sixes_and_sevens comments on Open Thread, October 27 - 31, 2013 - Less Wrong

2 Post author: mare-of-night 28 October 2013 12:59AM

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Comment author: sixes_and_sevens 29 October 2013 11:40:42AM * 4 points [-]

Several months ago I set up a blog for writing intelligent, thought-provoking stuff. I've made two posts to it, and one of those is a photo of a page in Strategy of Conflict, because it hilariously featured the word "retarded". Something has clearly gone wrong somewhere.

I'm pretty sure there are other would-be bloggers on here who experience similar update-discipline issues. Would any of them like to form some loose cabal of blogging spotters, who can egg each other on, suggest topics, provide editorial and stylistic feedback, etc.?

EDIT: ITT: I'm a bit of a dick! Sorry, everyone!

Comment author: Vaniver 29 October 2013 04:40:02PM 7 points [-]

Something has clearly gone wrong somewhere.

Are you sure the error is that you're posting too little to the blog, rather than that you're trying to have a blog in the first place?

Comment author: sixes_and_sevens 29 October 2013 05:02:10PM 0 points [-]

Is this intended as snark, or an actual helpful comment?

Assuming the latter, I have what I consider to be sound motives for maintaining a blog. Unfortunately, I don't have sound habits for maintaining a blog, coupled with a bit of a cold-start problem. I doubt I am the only person in this position, and believe social commitment mechanisms may be a possible avenue for improvement.

Comment author: Vaniver 29 October 2013 05:19:24PM 6 points [-]

I was going for actual helpful comment. I personally don't have a blog because several attempts to have a blog failed. Afterwards, I was fairly sure that the reason why my blogs failed was because I like conversations too much and monologuing too little. I found that forums both had a reliable stream of content to react to, as well as a somewhat reliable stream of content to build off of. The incentive structure seemed a lot nicer in a number of ways.

More broadly, I think a good habit when plans fail is to ask the question "What information does this failure give me?", rather than the limited question "why did this plan fail me?". Sometimes you should revise the plan to avoid that failure mode; other times you should revise the plan to have entirely different goals.

My immediate practical suggestion is to create a LW draft editing circle. This won't give you the benefits of a blog distinct from LW, but eliminates most of the cold-start problem. It also adds to the potential interest base people who have ideas for posts but who don't have the confidence in their ability to write a post that is socially acceptable to LW (i.e. doesn't break some hidden protocol).

Comment author: hyporational 31 October 2013 05:35:03PM 3 points [-]

If you have any old material, you could consider posting those to get initial readership, even if you don't consider them especially high quality.

I have what I consider to be sound motives for maintaining a blog.

I'd interpret Vaniver's comment more generally to mean that parts of your brain might disagree with this assessment, and you experience this as procrastination.

Comment author: philh 29 October 2013 11:45:46PM 2 points [-]

Would any of them like to form some loose cabal of blogging spotters, who can egg each other on, suggest topics, provide editorial and stylistic feedback, etc.?

Yes.

(My current excuse for not even having made one post is that I started to experience wrist pain, and didn't want to make it worse by doing significant typing at home. It seems to be getting better now.)

Comment author: Lumifer 29 October 2013 05:38:46PM 2 points [-]

Consider your incentives. Actual (non-imaginary) incentives in your current life.

What are the incentives for maintaining a blog? What do you get (again, actually, not supposedly) when you make a post? What are the disincentives? (e.g. will a negative comment spoil your day?) Is there a specific goal you're trying to reach? Is posting to your blog a step on the path to the goal?

Comment author: sixes_and_sevens 29 October 2013 05:55:54PM 0 points [-]

Are you requesting answers for my specific case, or just providing me with advice?

(As an observation, which isn't meant to be a hostile response to your comment, people seem very keen to offer advice on LW, even when none has been requested.)

