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DaFranker comments on Stupid Questions Open Thread Round 4 - Less Wrong Discussion
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At the moment, LW has provided negative benefit to my life. I recently quit my job to start learning positive psychology. My initial goal was to blog about positive psychology, and eventually use my blog as a platform to sell a book.
LW has made me deeply uncertain of the accuracy of the research I read, the words I write on my blog, and the advice I am writing in the book I intend to sell. Long-term, the uncertainty will probably help me by making me more knowledgeable than my peers, but in the short-term, demotivates (e.g. if I was sure what I was learning was correct, I would enthusiastically proselytize, which is a much more effective blogging strategy).
Still, I read on, because I've passed the point of ignorance.
I'm tempted to conclude that your current accumulated utility given LW is lower than given (counterfactual no-LW), but that in counterpart/compensation your future expected utility has risen considerably by unknown margins with a relatively high confidence.
Is this an incorrect interpretation of the subtext? Am I reading too much into it?
That interpretation is correct.
I've noticed that I don't even need to be knowledge to gain utility - there is a strong correlation between the signaling of my 'knowledgeableness' and the post popularity - the most popular had the largest number of references (38), and so on. When writing the post, I just hide the fact that I researched so much because of my uncertainty :)