On reflection yep "within 50 years" or something like that would have been better. 

This post gave me hands down the most useful new mental handle I've picked up in the last three years. 

Now, I should qualify that. My role involves a lot of community management, where Thresholding is applicable. It's not a general rationality technique. I also think Thresholding is kind of a 201 or 301 level idea so to speak; it's not the first thing I'd tell someone about. (Although, if I imagine actually teaching a semester long 101 Community Management or Conflict Management class, it might make the cut?) It's pretty plausible to me that there were other ways my last three years could have gone where Thresholding wasn't the problem that kept coming up, again and again, and so I'd look at this handle and go "huh, seems fine I guess but not important" or even "do people really do that?"

Given the way my three years actually went though, I think it makes accurate claims, and having the word is really useful in how I think and act. If I had the option to send a copy of Thresholding back in time to myself on January 1st, 2023, along with assurance from my future self that it was important no seriously. . . well, obviously not the best use of a time machine. But that would obviously have been advice worth ~$500 USD to me.

I'm not arguing it's worth that much to everyone; again, I have some vocational applications. But even if you don't handle community complaints, you live among other people, and some of those people are going to butt up against the thresholds of the rules, and I claim this will help you react more sensibly to that. I'll further claim that, given the kinds of people who hang out around LessWrong, the Thresholding concept is unusually useful for the blind spots we have. We like to have explicit rules, and we pride ourselves on being principled and holding to exactly what we said. But man, that doesn't stop incessant 2.9ing from being a problem. It's also a concept that gains from more people having the word in their vocabulary.

I want this thing in the Best Of LessWrong collection, because I want more people to read it and recognize it when it happens. Mostly, I really want past!me to have read it, and the next best thing I have is telling folks like me about it.

Bella: "I made a bet on this coin flip. If it comes up heads, I'm going to use the money to go out for dinner! Hrm, where would I want to eat if I win. . ."

Carl: "How do you know for certain it will come up heads? If you don't, it seems like an incoherent thing to even discuss."

Bella: "I'm not certain it will happen. It would be a bad idea to put too much weight or too many assumptions on something with only a 50% probability. But things can be both uncertain to happen and also coherent enough to talk about."

For the moment, the tag system exists. It'd be straightforward to make a Children or Parenting or somesuch tag. Users can filter what posts they want to show up by tag, though not everyone knows how to do it.

(I'm not saying this to imply the subdomain idea is bad, just that the tag version would be easy to implement.)

much has been made of the millennial aversion to phone calls that could have been an email, and I have a little bit of this nature, but I think most of my aversion here is to being on hold and getting bounced around different call departments.

I kind of want to check if 1. the aversion is real and generational as common wisdom holds, 2. if it is real, if calling became a genuinely worse experience around the time millennials started trying to do things.

Self Review:

This got nominated for the Best Of LessWrong review. I don't think it should be in the Best Of collection; maybe the results should be (I'm thinking of the Skill Issue section) but the call for the census isn't and I actually don't think general demographics info is worth inclusion. Worth the work, and I'm glad I did it, and some of us are getting good use out of the census, but it just seems the wrong type of post.

I expect to see you all next year, where maybe I'll argue the 2024 results are worth it. That'd be a stronger argument if I'd ever spun Skill Issue out into its own post I suppose.

Self Review:

Well, I think it's good.

The three fundamental questions feel like a useful set of prompts to pop into your head at the right moments. This post didn't get as much discussion, either positive or negative, as I wanted. I use the frame pretty regularly, but that's sort of a 'free' test in a way; I only wrote this up because I'd been using it regularly for years. A better test is if other people report it's helping them.

The followup work feels a bit fuzzy. Do lots of people use it, do they report it helps, do they actually perform better than people who don't use it? But this doesn't turn itself into quite an obvious objective test.

I notice I keep thinking of the Best Of LessWrong review in comparative terms. If we can only get people to read so many posts, which ones are worth it? If you're an eager reader looking to skim for only the cream, where do you start? From that perspective, section I probably pulls its weight in wordcount.

But this particular phrasing isn't vital. It's not like Bayes, where incremental improvements on the formula to make it easier to remember and more usable are worth putting a bunch of work into. I'd expect these kinds of questions to be more personal, some stuff will work for you that won't work for me and vice versa. It is fundamental to this whole pursuit of truth business, but there's many ways to express the idea.

Overall, I'd say this is a servicable entry for Best Of, but pretty plausibly replaceable.

Argh, that "with" snuck by my edit passes.

"How long have you had the issue" is the idea. The question somewhat assumes that people try to solve big issues.

For the exchanges- basically yep, I'm trying to find the indifference point.

Self review:

Looking back, I'm still decently proud of this one. It's a useful concept that shows up across disciplines, a bit abstract but with a plethora of examples. It's kind of hard to "test" in some empirical way, mostly just keep it in your back pocket. You're not going to be worse off for having the idea in your toolkit, but most people aren't in a situation where it's crucial.

The Anvil Shortage idea sticks around because I do think about what kinds of resources are harder to get more of once you run out vs if you start trying earlier. Probably the most practical is money; if you have no money, you can't buy nice clothes or a regular home address and getting a job is very hard. If you have some money, you can present like a working professional, but you are on a timeline before you need your next job. If you have lots of money, you can wait for a really good job.

Now, most people didn't need this post to tell them that, but I think that's pretty typical. The everyday, practical application people have picked up from conversations with others or advice from their parents. Its the generalization that needs a bit more advice for, and a few people miss the metis and need to learn from essays on the internet.

For a Best Of list, I'd call this serviceable but replaceable.

Typos fixed.

Intent in spoilers