Comment author: Lumifer 29 October 2013 06:44:02PM 1 point [-]

Advice, I guess, in the sense that I think these are the questions you'd be interested in knowing the answers to (for yourself, not for posting here).

Comment author: Tenoke 30 October 2013 07:38:39AM 3 points [-]

Count me in if anything comes out of it.

Comment author: lmm 30 October 2013 03:16:58AM 1 point [-]

Maybe you should consider joining an existing blogging community - livejournal or tumblr or medium? They're good at giving you social prompts to write something.

Comment author: sixes_and_sevens 31 October 2013 12:04:26AM 4 points [-]

In retrospect, my previous response to this does seem pretty unwarranted. This was a perfectly reasonable and relevant comment that caught me at a bad time. I'd like to apologise.

Comment author: sixes_and_sevens comment score below threshold [+] (40 children)

Comment author: Brillyant 30 October 2013 09:21:29PM 5 points [-]

You comment sounded to me like a request for help for which lmm gave a reasonable response.

Anytime you present all the options ABC as you see them, it is possible D is the best option and you just didn't see it.

(Sorry if that came across as more advice...I mean you no harm...)

Comment author: sixes_and_sevens comment score below threshold [+] (23 children)

Comment author: drethelin 30 October 2013 11:31:53PM 9 points [-]

Here's some advice: When you think you're right about the interpretation of what you said and everyone else is wrong you're probably wrong. The fact that you have to go ON and ON about how incredibly obviously right you are and how everyone should have seen it is the rationalization of you in fact being wrong.

1) "I've been having a problem lately with x" Does not explicitly ask for advice. It implicitly does so.

2) Vague advice is STILL more useful than no advice when someone is asking for advice. Giving someone advice that has worked for them in a situation that isn't exactly the same is still useful or at least leads to further possibly useful conversation. Example: "I've been having a lot of trouble sleeping lately." "Have you tried Melatonin?" "Obviously, I'm not an idiot! I can't sleep because of the construction! Clearly you didn't have enough information to tell me about soundproofing options so why even talk!?"

3) This isn't a private conversation. Responses to you are not just FOR you. If someone replies with general advice for a similar setting they're trying to have a conversation about that even if it's not exactly what you wanted to hear. I understand you didn't want a conversation about blogging productivity, you just wanted some yes or no answers to your question. Why should that prevent other people saying things they think are relevant to the conversation in general?

In the end, you could have just ignored people giving you unsolicited advice, but instead you chose to go off an an assholish ranting streak at everyone who was simply trying to be helpful. You've wasted far more of your own time with these complaints than reading anyone's advice has cost you. Nobody here was being rude except for you (and now me).

Comment author: sixes_and_sevens 30 October 2013 11:58:00PM 6 points [-]

I actually totally appreciate this comment, and largely agree with it. I maintain my general point about the pragmatics of interpreting things as implicit requests for advice, but yeah, I've certainly not handled this particular thread gracefully.

Thank you.

Comment author: Douglas_Knight 31 October 2013 03:44:55AM 3 points [-]

You should be pragmatic about pragmatics.
The comment was an attempt to affect other people. If you produce the wrong effects, your language is wrong.

If everyone agrees that it's a question, it's a question. If things that weren't questions a year ago are questions now, then the language changed. But it doesn't take a lot of people wrongly interpreting something as a question to produce unwanted answers, so maybe they are wrong. And language fragmentation is worth fighting.

Comment author: sixes_and_sevens 31 October 2013 11:44:13AM 0 points [-]

Having slept on it, I think I can offer a more fine-grained explanation for what I think is going on.

There are implicit and explicit speech acts. You can implicitly or explicitly threaten someone, or compliment someone, or express romantic interest in someone. There are some speech acts which you cannot, or as a matter of policy should not, carry out implicitly. As extreme examples, you cannot implicitly extend someone power of attorney, and you should not interpret someone's implicit expressions of interest in being erotically asphyxiated as an invitation to go ahead and do so.

