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MBlume comments on The Most Frequently Useful Thing - Less Wrong
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Eliezer, I suspect you might find the answers to these questions less useful than you expect. The most useful things we've learned from you are probably going to be those things that we've already forgotten you wrote, because they've become a part of us -- because they've become background in how we live, how we think, and thus are completely invisible to us at any given time.
Having particular names which may not be in common usage makes it easier for me to identify the things that I've picked up from OB that are now a part of me. Cached Thoughts, Inferential Distance, Mind-Projection Fallacy - those are all terms I use now when referring to things that are a part of me, but not many other people use those terms often. It makes it somewhat easier to identify those things.
Yes -- and easier to invoke the principles in social contexts. I suspect Eliezer's OB posts gain a significant fraction of their usefulness from the names and from the chunk-by-chunk useability of the named principles/methods.
I agree. I find it funny that you lead your list of examples with "cached thoughts", because that exactly what these are. Not that that's a bad thing.
If that's the case though, maybe we need to be proactive in preventing them from becoming cached thoughts of the bad kind. Eliezer's posts serve as a good introduction, but I don't think they are the ideal reference. Maybe a rationalist dictionary would do the trick. I envision something like urban dictionary where multiple definition/explanations can be submitted and voted on.
I think the answers will be useful, even if they don't exactly represent the set of "most frequently useful things from OB" but instead the set of "most frequently useful among the very memorable and surprising OB posts".
Maybe Eliezer asked about the first set fully expecting to get answers from the (still useful) second set.
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