The bar is lower than you think

XelaP
Sat, 04 Apr 2026 00:22:39 GMT

TL;DR: The efficient market hypothesis is a lie, there are no adults, you don't have to be as cool as the Very Cool People to contribute something, your comparative advantage tends to feel like just doing the obvious thing, and low hanging fruit is everywhere if you pay attention. The Very Cool People are anyways not so impossible to become; and perhaps most coolness is gated behind a self belief of having nothing to add. So put more out into the world, worry less about whether people already know or find it boring. At worst you'll be slightly annoying. How can you know, if you haven't even tried?

Apparently I live in the Iron Man timeline, so I asked Jarvis/Claude to make this and I got to see it get assembled piece by piece. In the words of Claude, "you have now witnessed art".[1]

Recently I've been commenting more on LessWrong[2]. This place is somehow the best[3] forum for sane reasoned discussion on the internet besides small academic-gated communities. A lot of posts and comments seem impressive, the product of minds greater than my own, the same way that even if I tried for years I probably wouldn't write a novel better than my own favorites[4] or beat Terrence Tao at his own game.

But... even taking for granted the (false) conclusion that all good posters here are unattainably beyond yourself, you just... don't need to be that good to have something to contribute. It's typically easier to notice that step 24 of an argument is fatally flawed than it is to come up with it, especially if you can read a dozen arguments and then only comment on the one you can find flaws in. Sometimes your life has given you evidence that others don't have, or you happened to hear a phrase from a friend that is apt. Sometimes people have good ideas or know a lot but cannot explain them.

Furthermore, frequently people systematically underestimate how good they are at their greatest strengths. When you have unusual skill in a domain, that domain will feel unusually easy. Thus, Focus on the places where everyone else is dropping the ball.

Personally I've found that having the mindset that you can fix things or contribute makes you notice when you can. It's like the frequency illusion. For example, the next time you're reading Wikipedia and get a twinge of "that's phrased poorly" or "that's a typo" or "why doesn't this mention X?", think "I could fix that, right now". You are allowed to edit Wikipedia. Similarly, comment with your addition.

What if that would take too much effort? Well... consider just half-assing it. That often gets you 80% of the way, and you shouldn't let perfect be the enemy of the good. You can always go back to put your full ass in it later. You think I'm proof reading this post? Hell no! I only added the image hours later. See the examples list for more.

What's the worst that could happen? You annoy a few people a little, some are a bit angry at you, maybe you mislead them (at least until someone deletes your text or comments about how wrong you are), you look a little lamer to the Cool Kids, and you lose some internet points.

Boo-hoo?[5] If you never take the risk of making people a little sad or annoyed or dumber, you'll never do much of anything anyways. I try to have life goals not best satisfied by a literal corpse. There are times and places to shy away from inaction due to the risk of causing harm but internet commenting just doesn't risk much harm to others.[6]

Now for examples, taken from my most upvoted comments, mostly in order to prevent cherry picking (currently I mostly write comments):

Bask in awe at my greatness[7], and realize that you might be in the same epistemic state that I was before I made these comments, and that most of these did not feel like 'effort posts', and I almost didn't do half of them due to thinking nobody would care. If you think mine are too impressive for you to replicate, this should make you wonder how you know you aren't in the same position. If you think mine are meh or trash, then you should have no problem beating me.[8]

Best Comments

My most upvoted comment is basically just a copy paste from a couple prediction market's about-me's, a regurgitation of something I read Hanson say, a quote from an ACX post, and a link to a paper I didn't even read beyond skimming the intro that was linked in one of the previous sources. It feels like I'm just being a proactive google or LLM (minus slop) here

My second most upvoted comment was me noticing that a fermi estimate used the total surface area of the Earth when they wanted the land area. I had the ballpark figure for the total in my recognition memory so it pinged my spidey-sense, and I knew the circumference of the Earth from memory (the French used to define the meter as a ten-millionth of the distance from the equator to the pole, so the circumference is 40k km), so I could do the check in my head while filling my water bottle (or something like that).

My third most upvoted comment is an explanation of why I loved a certain explanation of Shapley values with Venn diagrams. This was actually an effort-post - I had to think for a while about what makes for good math explanations and why I felt so fond of this one, and I think I came away with a picture that isn't the usual story.[9]

My fourth most upvoted comment was written off the cuff in my bed, and I almost didn't post it because I thought nobody would care. I thought it would be like expecting people to care about my diary or about my dreams.

[skipping two entries: an old post I don't really like that I wrote too long ago to remember anything about, a basically-poem that I like more than others did], My seventh most upvoted comment was just a simple clarification of someone's misunderstanding, where the domain knowledge about lockpicking is mentioned pretty early by basically anyone that talks about lockpicking to a general audience (don't pick locks you don't own because you might damage them).

My eight most upvoted comment was me pointing one of those people I think of as Very Cool to a certain linguistics research domain. The one time I took a linguistics class I watched none of the lectures and just ad libbed all of the assignments. I only know what a word learning bias is because it was in one of a series of ~10 minute YouTube videos covering intro level linguistics. Believe it or not, even smart people don't literally know everything.

Maybe you've heard most of this stuff before. I had. Maybe this time, you'll finally listen.

1. ^

It rolled the arrogant rude annoyed teenager tone as specified in my user preferences prompt.

2. ^

And less recently, Wikipedia. Same principles apply - you know you can just take snippets of non-Wikipedia stuff you read and put them on there, from as simple as "Disease X killed Y people in [recent year] according to the WHO" to updating said stats when time inexorably advances, to putting in lightly reformulated math or physics equations from papers or standard books like the Feynmann lectures or easy nice consequences of what's already on there. You may even get an ego boost when you look something up on Wikipedia and realize you wrote the text you are reading.

3. ^

Read: The worst form of forum, except for all the other fora we've tried.

4. ^

For fiction, the loophole I plan to exploit someday is that I only need to write something perfect for me or people like me, and I can just ask myself what I like.

5. ^

I don't mean to trivialize your sadness if you've been harmed. I just mean that there's a thing that some people are more prone to than others where they overinflate/catastrophize minor or unlikely downsides, and often pointing out how silly the worries are helps dissolve them.

6. ^

You can use a pseudonym and hide revealing information if you're worried about that. Here I was mostly talking about harm to others.

7. ^

In case you missed it I am playing up my ego for the lols.

8. ^

Unless you also think that LW is deeply flawed about what it rewards

9. ^

Thanks to the people who downvoted my previous super short "Wow that's great!" comments - I may not have written that had you not kicked me to elaborate.

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