Dagon comments on Only You Can Prevent Your Mind From Getting Killed By Politics - Less Wrong

39 Post author: ChrisHallquist 26 October 2013 01:59PM

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Comment author: Dagon comment score below threshold [+] (15 children)

Comment author: Ben_LandauTaylor 26 October 2013 05:47:08PM 5 points [-]

A lot of text? It's 1400 words. An average adult can read this in five minutes. That is not too much time to invest in a top-level post.

Comment author: Viliam_Bur 26 October 2013 06:29:12PM 5 points [-]

On internet no one behaves as an adult, and no one has the patience to spend five minutes reading an article without pictures. This is why Science invented abstracts. :D

tl;dr: use abstracts

Comment author: Ben_LandauTaylor 26 October 2013 07:03:24PM 4 points [-]

I agree that this phenomenon occurs, but I respond to it differently. Part of what I love about Less Wrong is that it's less tolerant than most places of the "tl;dr lol" approach to skimming content that you describe. I want to maintain or even increase the force of that social norm.

I'm in favor of summaries and abstracts on long pieces. This is not a long piece. The first paragraph is the summary. A separate "abstract" section would only encourage people to skip the body of the essay, and that would be bad.

Comment author: Dagon 27 October 2013 07:12:31AM 0 points [-]

Fair enough - it's not all that long if it was necessary for a novel or interesting point. It's too long for something relatively simply that I already have in my toolbox, and there was no way to figure out if that's all it was without reading the whole thing.

Comment author: BaconServ 27 October 2013 07:18:39AM * 0 points [-]

So because you already have the tool, nobody else needs to be told about it? I feel like I'm strawmanning here, but I'm not sure what your point is if not, "I didn't need to read this."

Comment author: Dagon 27 October 2013 07:32:14AM 2 points [-]

"I didn't need to read this" is probably close to what prompted my comment. Along with "and I suspect most readers also won't get much out of it",

I should have just said "this should have gone in discussion first, then (if it was popular) rewritten as a top-level post with a clearer summary". Since it's gotten a reasonable amount of comments and upvotes, I think I was incorrect in my assessment that most readers would be like me,

Comment author: BaconServ 27 October 2013 07:45:19AM 0 points [-]

Thank you. I no longer suspect you of being mind-killed by "politics is the mind-killer." Retracted.

Maybe I'm being too hasty trying to pinpoint people being mind-killed here, but it's hard to ignore that it's happening. I think I probably need to take my own advice right about now if I'm trying to justify my jumping to conclusions with statements like, "It's hard to ignore that it's happening."

I was planning to make a top-level comment here to the effect of, "INB4obvious mind-kill," but I think I just realized why the thoughts that thought that up were flawed from a basic level. Still, I think someone should point out that the comments here are barely touching the content of this article, which is odd for LessWrong.

Comment author: Vladimir_Nesov 26 October 2013 06:04:34PM * 4 points [-]

That is not too much time to invest in a top-level post.

It's not a lot of time, but it can simultaneously be too much, if the value of the post is even smaller than the small cost.

Comment author: Ben_LandauTaylor 26 October 2013 06:25:06PM 2 points [-]

True! But (1) that's not the case for this post, and (2) if it were the case, then this post would not belong in Main, and adding a summary would not fix the fundamental problem of low value.

Comment author: Douglas_Knight 27 October 2013 12:49:50AM -1 points [-]

The fact that the author puts a piece in main, or that the community votes it highly, or that the administrators do not remove it from main, is only very weak evidence that I want to read it.

Comment author: BaconServ 27 October 2013 07:15:21AM * 0 points [-]

Do you have an actual complaint here or are you disagreeing for the sake of disagreeing

Because it sounds a damn lot like you're upset about something but know better than to say what you actually think, so you're opting to make sophomoric objections instead.

Comment author: peter_hurford 27 October 2013 03:44:19AM 2 points [-]

The thesis / recommendation seems pretty clear to me from the opening paragraph -- if you see a mind-killing political example, just calm down as a reader and refuse to be mind-killed.

Comment author: Dagon 27 October 2013 07:24:47AM 0 points [-]

IMO, that's not helpful advice. It provides very few tools for diagnosing when you're overreacting, and no techniques for actually implementing this refusal.

More importantly, it ignores the fact that you need mutual knowledge, not just calm, that you AND ALL READERS are interpreting this as only a value-free fact estimate, and not the overwhelmingly more common cluster of topics that includes how to act on it.

Comment author: BaconServ 27 October 2013 07:35:19AM * 1 point [-]

We can only go a step at a time. The other recent post about politics in Discussion was rife with obvious mind-kill. I'm seeing this thread filling up with it too. I'd advocate downvoting of obvious mind-kill, but it's probably not very obvious at all and would just result in mind-killed people voting politically without giving the slightest measure of useful feedback. I'm really at a loss for how to get over the mind-kill of politics and the highly paired autocontrarian mind-kill of "politics is the mind-killer" other than just telling people to shut the fuck up, stop reading comments, stop voting, go lie down, and shut the fuck up.

Comment author: TheOtherDave 26 October 2013 05:37:54PM 0 points [-]

FWIW, I would summarize the substantive point as "Given behavior B from agent A where B is differentially characteristic of group G and trait T is also differentially characteristic of group G, don't infer that A has T."

To which I would respond "Nah, go ahead and infer it, but be aware that you might be wrong and keep your confidence levels as well-calibrated as you can."

That said, I might be missing the OP's intended point.

Dagon comments on Only You Can Prevent Your Mind From Getting Killed By Politics - Less Wrong

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