Group Rationality Diary, January 16-31

therufs

This is the public group instrumental rationality diary for January 16-31.

It's a place to record and chat about it if you have done, or are actively doing, things like:

Established a useful new habit

Obtained new evidence that made you change your mind about some belief

Decided to behave in a different way in some set of situations

Optimized some part of a common routine or cached behavior

Consciously changed your emotions or affect with respect to something

Consciously pursued new valuable information about something that could make a big difference in your life

Learned something new about your beliefs, behavior, or life that surprised you

Tried doing any of the above and failed

Or anything else interesting which you want to share, so that other people can think about it, and perhaps be inspired to take action themselves. Try to include enough details so that everyone can use each other's experiences to learn about what tends to work out, and what doesn't tend to work out.

Thanks to cata for starting the Group Rationality Diary posts, and to commenters for participating.

Immediate past diary: January 1-15

Rationality diaries archive

This is the public group instrumental rationality diary for January 16-31.

It's a place to record and chat about it if you have done, or are actively doing, things like:

Established a useful new habit

Obtained new evidence that made you change your mind about some belief

Decided to behave in a different way in some set of situations

Optimized some part of a common routine or cached behavior

Consciously changed your emotions or affect with respect to something

Consciously pursued new valuable information about something that could make a big difference in your life

Learned something new about your beliefs, behavior, or life that surprised you

Tried doing any of the above and failed

Or anything else interesting which you want to share, so that other people can think about it, and perhaps be inspired to take action themselves. Try to include enough details so that everyone can use each other's experiences to learn about what tends to work out, and what doesn't tend to work out.

Thanks to cata for starting the Group Rationality Diary posts, and to commenters for participating.

Immediate past diary: January 1-15

Rationality diaries archive

Let's not pat ourselves on the back too much. Voters here absolutely respond to social cues (albeit unusual ones from the perspective of the wider culture) and to local status; the vote record on a post is not a totally dispassionate estimate of its quality.

That said, pure social awkwardness might limit a post's potential upvotes, but it usually isn't enough to get a post downvoted: that takes obvious bias, factual error, egregiously bad English, a perception of bad faith, or -- exceptionally -- attracting the ire of a serial downvoter. The truly clueless may risk pattern-matching to "bad faith", but that's fairly rare; the rest are more or less orthogonal to social skills.

Let's not pat ourselves on the back too much.

That was never my intention. I actually initially meant to stress this more, but I cut it as it didn't really fit.

The most important note that it is not necessarily a good thing to ignore social cues. They exist for good reasons. Discourse flows a lot better when it is polite and well presented. Those who ignore that do so at their own peril.

Some do, however. Including us, to some exten. You cannot deny that the population of Less Wrongers is weighted heavily towards the type of people that might be known as... (read more)