army1987 comments on Rationality Quotes February 2013 - Less Wrong

2 Post author: arundelo 05 February 2013 10:20PM

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Comment author: [deleted] 05 February 2013 05:05:54PM *  1 point [-]

I would have quoted more, because on reading that out of context I was like “YOU DON'T SAY?”

Comment author: Qiaochu_Yuan 06 February 2013 10:17:47PM 13 points [-]

Most people, when giving advice, don't optimize for maximal usefulness. They optimize for something like maximal apparent-insight or maximal signaling-wisdom or maximal mind-blowing, which are a priori all very different goals. So you shouldn't expect that incredibly useful advice sounds like incredibly insightful, wise, or mind-blowing advice in general. There's probably a lot of incredibly useful advice that no one gives because it sounds too obvious and you don't get to look cool by giving it. One such piece of advice I received recently was "plan things."

Comment author: Nornagest 06 February 2013 11:08:50PM 5 points [-]

There's probably also a lot of useful advice that our minds filter out because it scans as obvious or trivial. Even when I'm trying to give maximally effective advice, I usually spend a lot of effort optimizing it for style; the better something sounds, the more people dwell on its implications and the likelier it is to stick. Fortunately, most messages leave plenty of latitude for presentation.

Alternately, you could try dressing simple advice up in enough cultural tinsel that it looks profound, as suggested here.

Comment author: Stabilizer 06 February 2013 09:51:28PM *  5 points [-]

Well, a lot basic rationality literally seems to be about doing what is almost obvious but is hard to do because of bugs in your cognitive architecture. This reminds me of the following quote by Elon Musk in an interview where he was asked what he would say to new start-up founders:

Try to get together a group of people to do something useful. This may seem like an obvious thing, but often people will organize into a company that doesn't produce anything useful.