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RichardKennaway comments on You have a set amount of "weirdness points". Spend them wisely. - Less Wrong
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Comments (94)
That's a bit like asking how I recognise someone's face, or how I manage to walk in a straight line. Sometimes things just "sound a bit off", as one says, which of course is not an explanation, just a description of what it feels like. That brings to my attention the distinction between what has been said and whether it is true, and then I can consider what other ways there are of joining up the dots.
Of course, that possibility is always present when one person speaks to another, and having cultivated consciousness of abstraction, it requires little activation energy to engage. In fact, that's my default attitude whenever person A tells me anything negatively charged about B: not to immediately think "what a bad person B is!", although they may be, but "this is the story that A has told me; what does it seem to me likely to be true?"
Well, based on that description, would I be accurate in saying that it seems as though your "method" would generate a lot of false positives?
You can always trade of specificity for sensitivity. It also possible to ask additional questions when you are suspicious.
Suspending judgement is not a false positive. And even from such a limited interaction as seeing the name and subject line of an email, I am almost never wrong in detecting spam, and that's the spam that got past the automatic filters. I don't think I'm exceptional; people are good at this sort of thing.
My hobby: looking at the section of the sidebar called "Recent on rationality blogs", and predicting before mousing over the links whether the source is SlateStarCodex, Overcoming Bias, an EA blog, or other. I get above 90% there, and while "Donor coordination" is obviously an EA subject, I can't explain what makes "One in a Billion?" and "On Stossel Tonight" clearly OB tiles, while "Framing for Light Instead of Heat" could only be SSC.
Deliberately uninformative title. Robin Hanson does this fairly often, Scott much less so. Very short, which is highly characteristic of OB. Very large number is suggestive of "large-scale" concerns, more characteristic of OB than of Scott. Nothing that obviously suggests EAism.
Self-promoting (RH frequently puts up things about his public appearances; other sidebarry folks don't). Very short. Assumes you know what "Stossel" is; if you don't this reads as "deliberately uninformative" (somewhat typical of OB), and if you do it reads as "right-wing and businessy connections" (very typical of OB).
(As you may gather, I share your hobby.)
Huh. I must just be unusually stupid with respect to "this sort of thing", then, as I'm rarely able to discern a plausible-sounding lie from the truth based on nonverbal cues. (As a result, my compensation heuristic is "ignore any and all rumors, especially negative ones".) Ah, well. It looks like I implicitly committed the typical mind fallacy in assuming that everyone would have a similar level of difficulty as I do when detecting "off-ness".
That sounds like an awesome hobby, and one that I feel like I should start trying. Would you say you've improved at doing this over time, or do you think your level of skill has remained relatively constant?
I couldn't really say. Back when I read OB, I'd often think, "Yes, that's a typical OB title", but of course I knew I was looking at OB. When the sidebar blogroll was introduced here, I realised that I could still tell the OB titles from the rest. The "X is not about Y" template is a giveaway, of course, but Hanson hasn't used that for some time. SSC tends to use more auxiliary words, OB leaves them out. Where Scott writes "Framing For Light Instead Of Heat", Hanson would have written "Light Not Heat", or perhaps "Light Or Heat?".