Status: Endorsed, but ready to be updated as I learn local UI and (re)learn local culture. What if everyone actually was a 'perfectly rational actor'? It's obviously not true in every sense, or the term wouldn't have been standardized. But it's also not something obviously well-known in the Rationalist community,...
If it’s worth saying, but not worth its own post, here's a place to put it. If you are new to LessWrong, here's the place to introduce yourself. Personal stories, anecdotes, or just general comments on how you found us and what you hope to get from the site and...
I feel a strong affinity with this community, but that's hard to remember when my own locally-weird ideas get downvoted and/or reverted to draft without giving me a clear route to explain myself. Even just splitting the Karma mechanism into "doesn't seem benevolent" and "doesn't seem accurate" would be much...
Status: Endorsed, but ready to be updated as I learn local UI and (re)learn local culture.
What if everyone actually was a 'perfectly rational actor'? It's obviously not true in every sense, or the term wouldn't have been standardized. But it's also not something obviously well-known in the Rationalist community, which hasn't done a terribly good job of making centrally-planned updates to its' canonical texts.
So working from the assumption that you haven't really considered this yet, I feel like I ought to explain myself. I'm still kind of a stranger here, so pardon if the links aren't obvious.
'Smart' has always felt like a fake sort of praise to me. Partly that's because my... (read 222 more words →)
Hi! I'm Helaman Wilson, I'm living in New Zealand with my physicist father, almost-graduated-molecular-biologist mother, and six of my seven siblings.
I've been homeschooled as in "given support, guidance, and library access" for essentially my entire life, which currently clocks in at nearly twenty two years from birth. I've also been raised in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, and, having done my best to honestly weigh the evidence for its' doctrine-as-I-understand-it, find myself a firm believer.
I found the Rational meta-community via the TvTropes>HPMOR chain, but mostly stayed peripheral due to Reddit's TOS, the lack of fiction community on LessWrong, and somewhat-borne-out concerns that I would not actually be accepted here.... (read more)
If it’s worth saying, but not worth its own post, here's a place to put it.
If you are new to LessWrong, here's the place to introduce yourself. Personal stories, anecdotes, or just general comments on how you found us and what you hope to get from the site and community are invited. This is also the place to discuss feature requests and other ideas you have for the site, if you don't want to write a full top-level post.
If you want to explore the community more, I recommend reading the Library, checking recent Curated posts, seeing if there are any meetups in your area, and checking out the Getting Started section of the LessWrong FAQ. If you want to orient to the content on the site, you can also check out the new Concepts section.
The Open Thread tag is here. The Open Thread sequence is here.
I think we need an actual style guide, and it needs to be prominent, properly maintained, and right here.
If it's not obvious why, and I weakly presume it isn't, it's because linguistic standardization seems like the obvious group-context form of linguistic precision, which seems like an obvious rationality virtue.
Thoughts?
I can see where you're coming from, but tracing every connection is very difficult, because beliefs/heuristics are based on whole networks of data, which I think are stored as smaller heuristics. Efficiency demands that I not explain more than I must to get my point across. Not just on my end, either. This is why target audience is useful.
...Thinking about it, I should see if I can optimize the site-intro stuff. A proper style guide for posting and reading seem like they'd have big advantages, although they would obviously need justification.
I feel a strong affinity with this community, but that's hard to remember when my own locally-weird ideas get downvoted and/or reverted to draft without giving me a clear route to explain myself.
Even just splitting the Karma mechanism into "doesn't seem benevolent" and "doesn't seem accurate" would be much more comforting. None of us have the working memory to keep that straight all the time.
Or, since nonbenevolence is a stronger claim, it could be the Strong Downvote? It should absolutely be labeled as such, though.
I was going for a style of writing I'm familiar with in explaining useful things - question to conclusion, I don't know the formal name for it - and then I wrote the title last, so that people who already knew the core point wouldn't need to waste time getting the evidence.
I'm not sure excluding this style from LessWrong actually improves Less Wrong's efficiency at sharing useful knowledge? Tagging it better would be good, of course.
Ah, language difficulties. Sorry. Will update for 'extremely literate crowd, even for nerds' then.
Why do you think it's ignored here? Just so widely accepted as to be invisible, or?
Perhaps the problem is that my writing style is kind of intense, and thus reads as persuasion-coded rather than explanation-coded to this audience? I'd be happy to fix that, but I'll need a guide if it's going to happen any time soon.
(Relatedly, does anyone have a good guide for 'subtext in general'? Connotation varies even more than denotation, of course, but just really diving in to exploring connotations would be nice. Twig was valuable to me for that reason, even if it's hard to recommend on other counts.)
Hm. Gotta say, I'm disappointed with how inarticulate the criticism has been here. Perhaps it's because Karma is supposed to be defined elsewhere, but if so, that seems like an issue with the Karma system.
The who?
One thing I think this community may not realize, is that "religion" - and indeed "Christianity" - is too broad a term to be useful without further definition. People have been fighting over what defines a True Christian for hundreds - and, if you include the Old Testament era, thousands - of years. Characterizing us as all equivalent to some prominently bad examples is, well, quite fallacious.
That said:
I do remember a story from the Old Testament where the Moabites were, according to the standard translation, supposed to all be killed. But then Saul is told off for keeping their livestock to use as sacrifice, and Jesus' lineage specifically mentions Ruth, a... (read more)
I thought it was odd that I couldn't find the general tag, and that's why I gave it the 'Should Possibly Be Merged' flag. I'm pretty sure I used the tagsearch before creating a new one, though, so this might be a coding issue.
So much of mapping reality is figuring out what the pieces are, and how they overlap and don't overlap, that defining terms is arguably the only product of thinking.
I'd really like to crowdsource this, as it's an extremely strong claim.