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While the framing of treating lack of social grace as a virtue captures something true, it's too incomplete and imo can't support its strong conclusion. The way I would put it is that you have correctly observed that, whatever the benefits of social grace are, it comes at a cost, and sometimes this cost is not worth paying. So in a discussion, if you decline to pay the cost of social grace, you can afford to buy other virtues instead.[1]

For example, it is socially graceful not to tell the Emperor Who Wears No Clothes that he wears no clothes. Whereas someone who lacks social grace is more likely to tell the emperor the truth.

But first of all, I disagree with the frame that lack of social grace is itself a virtue. In the case of the emperor, for example, the virtues are rather legibility and non-deception, traded off against whichever virtues the socially graceful response would've gotten.

And secondly, often the virtues you can buy with social grace are worth far more than whatever you could gain by declining to be socially graceful. For example, when discussing politics with someone of an opposing ideology, you could decline to be socially graceful and tell your interlocutor to their face that you hate them and everything they stand for. This would be virtuously legible and non-deceptive, at the cost of immediately ending the conversation and thus forfeiting any chance of e.g. gains from trade, coming to a compromise, etc.

One way I've seen this cost manifest on LW is that some authors complain that there's a style of commenting here that makes it unenjoyable to post here as an author. As a result, those authors are incentivized to post less, or to post elsewhere.[2]

And as a final aside, I'm skeptical of treating Feynman as socially graceless. Maybe he was less deferential towards authority figures, but if he had told nothing but the truth to all the authority figures (who likely included some naked emperors) throughout his life, his career would've presumably ended long before he could've gotten his Nobel Prize. And b), IIRC the man's physics lectures are just really fun to watch, and I'm pretty confident that a sufficiently socially graceless person would not make for a good teacher. For example, it is socially graceful not to belittle fledgling students as intellectual inferiors, even though they in some ways are just that.

  1. ^

    Related: I wrote this comment and this follow-up where I wished that Brevity was considered a rationalist virtue. Because if there's no counterbalancing virtue to trade off against other virtues like legibility and truth-seeking, then supposedly virtuous discussions are incentivized to become arbitrarily long.

  2. ^

    The moderation log of users banned by other users is a decent proxy for the question of which authors have considered which commenters to be too costly to interact with, whether due to lack of social grace of something else.

From what I understand, because the US Electoral College is structured such that state laws determine who the electors will vote for as president, you wouldn't need any constitutional amendment or federal legislative action to impose an age limit for the US presidential election in particular. In contrast, I think the lower age limit of 35 for US presidents is a constitutional requirement, and as such would not be nearly as easy to change.

On a somewhat related note, there's an interesting attempt by US states to assign electoral votes based on the national popular vote.

In 48 of the 50 states, state laws mandate that the winner of the plurality of the statewide popular vote receive all of that state's electoral votes.

Based on this Wikipedia quote, I imagine states could impose arbitrary requirements for who can or cannot receive the electoral votes, including imposing an age limit. Basically, add a clause to the state laws that "Electors must abstain if the winner of the plurality does not fulfill the following requirements...".

EDIT: Note, however, that if no candidate gets a majority of the electoral vote (270+ votes), then the US House of Representatives elects the US President instead. So while such a state law would disincentivize particular candidates, if such a candidate ran for president anyway and won the plurality of the state vote, then the abstention of the electors might well result in the Electoral College disempowering itself. And furthermore the House of Representatives could still elect an arbitrary candidate.

EDIT2: Okay, I think I've come up with a better state law design: If the winner of the plurality of state votes exceeds the age limit, then assign the electoral votes to either the second place instead (regardless of their age), or alternatively to whoever of the top two candidates is younger. Either version ensures that the electoral college will not abstain, which makes the House of Representatives route less likely. And either version disincentivizes a scenario where the presidential candidates of both parties exceed the age limit, since in this case, both parties are incentivized to run either a candidate below the age limit, or if not that, then at least a younger candidate than the opposing party's. And only the former strategy results in a stable outcome, whereas the strategy of running a younger candidate above the age limit can be circumvented by the opposing party running a still younger candidate.

I'd already clicked on most of the articles, so I also didn't realize that some cells were marked as unread, but I agree that titles with the unread background are comparatively easier to read. And the readability on all titles benefited from the stronger shadows you've implemented. Overall my impression is that those stronger shadows make the page slightly less pretty but a lot more readable.

Thanks for making this :).

Feedback on aesthetics and UX:

  • Art and layout are pretty!
  • I find the white text on colored backgrounds hard to read. In particular, some cells have white backgrounds and a white font which only offers contrast via a thin shadow outline. Also, the font color stays constant, but the backgrounds don't, which makes for a somewhat jarring experience of reading text in adjacent cells.
  • When I move my cursor from hovering one cell to another, the art instantly changes, in a way I find pretty disorienting.
  • Overall, it feels like there's way more flickering on the page than on the rest of LW.
  • The section headings (e.g. "Rationality", "Optimization") cannot be read from left to right, but require tilting one's head or something, which seems suboptimal.
  • The "Show All" UX is confusing: first you hover a cell in e.g. "Rationality"; then a small plus sign appears in the bottom left, which is apparently clickable; and only then a "Show All" appears all the way in the bottom right. In particular, it's weird that the buttons are in different corners, rather than in the same corner.

