LessWrong team member / moderator. I've been a LessWrong organizer since 2011, with roughly equal focus on the cultural, practical and intellectual aspects of the community. My first project was creating the Secular Solstice and helping groups across the world run their own version of it. More recently I've been interested in improving my own epistemic standards and helping others to do so as well.
I do sure wish that abstract was either Actually Short™, or broken into paragraphs. (I'm assuming you didn't write it but it's usually easy to find natural paragraph breaks on the authors' behalf)
(hurray for thoughtful downvote explanations)
I don't think this post is trying to hide Nate's identity, he's just using his longstanding LessWrong account. Evidence: his name's on the book cover!
I think this is actually already part of the LessWrong-style-rationalist zeitgeist. Taste, aesthetics, focusing and belief reporting are some keywords to look at.
(I think this post also seems to not understand what LessWrong's conception of rationality is about, although I'm not 100% sure what you're assuming about it. Vlad's comment seems like a good starting point for that)
@benwr oh I guess I did very specifically include a longer timescale example, so, uh, whoops. I do think there are fairly different flavors to the shorter term and longer term ones.
mm, okay yeah the distinction of different-ways-to-cling-less seems pretty reasonable.
Nod, those all seem like good moves.
I'm sort of torn between two more directions:
On one hand, I actually didn't really mean "buckle up" to be very specific in terms of what move comes next. The most important thing is recognizing "this is a hard problem, your easy-mode cognitive tools probably won't work."
(I think all the moves you list there are totally valid tools to bring to bear in that context, which are all more strategic than "just try the next intuitive thing")
On the other hand... the OP does sure have a vibe about particular flavors of problem/solution, and it's not an accident that I wrote a thing that resonates with me with that you feel wary of.
But, leaning into that... I'm a bit confused why the options you list here are "last resorts" as opposed to "the first thing you try once noticing the problem is hard". Like the airbender should be looking for a way for it to feel fun pretty early in the process. The "last resort" is whatever comes after all the tools that came more naturally to the airbender turn out not to work. (Which is in fact how Aang learned Earthbending).
((notably, I think I spent most of my life more airbendery. And the past ~2 years of me focusing on techniques that involve annoying effort is that the non-annoying-brute-force-y techniques weren't solving the problems I wanted to solve.))
But I think the first-hand is more the point – this is less about "the next steps will involve something annoying/powerthrough-y" and more "I should probably emotionally prepare for the possibility that the next steps will involve something annoying/power-through-y"
Also: the particular "buckle up" move I'm imagining is for things that are more like "1 to 16 hours of concentrated work". For things that are like months or years of work, there's some equivalent of "buckle up" but it's enough of a different move I'd probably write a pretty different post about it.
I think the original just also had very large paragraphs and not-actual-footnotes