I'm working on a brand of modesty based on the hypothesis that if you're really good at something, people will often notice it even if you don't signal it, and a need to signal it is just costly nonsense that biases you and gets in the way of your peace of mind
People are also good at ignoring things that are inconvenient for them. Consider an office politics situation where being good at your job may mean that someone else's status gets lowered. You may have to signal that you're good at your job in order to get noticed at all.
There's also the problem that even if it's obvious, obvious+signal is still going to beat out your obvious+no signal. By your reasoning you don't need to walk into a job interview wearing a suit, because your resume should speak for itself. But then the next guy with an equally good resume and a suit comes in and gets hired over you.
More generally: If you've "rationally" deduced that you don't really need to follow pointless social conventions, you're almost certainly wrong and have failed to consider something. Chesterton's Fence applies, at least.
Indeed. Like I mentioned briefly in my footnote, I understand that this is not an approach that you can apply that generally, in any situation. Particularly if you actually somehow depend on other people's impressedness for something that matters to you, actively putting effort into impressing them (if done right) will probably get you more reliable results. If you really need people to think you're amazing, I guess my approach would be a pretty big gamble. The whole point of being subtle is to accept the risk that people won't notice, which works well for...
Related to: Generalizing from One Example, Connecting Your Beliefs (a call for help), Beware the Unsurprised
The idea of this article is something I've talked about a couple of times in comments. It seems to require more attention.
As a general rule, what is obvious to some people may not be obvious to others. Is this obvious to you? Maybe it was. Maybe it wasn't, and you thought it was because of hindsight bias.
Imagine a substantive Less Wrong comment. It's insightful, polite, easy to understand, and otherwise good. Ideally, you upvote this comment. Now imagine the same comment, only with "obviously" in front. This shouldn't change much, but it does. This word seems to change the comment in multifarious bad ways that I'd rather not try to list.
Uncharitably, I might reduce this whole phenomenon to an example of a mind projection fallacy. The implicit deduction goes like this: "I found <concept> obvious. Thus, <concept> is inherently obvious." The problem is that obviousness, like probability, is in the mind.
The stigma of "obvious" ideas has another problem in preventing things from being said at all. I don't know how common this is, but I've actually been afraid of saying things that I thought were obvious, even though ignoring this fear and just posting has yet to result in a poorly-received comment. (That is, in fact, why I'm writing this.)
Even tautologies, which are always obvious in retrospect, can be hard to spot. How many of us would have explicitly realized the weak anthropic principle without Nick Bostrom's help?
And what about implications of beliefs you already hold? These should be obvious, and sometimes are, but our brains are notoriously bad at putting two and two together. Luke's example was not realizing that an intelligence explosion was imminent until he read the I.J. Good paragraph. I'm glad he provided that example, as it has saved me the trouble of making one.
This is not (to paraphrase Eliezer) a thunderbolt of insight. I bring it up because I propose a few community norms based on the idea:
I'm not sure if these are good ideas, but I think implementing them would decrease the volume of thoughts we cannot think and things we can't say.