Other feedback:

  • Major kudos to the LW team for continuing to work on stuff like this <3.
  • I'm not loving the name "LeastWrong".
    • I agree with some of the other objections, e.g. how this sounds from outside the community.
    • Also, while a title like "Best of LessWrong" would be more wordy and less funny, it seems clearer and easier to understand. E.g. I could link someone to "Best of LessWrong" and the name would be self-explanatory, whereas linking to "LeastWrong" is more of an insider. And it's not like this community suffers from an insufficient supply of jargon.
    • Also, does "LeastWrong" even capture the spirit of the yearly LW Reviews? Truth and accuracy are important considerations, to be sure, but we as a community don't actually have the manpower to 100% vet the reviewed posts. Furthermore, tons of other things are also considered during the review vote: like "this post was important to me", "I referenced this post a lot", "this post (or author) makes LW better (or worse)", etc. Not to mention that there's guidance by the LW team for what an upvote/downvote is supposed to mean, and this meaning has changed over time! E.g. IIRC at some point we were asked to consider whether a post contributed to intellectual progress or some such. It seems to me like "LeastWrong" doesn't properly capture all that, and rather makes it sound like we as a community have decided that these are the most accurate posts on LW.

I know what you mean, and it used to absolutely be an issue in our group, especially with games like Eldritch Horror or Pandemic Legacy, i.e. multi-hour games where you have full information about everything every player is doing. That said, an obvious design which circumvents this problem is co-op games where every player has some private information: then other players can't play for you and vice versa.

Incidentally, all the non-team co-op games I suggested above have this design.

Just One is a co-op party game where the active player must guess a word and each other player independently provides a word hint. Then the hint givers compare hints and eliminate all hints that were given multiple times (hence the title, "Just One").

Resulting game flow: If everyone tries to give an "obvious" hint (e.g. giving the hint "metal" for the word "steel"), then multiple people will likely give the same hint, and as such this hint will be unavailable to the active player. Whereas if nobody gives obvious hints, there's a higher chance that there are no duplicate hints to eliminate, so the active player can work with a lot of hints but might get misled by all hints being non-obvious. This makes it an interesting challenge for what kinds of hints to give and how to interpret the hints one receives.

Meanwhile Letter Jam is a bit like Hanabi: Every player has one letter card facing away from themselves, so everyone but themselves knows what it is. The goal is for everyone to guess their 4-7 letter cards in as few rounds as possible. Every round one player (chosen by the group) gives a word hint to the other players based on the letters they see.

E.g. suppose there are four players. Then I would see the letter cards of the three other players, plus 1-2 letters visible to everyone, plus finally a joker which can substitute for any one letter. And suppose I see the player letters P L A, and an open letter T. Then I could make the word hint PLANT (by using the joker for the N). This hint is given silently by placing numbered poker chips next to the letters I want to use, e.g. the 1-chip in front of the player with the letter P. Here's how these hints look like to the other players: player 1 sees ?LA*T, player 2 P?A*T, player 3 PL?*T. Based on such hints, players try to narrow down what their own letter is.

The hint I gave involved the joker and thus doesn't provide much info on the hidden letters, whereas one great hint can directly help multiple players guess their current letter and proceed to the next one. But even if one player is much better at giving hints, they still rely on others to also provide hints, since you cannot identify your own letters when you give a hint. And even if you could give 5 perfect hints and would then need 5 perfect hints yourself, that's still much less efficient (i.e. it requires more rounds) than if each player can contribute a perfect hint.

When I play an N-player game I want everyone to both: 

  • Try to win
  • Win about 1/N of the time

This may be besides the point of your post, but: you can do even better than that, and without a need for handicapping, by playing co-op board games instead. Versus-style board games are just one type of game, and while you can modify their rules to come closer to equality of outcomes, that seems like a rather convoluted way of getting there. Like, in this situation, why play a zero-sum game when you could play a positive-sum game instead?[1]

Or if entirely co-op games don't seem appealing, another option along this axis is to play team-based games; then you can balance team strengths by which and how many people you assign to each team.

Some co-op board game recommendations suitable even for groups of widely disparate skill levels: Letter Jam, Just One.

A co-op game for groups that want a challenge: Hanabi.

Some team-based board game recommendations: Codenames, Decrypto. I wrote about these two games here.

  1. ^

    Speaking from my own experience, when I grew up I only knew versus board games, stuff like Monopoly or Settlers of Catan. But once I discovered co-op board games, I eventually realized that I had a lot more fun playing those with my siblings.

Off-topic tip: in addition to normal posts, LW also has a "Question" type of post which offers better UX for question-style posts like this one.

I basically can't read stuff without noticing typos and grammar issues, so I make a ton of typo and edit suggestions. For some authors and works (currently the web serial Super Supportive in particular), a significant fraction of my suggestions consists of using more hyphens.

I liked this explainer. Thanks for writing it! More generally, I appreciate efforts to explain novel stuff in simple terms.

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