Seems fine to just link to Eventbrite, but currently it says Partiful, which is confusing

Is there a Solstice afterparty, and is it gated on Unconference tickets?

oh also, another next step is "see if I can make this task more pleasant/tolerable". (sometimes "assign this task more time and recruit help" helps achieve this too. but there can also be separate steps like "fix any current sensory annoyances" and "make some nice tea")

Yeah this is relatable and familiar. When I do this my next step is usually some flavor of "set aside some time for the task" - can be "I will work on this for the next pomo" or "I will set aside a day to work on this specifically" or "welp I guess I need to make an entire project of this/I think I will not make progress on this unless it is the ~main thing in my life". For the medium- or larger-scale things, also "see if I can get other people in the loop".

Will also note that one less intuitive type of task this can apply to is "deal with my emotions about this thing I'm trying to do". Ideally this would happen trivially and I could just do the thing, but sometimes I notice I am stuck and then I need to add an action item of actually looking at the emotional blocker before I can proceed. (And sometimes the emotional blockers are large enough to turn into their own project.)

Yeah when I notice I'm stuck on a vague/complicatd work task I ask "ok what do I actually want here?" and this helps.

I guess to the extent that's different from "what's my goal", it's mostly that "what I want" may not be achievable or within my control, so my goal might be something more bounded than that or something with a chance but not a certainty of getting what I actually want.

wait can you explain the hip problems/eyepatch thing?

Sorry, but I call bullshit on this being a problem for you, or any other LW reader.

What? I am telling you it is. Not in the sense that I can't parse it, but in the sense that I notice the cognitive effort involved, and preferentially read things that take less cognitive effort (all else equal, of course). If I'm skimming a bunch of titles and trying to pick which thing to read, the difference between titles that lodge their meaning into my brain as soon as my eyes fall on them vs. titles that take an extra couple seconds to parse is going to matter. (Similarly, I prefer Cooking For Engineers recipe layouts to recipe blogs that require me to extract the instructions from longer-form text - not that I can't do that, but I don't prefer to.)

Maybe this means you don't want me to read your post! But I don't think that's right. Titles are usually the most optimized-for-memeticness part of a post; I typically assume that the rest of it will be denser, and that's fine - if I'm reading your post I am probably sold on being interested in what you're saying. (Still better all things equal to make stuff easier to parse, when that doesn't trade off against other desiderata.)

Using that subtitle as the title would make it work worse for me because: 

• that title would be too long. many of the interfaces that show me titles would simply cut it off and I would not see the back half of it
• that sentence is semantically dense and grammatically complicated. I have to put in some work to break it down into noun phrases and such and figure out how it fits together. requiring cognitive work of potential readers before they've even decided if they want to read your thing is extremely anti-memetic
• the tone of it sounds like a dry academic paper. those are typically not very fun to read. it signals that this will also not be fun to read

Whereas the actual title has none of those problems. It's short, it's easy to parse, it's conversational with a clear and compelling valence. It's true it does not already explain why the author is worried about Chicago, but I think that's fine - when the explanation is complex enough you should need click on the article to find it out. Clickbait is when the answer could easily fit into the title and the author chose not to do that. Here I don't think it can.

I mean "radioactive" in a descriptive political sense. I agree that truth claims ought not be radioactive in this sense and it is a bad thing about the political landscape than they are.

(What, does discrimination against mentally ill people suddenly not exist? Or do you think that no trans person has ever been discriminated against for being mentally ill?)

Yes, trans people can be discriminated against for being mentally ill. What I meant was that if someone says "trans people are often discriminated against and that's bad" you should not respond with "well, trans people are mentally ill, what do you expect" as though (a) that's universally true of trans people (b) that means the discrimination is justified.

(Additionally, I claim you could have understood that this was what I meant, by applying a modicum of interpretive labor and using mental motions like "I am confused about why someone would say this, can I try to build a model where it makes sense / pass their ITT internally". My impression is that you are going around spamming attempted gotchas and refusing to engage even the slightest flexibility towards attempting to understand the views of people you think you disagree with; this is pretty annoying and bad for your truthseeking.)

The first three claims you list are either politically anodyne or else have the valence of the dominant political faction. And one basically never sees anyone condemned and targeted for shunning on the basis of having such beliefs.

Okay first of all, I have spent a fair bit of time in discourse contexts where they're not really anodyne. But more importantly, ...and??? I answered the question you asked (in a tone of confident assumption I would not be able to produce an answer)! I thought maybe you wanted existence proofs of me actually believing that saying a true thing can be bad rather than using that as a smokescreen for some reason, and I provided that even though it was a deeply obnoxious ask?

(Actually that would be a weird smokescreen. The type of person who I think you're gesturing at would never want to admit that a radioactive claim might possibly be true and if anything might end up using smokescreens to try to avoid admitting that.)

First, I don't think rationalists should shun Cremieux. The only cases I'm aware of where there was a push to get someone actually banned from rationalist stuff and truly "cancelled" are cases of, like, abuse, theft, murder, and I think this is good. I don't think Cremieux should be banned from rationalist events, I don't think people should refuse to read his blog or anything. He has good Twitter threads sometimes. (though after the Dynomight thing I'm a little suspicious of how much of that is his work)

What I do think is that his character as a person (which includes the blowup in response to the plagiarism accusation, and also the posts we're talking about here) should inform to what extent we hold him up as an exemplar of how to be. I wish we wouldn't. I am not myself lodging any kind of big protest about this, I am going to LessOnline myself (though not as any sort of featured guest), but it does make me a little less happy about how my community works.

Anyway, if someone is, say, a diehard communist who likes to post "kill all landlords" and argue that we need to immediately have a communist revolution and put a lot of people in gulags, that would

• (a) be a very different valence from Cremieux's takes
• (b) not warrant banning them from rationalist meetups (assuming they're not constantly going on about this at the meetups - if they are, ask them to cut it out and ban them if they won't)
• (c) cause me to not want to be friends with them or respect their opinions
• (d) cause me to think that if e.g. LessOnline organizers are holding them up as an example of how one should be, they are wrong and have worse judgment than I thought