A surprising movie that met many of these guidelines: Oculus. It's a horror movie, though, not a happy movie. The characters are smart and empathetic and it has Katie Sackhoff in it.

I have an Anki deck called Sequences - Useful Bits, where I threw some interesting things. Aside from that, re-reading is a good idea, as is talking with people who are familiar with the content.

I occasionally just forget that I can change things about my environment. If my clothes are uncomfortable, I can change. If there are annoying sounds, I can wear earplugs.

I thought that to most LW'ers the weak version of "Calories in, Calories out" was uncontroversial. One can accept that Calories in (the mouth) is not the whole story, and at the same time feel it's pretty much most of the story.

Disdain for the existing literature is common on LW.

I want to point out that 5 love languages is not literature so much as pop psyc (in that it has no peer review). Humans are filled with noise and complicated cases. There is no reason why 6 love languages would not explain communication better than 4 would than 5 would.

Other than the fact that many humans agree with the book (leading it to be popular).

Science goes: generate theory test theory publish results

pop goes: generate theory publish theory let the public be the judge.

I am suggesting people do the more science-based iteration route than the pop-route.

I have a few thoughts on various aspects of this piece.

On tone: seeming immediately disdainful of your object-level example is going to garner hostility right off the bat. I found myself going "Oh, come on, dude, they're helpful for a lot of people!" and I know you. We're friends, and I like you, and can generally assume that you're making arguments in good faith. I still had the hostile reaction to tone, even with all of that context.

On subject matter: I think there's a bit of typical mind here. While anyone who's talked to me about the subject knows my feelings on LW's tendency to over-embrace models, I still think they're useful. At the level of your specific example, I think that this advice kind of talks past people in the midst of many relationship problems. A model that immediately gets an important point across is invaluable. In this case, the point is that "The things you're doing might not be making your partner feel loved, and vice versa." Many people haven't ever realized that there are different ways to express love. Some people have disdain for certain types of expression, not realizing that such emotional needs are in the territory, not the map. This is a quick and dirty way to get that point across.

On suggesting that people generate models from scratch: I think this is a bad idea for many people until they're very, very good at checking themselves for typical mind biases. Most people aren't; I'm not. Modification of existing models at least exposes the designer to alien perspectives. If I'd sat down and tried to develop a model of relationships when I was sixteen, I would have left out the need for small gifts entirely. They don't mean much to me, and I would have remained disdainful of the idea. It would have been sad if I hadn't been able to recognize a partner's expressed need for small physical tokens, especially if the relationship was otherwise viable.

I've stuck to the love languages example here, but assume that I mean this sort of thing generally. I do have something to address on relationships themselves. When problems are obviously rooted in communication issues, trying to solve the problem on your own is only going to produce solutions that depend on your communication style! Most people aren't great at switching the entire emotional context from which their communications are generated. You aren't, I'm not, and I can only think of one or two people who have seemed to exhibit this skill.

An even more general note: Disdain for the existing literature is common on LW. It's understandable. This site exists in large part because of a scholarly gap. But I worry that we're too immediately contrarian, ignoring things that have worked while being imperfect.

I used to live in Boise; I've got family there.

You know the Williams?

I leveled up in Adult at work. I'm being trusted with more responsibility, have taken advantage of several opportunities to impress my superiors, and am getting a reputation as highly competent.

This is a subject that strongly matters to me. I too would love to see a return to non-proprietary, open communication protocols, open source software and decentralized hosting - everywhere on the Internet, not just on Less Wrong. This is one of the few capital-C Causes in my area of professional competence that I would happily donate a lot of labor and/or money to, if only I knew of a way to promote it. But I don't, and I don't know of anyone who does.

To argue that the problem can be solved in the LW microcosm would need to either take advantage of LW-specific community features, or explicitly not solve the general problem (e.g. by not scaling, or by admitting that some things would always remain Web-only and non-interoperable). If either one is the case, please mention that explicitly.

Like gjm, I immediately want to jump the inferential distance to the usual unsolved problems. (E.g., how do you handle 'graceful degradation' for people who encounter a necessarily web/http link for the first time, so the community can grow and people with regular blogs can link to it?)

It might help if you add explicit disclaimers saying "please don't bring up issue X, that's for a future post". Are there things you don't want to talk about before a certain point? Is your sequence planned out enough (and short enough in practice) that I should refrain from anticipating certain issues, even in separate posts?

I fear that my comment(s) might appear negative, focusing on problems that I don't know how to solve before you even posted about them. I very much want this conversation (and the wider LW 2.0 one) to be constructive! If you think there's a better way for me to engage with it, please don't hesitate to tell me so. And thank you for taking the time to advocate a solution to a problem I deeply care about.

ETA: also, I would very much enjoy myself writing posts on subjects like "Your Web Browser Is Not Your Client" (or as it's sometimes known, The Web Is Not The Net), "The Proper Placement of User Features (is at the clientside)" aka "separation of protocols from implementation", and so on. I just didn't think it was on-topic for LW. But if you make it on-topic, then I might just join in.