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palladias comments on Strawman Yourself - Less Wrong
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Comments (33)
Be a little careful about what kinds of arguments come to mind. If I run "look for the most obvious uncharitable insulting argument" on one of my current projects (writing a book), my oh-so-helpful brain immediately returns "It's arrogant for you to write a book. Also you can't finish a project this long. You're going to hit a hurdle and all the work will be for nothing!"
This, despite the fact that I've got a contract, my editor liked the first three chapters I sent, and I'm over halfway to the finish, look to be on track for deadline, and set aside a month of nothing but this at the end.
I'd suggest just being slightly more suspicious of insulting arguments that make claims about your character sucking (immutably) than ones about the way you've laid out the plan.
I do like this comment from "Die Vampire Die" as a countermeasure:
Ugh. I get this sort of thing when writing, too, and I hate it. For blog posts it comes out as "the insights you think are revelatory are actually banal and somewhat pathetic, and you're embarrassing yourself by presenting them as heartfelt knowledge. You're trying to signal wisdom (and lying to yourself about that, incidentally), but you're actually signaling a contemptible desperation for validation. Any halfway intelligent reader is going to smell that desperation, like it's roadkill of Pepe le Pew."
For fiction it's more like "the scene you think is tense and gripping is actually made of grade A Narm that you can't see. The one you think is touching is really teenage angsty melodrama." The bit about transparent reaching for validation stays the same, though.
Yeah, that's pretty close to it. Die, vampire, die.
Let me try to defeat this.
I have learnt something.
That means, I didn't know, and then I put in effort, and now I know.
Previously, I did not know; it is highly unlikely that I am the only person who did not know.
Even though it's obvious in hindsight, I still value having the knowledge; it is highly unlikely that I am the only person to value it.
I spent n minutes acquiring this knowledge; barring better data about others I should expect this time to be about average.
Reading this article will take t minutes where t < n.
Articles get written once and read many times; thus, my investment of effort is a net social good. (The time value is
(n - t) * readers - n: time expended - time saved.)PS: this gives you license to spam your article everywhere. You're committing a social good!
tl;dr: the corollary of "You are not a special snowflake" is "you are not alone".
When I run that through my own mind, it spits out an accusation of motivated reasoning. Thanks for the attempt though.
In fairness, whatever lives inside your head probably knows you better than some dude.
Probably false for an average person.
It seems katydee may have made a mistake in choice of language here by conflating "yourself" with "your plans". To nitpick, it might better to consistently refer to the thing to be strawmanned as "your plan(s), and not use "you" at all. If one wants to generate an argument to point out flaws in their own plans, strawmanning yourself is like launching an ad hominem attack upon oneself. When somebody is looking to improve only one plan targeted for a (very) specific goal, strawmanning the plan rather than one's own character would seem to illuminate the relevant flaws better.
Of course, if somebody wants to prevent mistakes in a big chunk of their lives, or their general template for plans, strawmanning themselves, then might be the time strawmanning one's own character is more worthwhile.
We are much more sadistic to ourselves than we'd ever be with others.
I agree that "it's arrogant for you to write a book" is probably not helpful, though "you can't finish a project this long" may or may not be helpful depending on whether you generate that thanks to reference class forecasting (even insulting, biased reference class forecasting) or thanks to negative self-image issues.
In general, I do not advocate this (or any other) technique if it causes damage to your self-concept, intrusive thoughts, etc.
The problem with "You can't finish a project this long" is that is doesn't come with a reason like "You haven't set aside enough time" or "Planning fallacy!" or "You'll have to trade off against more worthwhile use of your time" which are all useful to address. I'm describing a kind of thought that doesn't feel like troubleshooting but more like anti-self efficacy, where the problem isn't the plan, it's that the plan has you in it.
I like pre-mortems, outside view, etc, so I'm not denigrating the technique, just flagging an error mode.
Okay, the internal critic is officially is prohibited from ad-hominems.