I believe implicit requests for advice basically shouldn't exist. I would expect social decorum to drive people's interpretations away from this possibility. Out in the big wide world, my experience is that people are considerably more careful about how they do and do not offer advice. My consternation is that on LW there appear to be forces driving people's interpretations towards the possibility of implicit requests for advice, which runs counter to my expectations.

Not what-the-fuck-are-you-doing counter to my expectations, I should point out. I might, for example, occasionally expect relative strangers at work to wordlessly take a pen from my desk, use it to scribble a note and then put it back. This is probably the most mildly-invasive act I can think of, but if I was disrupted every five minutes by someone leaning in and pinching one, stopping a wordless pen-borrower in their tracks and saying "seriously, what is it with the pens?" seems like a reasonable line of inquiry.

I'm not precious about my pens, (nor do I think I'm especially hostile to receiving unsolicited advice) but there are good reasons to have social norms that drive people away from this sort of behaviour. When those social norms cease to exist, those good reasons don't go away.

Comment author: Douglas_Knight 31 October 2013 04:59:33PM 1 point [-]

I believe implicit requests for advice basically shouldn't exist.

That's not very pragmatic. Worry about whether they do exist. You say they don't exist in other contexts, but this statement makes me distrust your observations.

Also, I suggest you consider more contexts. Are you familiar with other venues intermediate between LW and your baseline? nerds? other online fora?

saying "seriously, what is it with the pens?" seems like a reasonable line of inquiry.

Really? It seems like a reasonable way of stopping it. It does not seem to me like a way of learning. And since not that many people go by your desk, it might scale to actually stopping it.

continue this thread »

Comment author: TheOtherDave 31 October 2013 05:50:48PM 0 points [-]

I believe implicit requests for advice basically shouldn't exist ... there are good reasons to have social norms that drive people away from this sort of behaviour

Why do you believe this? That is, is this an aesthetic preference about the kind of society you want to live in, or do you believe they have negative consequences, or do you adhere to some deontological model with which they are inconsistent, or... ?

continue this thread »

Comment author: Emily 30 October 2013 11:54:59AM 4 points [-]

Most likely this part:

Something has clearly gone wrong somewhere.

I don't think it's that much of a stretch to infer, "and if you can suggest what, or how I might remedy it, that would be cool!"

Comment author: sixes_and_sevens comment score below threshold [+] (11 children)

Comment author: Emily 30 October 2013 01:13:36PM 3 points [-]

Maybe the "advice" (or instrumental rationality?) style of post has become more common and this approach to discussion has bled over into the comments? I don't know, I find lmm's comment to read as a perfectly natural response to yours, so perhaps I'm not best placed to analyse the trend you seem to be experiencing.

Comment author: Tenoke 30 October 2013 01:40:09PM * 0 points [-]

One possible explanation is that you are just getting more responses (and thus more advice-based responses) because the Open Threads (and maybe Discussion in general) have more active users. Or maybe the users are more keen to participate in discussions and giving advice is the easiest way to do so.

It might help if you start.... (just kidding, I'm making a mental note not to give you advice unless you specifically ask for it from now)

Retracted because you haven't asked for an opinion on the reason as to why you are getting advice either.

Comment author: sixes_and_sevens 30 October 2013 03:20:44PM -2 points [-]

In this context, the discussion is about receiving unnecessary advice, so I think speculating on why this is happening is entirely reasonable.

To illustrate why it's annoying, it may help to provide the most extreme example to date. A couple of months ago I made a post on the open thread about how having esoteric study pursuits can be quite isolating, and how maintaining hobbies and interests that are more accessible to other people can help offset this. I asked for other people's experience with this. Other people's experiences was specifically what I asked for.

Several people read this as "I'm an emotionally-stunted hermit! Please help me!" and proceeded to offer incredibly banal advice on how I, specifically, should try to form connections with other people. When I pointed out that I wasn't looking for advice, one respondent saw fit to tell me that my social retardation was clearly so bad that I didn't realise I needed the advice.

