dxu comments on You have a set amount of "weirdness points". Spend them wisely. - Less Wrong

55 Post author: peter_hurford 27 November 2014 09:09PM

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Comment author: dxu 06 December 2014 11:34:08PM *  3 points [-]

I don't think I'm exceptional; people are good at this sort of thing.

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".

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.

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?

Comment author: RichardKennaway 07 December 2014 10:02:32AM 2 points [-]

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?".

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