fact.
I think the post disagrees with you:
I expect having a handle with which to say “no I don’t have a concise argument about why this work is wrong, and that’s a fact about the work” to be very useful.
That a work is Epistemically Legible doesn't mean you'll comprehend it: you may be lacking necessary background context, for example. See the section Legibility vs Inferential Distance.
In this case, an E-Legible work will still bless you with the awareness that you were missing background context, so that you didn't understand what was said -- as opposed to g...
No, still broken.
Nice with a female version, but nicer if the artist didn't feel the need to focus on her beauty instead of strength. Makeup, really? Also, with the colored skin I have a hard time identifying her as a statue; she seems to be about to open a bleeding wound with that chisel.
There's at least one failure mode here. I've wanted to do what OP describes since 2013, but I got overwhelmed by perfectionism and the scope of the project "Ankify everything", which also made me stop reading insightful blogs in the first place, as I felt guilty for not making SR cards out of what I'm reading.
I'm finally doing it. I started soft with simple mindmapping with zettelkasten (https://logseq.com/), integrated lots of my old notes into it, gradually found I could Ankify some insights, then decided to skip some grunt work by importing a deck of th...
It took me a while to understand that the "blue glow" comment was directed at the electric discharges picture in the comment you replied to, and not at your own nuclear reactor picture, which is real Cherenkov radiation.
Not downvoting because it's bad, but it doesn't seem relevant to the topic.
It's a thing on LW, which I guess MikkW should have linked. https://www.lesswrong.com/tag/spaced-repetition
I've had the rare kind of conversation where it was clear to both that both cared about listening. Sounding cheesy is no concern in this context -- you also sound super genuine because you're putting in real effort.
I agree some/many of us need a systematic approach, and this is a good one for introverts all ready to memorize things, but I figure you could also set up a "natural" improvement gradient via a series of debates, by going to a good debate club.
Why can't you say it word-for-word? "What you said set off alarm bells in my head and I'm not sure why".
Did you make more scripts?
just chiming in ten years after the fact to remark that you could flip the page when this happens.
Many ringworld depictions I've seen have primarily been "about" the ringworld, whereas this seems to successfully push the fact into the background and focus more on a "bright future"-feeling. I talk to people who are not very much scientists so this kind of painting can help show why I attach so much positive valence to science's potential, sort of.
Is the sea a metaphor for something?
You only notice that anything is off because of the subtle flaws around the edges - much like managing false beliefs.
Surprisingly useful, after cleanup (20% of the notes should be deleted). The link here is broken, but Pablo hosts an archive at https://www.stafforini.com/blog/anki-decks-by-lesswrong-users/.
Some of the notes in this deck are "title first", i.e. they just name a concept and invite you to generate an ad-hoc explanation in your head. It's a nonstandard use of SRS, and can take an immense amount of effort per card, but is also immensely useful practice for just being able to explain things. You can always move those to a separate deck called "The Tryhard Deck...
there is no "decision theory/rationality under ADHD coherence constraints"
That's a nice framing to get us thinking. Could be generalized to "under constraints of suboptimal executive function", since everyone has unique issues with it. Anyway, any progress since last?
I have thoughts on #15:
Computer use is absolutelly necessary, but also extremely risky.
I've had periods of my life when I cut out my computer (just shoving it into my wardrobe and forgetting about it). They lasted a few weeks and I can say they were amazing periods. I was able to "live ...
For all the Linux-friendliness, it can be easy to miss that it's closed source. https://github.com/obsidianmd only lists nonessential components.
It's not very ironic. One aspect of rationalfic is to load you up with examples of more rational behavior than you've ever seen in fiction so you have better defaults.
That wouldn't work as it looks like you imagine: he'd write the choices without any associated numbers because your probability is your own.
(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?