Tyrrell_McAllister2 comments on Informers and Persuaders - Less Wrong

12 Post author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 10 February 2009 08:22PM

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Comment author: Tyrrell_McAllister2 11 February 2009 07:00:48PM 0 points [-]

Paul Crowley:

One trivial example of signalling here is the way everyone still uses the Computer Modern font. This is a terrible font, and it's trivial to improve the readability of your paper by using, say, Times New Roman instead, but Computer Modern says that you're a serious academic in a formal field.

I don't think that these people are signaling. Computer Modern is the default font for LaTeX. Learning how to change a default setting in LaTeX is always non-trivial.

You might argue that people are signaling by using LaTeX instead of Word or whatever, but switching from LaTeX to some other writing system is also not a trivial matter.

Comment author: sketerpot 01 March 2010 03:24:52AM 0 points [-]

In case anybody was wondering, just add this to your LaTeX file:

\usepackage{times}

It's actually pretty trivial. I always do this, though it took me a while. Also, in the papers I see online, they've usually done this.