This post by Brian Hamrick makes a similar point about how organizational mottos should prioritize a single thing (but leaves the "large company" part implicit).

Not the same paper, but related: https://twitter.com/jamespayor/status/1634447672303304705

Can someone say more about what is meant by credit allocation in this conversation? The credit allocation section here just talks about BATNAs and I don't see how BATNAs are related to what I imagine "credit allocation" might mean. I searched Michael Vassar's Twitter account but there are only three instances of the term and I couldn't quickly understand any of the tweets. I also don't understand what "being able to talk about deceptive behavior" has to do with credit allocation.

I upvoted this post because I think it's talking about some important stuff in ways (or tone or something) I somehow like better than what some previous posts in the same general area have done.

But also something feels really iffy about the way the word "fun" is used in this post. If I think back to the only time in my life I actually had fun, which was my childhood, I sure did not have fun in the ways described in this post. I had fun by riding bikes (but never once stopping to get curious about how bike gears work), playing Pokemon with my friends (but not actually being very strategic about it -- competitive battling/metagame would have been completely alien to my child's self), making dorodango (but, like, just for the fun of it, not because I wanted to get better at making them over time, and I sure did not ever wonder why different kinds of mud made more stable or shinier dorodango, or what the shine even consists of), etc.

The kind of "fun" that is described in this post is, I think, something I learned from other people when I was in my early teens or so, not something I was born with (as this post seems to imply?). And I learned and developed this skill because I was told (in books like Feynman's and the Sequences) that this is what actually smart people do.

So personally I feel like I am trying to get back the "original fun" that I experienced as a child, as well as trying to untangle the "useful/technical fun" from its social influences and trying to claim it as my own, or something, in addition to doing the kind of thing suggested by this post.

I think it's often easiest/most tempting to comment specifically on a sketchy thing that someone says instead of being like "I basically agree with you based on your strongest arguments" and leaving it at that (because the latter doesn't seem like it's adding any value). (I think there's been quite a bit of discussion about the psychology of nitpicking, which is similar to but distinct from the behavior you mention, though I can't find a good link right now.) Of course it would be better to give both one's overall epistemic state plus any specific counter-arguments one thought of, but I only see a few people doing this sort of thing consistently. That would be my guess as to what's going on in the situations you mention (like, I could imagine myself behaving like the people you mention, but it wouldn't be because I'm taking averages, it would be because I'm responding to whatever I happen to have the most thoughts on). But you have a lot more information about those situations so I could be totally off-base.

This doesn't seem to be what I or the people I regularly interact with do... I wish people would give some examples or link to conversations where this is happening.

My own silly counter-model is that people take the sum, but the later terms of the sum only get added if the running total stays above some level of plausibility. This accounts for idea inoculation (where people stop listening to arguments for something because they have already heard of an absurd version of the idea). It also explains the effect Ronny mentions about how "you may very quickly find that everyone perceives the anti-T-ers as being much more reasonable": people stopped listening to the popular-and-low-quality arguments in favor of T.

I bought these after seeing Wei Dai's post. Everyone in my family and in-person friend group refuses to wear this mask because it makes them look like a duck (besides one person, who refuses to wear it because it is harder to breathe through compared to a surgical mask). So I am the only one wearing this mask. So I agree with your assessment that "the main problem is that they make you look a bit like a duck", but I would add that this is apparently a very strong effect. People really would prefer to be less comfortable or increase their risk of COVID than to look weird.

I think I agree with everything in your comment. Seems like there was less disagreement here than I initially thought. Moving on... :)

I think it's often hard to tell whether something is a psychological problem for an individual or instead a cultural problem with the group. Past social progress can be framed as "society used to think certain individuals had a psychological problem, but then it turned out that the society's rules/norms/culture was the problem". It currently seems to me that a lot of what people view as "psychological problems" are actually an individual's way of saying "something about the culture I find myself in doesn't seem right". I read this post as kinda ignoring this whole issue and making it seem like it's obvious whose problem it is, which I think avoids the hard core of these situations.

I think if the umbrella blog post on which the user's shortform posts (which are just comments) get added was created before 2022-06-23 then it won't have agree/disagree votes, whereas ones created on or after that date do?