To my mind, asking for advice has a recognisable format in which the asker provides details for the situation they want advice on. If you have to infer those details, the advice you give is probably going to be generic and of limited use. What I find staggering is why so many people skip the process of thinking "well, I can't offer you any good advice unless you give us more deta-...oh, wait, you weren't asking for advice", and just go ahead and offer it up anyway.

Comment author: Moss_Piglet 30 October 2013 03:38:04PM 10 points [-]

People will leap at any opportunity to give advice, because giving advice a) is extraordinarily cheap b) feels like charity and most importantly c) places the adviser above the advised. It's the same impulse which drives us to pity; we can feel superior in both moral and absolute terms by patronizing others, and unlike charity there is only a negligible cost involved.

I, for example, have just erased a sentence giving you useless advice on how not to get useless advice in a comment to a post talking about how annoying unsolicited useless advice is. That is the level of mind-bending stupidity we're dealing with here.

Comment author: drethelin 30 October 2013 10:31:24PM 2 points [-]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-4EDhdAHrOg

Comment author: sixes_and_sevens 30 October 2013 11:09:20PM 1 point [-]

Can you please use actual words to explain the underlying salience of this video? I see what you're getting at, but I'm pretty sure if you said it explicitly, it would be kind of obnoxious. I would rather you said the obnoxious thing, which I could respond to, than passively post a video with snarky implicit undertones, which I can't.

Comment author: philh 30 October 2013 06:59:59PM 1 point [-]

I think this isn't entirely fair. You asked what people do to keep themselves relatable to other people. That's not the same as asking for help relating to other people, but it is closer to that than you implied.

Not to say that I think the responses you got were justified, but I don't find them surprising.

Comment author: sixes_and_sevens comment score below threshold [+] (0 children)

Comment author: TheOtherDave 30 October 2013 03:23:31PM 0 points [-]

What I find staggering is why so many people skip the process of thinking "well, I can't offer you any good advice unless you give us more deta-...oh, wait, you weren't asking for advice", and just go ahead and offer it up anyway.

When you say you find this staggering, do you mean you don't understand why many people do this?

Comment author: sixes_and_sevens 30 October 2013 03:41:47PM 1 point [-]

I can speculate as to why people do this, but given my inability to escape the behaviour, I clearly don't understand it very well.

To a certain extent, I'm also surprised that it happens on Less Wrong, which I would credit with above-average reading comprehension skills. Answering the question you want to answer, rather than the question that was asked, is something I'd expect less of here.

Comment author: TheOtherDave 30 October 2013 03:49:07PM 0 points [-]

That's fair.

Comment author: philh 30 October 2013 02:27:38PM * 4 points [-]

There's a pattern of "I have a problem with X, the solution seems to be Y, I need help implementing Y".

Sometimes people ask this without considering other solutions; then it can be helpful to point out other solutions. Sometimes people ask this after considering and rejecting lots of other solutions; then it can be annoying to point out other solutions. Unfortunately it's not always easy for someone answering to tell which is which.

Edit because concrete examples are good: I just came across this SO post, which doesn't answer the question asked or the question I searched for, but it was my preferred solution to the problem I actually had.

Comment author: Douglas_Knight 30 October 2013 04:47:32PM 2 points [-]

Maybe that's a description of the other responses, but lmm is not suggesting an alternative to Y, but an alternate path to Y. I think sixes and sevens's response is ridiculous.

Comment author: [deleted] 01 November 2013 03:46:21AM 0 points [-]

If I wanted to update a blog regularly, I would consider it imperative to put "update my blog" as a repeating item in my to-do list. For me, relying on memory is an atrocious way to ensure that something gets done; having a to-do list is enormously more effective.

Comment author: Ritalin 29 October 2013 12:56:45PM 0 points [-]

I tried translating the sequences. Gave up on the third post.

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