Comment on Bizarre Illusions

Thu, 28 Jan 2010 03:50:47 GMT

I don't think you have anything to be ashamed of in this post. It's not deep, it's not extraordinary in its conclusions, but it is correct and brief. The complaints seem to me best addressed by elaboration and discussion - things which require far more than a brief edit placed at the end of the post.

It's not so much that I am ashamed; I am just frustrated. The behavior of this post caught me completely off-guard. It was upvoted to +5 within a few hours and people started asking questions. After my responses, the post dropped to +1. The karma itself doesn't mean much to me, but the feedback here was evidence of something greater than a non-interesting or incorrect post.

People were willing to talk about it, so I stuck it out for as much feedback as I could. The investment was completely worth it. I got several comments worth of extremely valuable insights to my writing style and how to better post here at LessWrong.

I think the post itself failed, but the whole experience has been a net gain.

As SilasBarta mentioned, there's a lot of commentary on this post that is worth preserving, and should be preserved with the original post. It would be unfair to the commenters to render their comments incomprehensible - even briefly - by distortion of that to which they responded.

I agree. My intent in the revisions has been to keep people from being distracted by my quirks and leading them into a wonderful discussion in the comments. This particular illusion has a lot more history behind it than I originally thought; I learned a lot.

And, if I may be frank, if the idea which inspired this post is interesting, it is probably capable of generalization. The idea of my own which I promoted to a post I did so because I saw that it was applicable beyond the scope of its origination, and in a manner which was natural, elegant, and interesting. It proved of interest to a number of people here, despite its unabashedly algebraic treatment. If you can find a profitable extension of your concept, it will be likely to be worth reporting in a followup post (and if you are concerned about the appropriateness of it, I - as one remaining upvoter of the OP - will have sent my email to you in a PM, and be willing to comment on any draft you wish to send).

Thank you very much. I have to sit on the events of today and ponder if there is a next step to take. If a followup is coming I will certainly take you up on your offer.

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