= 27d567bc2d48d9f40e9ccc20ea370b15)
Well not literally of course, but I consider the useful meaning to be: beware of the intuitive tendency to assume it is necessary to say much, when saying a little would actually suffice. It's a guideline rather than a rule, not always applicable, but often enough to be of value.
Fair. That's how I took it at first, and why I liked it more then.
In response to
Measuring aversion and habit strength
The injunction to measure aversion strength by effect on behavior is one I think I will find particularly useful - in particular because I already consider myself good at dealing with strong feeling aversions. If an aversion feels strong, it tends to make me question myself rather pointedly about why I feel that way, whereas those that feel only like a mild preference or a case of 'have better things to do' have not, in the past, set off those alarm bells. I quite enjoyed this post.
In response to
The 48 Rules of Power; Viable?
I think, if in doubt, you could do a lot worse than use this as a list of guidelines for what not to do. It's designed to sell by masking itself as frightfully hard-nosed realism while actually appealing to the audience's baser instincts.
What does 'baser instincts' mean? Recall that in the Stone Age, life was mostly a zero-sum game. Wealth was mostly foraged, not farmed or manufactured. You spent your life in the tribe you were born in, which was unlikely to grow or find new opportunities except at the expense of another tribe. You couldn't win except by making somebody else lose. None of these things are anywhere near true anymore, but evolution hasn't caught up; we still have instincts honed for that environment, against which our main antidotes are a sense of moral value together with a widening of the scope of what we consider our tribe. In other words, if you feel a sense of moral revulsion when presented with what looks like hard-nosed, realistic advice, it's quite likely that your visceral reaction is correct and the advice is wrong.
"Never outshine the master"? Wrong. A master worth having, would have it no other way. A master not worth having is, well, not worth having.
"Conceal your intentions"? Wrong. Make your intentions clear, then follow through on them. It attracts those who would deal honestly with you, and deters would-be aggressors so that a fight doesn't have to start in the first place.
"Get others to do the work for you, but always take the credit"? Only if you want your employees to be those who know they can't find work elsewhere. The competent are no longer permanently stuck in the positions into which they were born.
"Learn to keep people dependent on you"? Then you'll be able to keep them in the mud and your boots on their faces slightly higher in the mud - meanwhile, those who fostered independent allies, will be climbing the highest peaks.
"Play a sucker to catch a sucker: play dumber than your mark"? Only if you want to become entangled with suckers. If your own self-interest really matters to you, don't exploit suckers, just stay away from them.
(Okay, granted there are a few pieces of often-good advice, like "Always say less than necessary" and "Do not go past the mark you aimed for; in victory, learn when to stop". You can't literally use this list as anti-advice. But on the whole, it's bad.)
Caveat: if your life's ambition is to become chief of your tribe, then to a certain extent you are playing a zero-sum game after all, and perhaps this advice may serve you well. But outside that, if you ever find yourself in a situation where it starts looking like good advice, that may be a warning sign you have stumbled into a zero-sum game. In that case, don't spend your efforts on becoming good at it. Spend them on getting the hell out of it.
"A strange game. The only winning move is not to play."
Do you really think saying less than necessary is good advice? That one seemed intuitively good to me at first glance, but then I thought about it a bit more. If I seek to communicate clearly, I should definitely say as much as necessary.
Otherwise, I heartily agree with you.
In response to
lessannoying.org
Very few of my friends will read anything from LW that I link to them, and I suspect that they would find this link absolutely hilarious. I have never managed to get any of them to give a generalized account of exactly what they think is so systematically annoying about LW, though - they call the whole site 'pompous' and stop there.
In response to
Requesting advice
I have noticed that I become more tense when reading effective arguments for Christianity and more relaxed when reading good arguments against it
What do you consider an effective argument for Christianity, and what sorts of thoughts do you find yourself thinking when you encounter such an argument? It might be useful to write them down.
As for whether it's appropriate for LW... well, since I have a fairly good idea of what I'm going to write on the subject in the future, I think it is, because I intend to keep it targeted and relevant to issues the community has interest in - offering either another angle from which to consider them, or more background information from which to evaluate them, or ideally both. As I've said before, I've no desire to write a textbook, and there's plenty of other places on the internet we could go if we wanted to read the equivalent of one.
To me it seems sufficiently relevant for a front page post. Just not a promoted front page post. :)
I agree. I didn't actually expect it to get promoted, since it doesn't fit the pattern of things I've seen on the very front. I'll show how new I am here and ask, though - Eliezer's comment read like he had been presented with some expectation that this be promoted. Is that because posts that get upvoted this far typically (or always) are?
Since I didn't ask, or state that I thought it should be, it seemed a bit out-of-the-blue, which did then and is still causing me to try to figure out whether his objection was only to the idea of promotion, or if he objected to promotion because he thought it shouldn't be here at all.
In response to
LW Biology 101 Introduction: Constraining Anticipation
Um... I may be a bit prejudiced, here, especially considering that this has been highly upvoted, but I have to admit I have two major problems with promoting this post:
1) It says "Constraining Anticipation" in the title, and after reading it, I cannot think of anything I expect to see happen.
2) More importantly, I don't feel I know anything about rationality which I didn't know earlier. I'm not sure LW should be in the business of fully general scientific intros.
On the title - the idea was, for this post specifically, to sketch the general principles that define both the space of reasonable approaches and likely outcomes in biological problems. I do think I did an underwhelming job demonstrating that link, and if that is what you mean or close to it, then I agree with you and will take it as a reminder to work on cohesion/full clarity of purpose in future posts. (If it's not, I invite further clarification.)
As for whether it's appropriate for LW... well, since I have a fairly good idea of what I'm going to write on the subject in the future, I think it is, because I intend to keep it targeted and relevant to issues the community has interest in - offering either another angle from which to consider them, or more background information from which to evaluate them, or ideally both. As I've said before, I've no desire to write a textbook, and there's plenty of other places on the internet we could go if we wanted to read the equivalent of one.
However, if you don't think that is enough to be relevant here, I would very much like to hear what, if anything, would make such a set of posts relevant to you (not trying to shift the reference frame - I mean relevant to you in the context of LW). The large positive response I received previously and in this post indicates to me that it's worth continuing in some form.
In response to
LW Biology 101 Introduction: Constraining Anticipation
I noticed the texts cited at the bottom (in particular Molecular Biology of the Cell, as that is something I am currently reading and enjoying).
Do you have any particular texts on biology you might want to recommend ?
Yes! Thank you for linking that thread; I hadn't seen it.
I have updated based on this evidence.
One follow up question:
On a practical level, the oversight on manipulation of organisms beyond your run-of-the-mill, single-celled lab workhorses (bacteria, yeast) is massive.
Is this sort of thing not changing?
To the best of my knowledge - and that deserves a disclaimer, since I'm a grad student in science and not yet completely versed in the legal gymnastics - it is changing, but any loosening of policy restrictions only comes with exceptional evidence that current norms are grossly unnecessary. In a general sense, bioengineering and tech started out immersed in a climate of fear and overblown, Crighton-esque 'what-if' scenarios with little or no basis in fact, and that climate is slowly receding to more informed levels of caution.
Policy also assuredly changes in the other direction as new frontiers are reached, to account for increased abilities of researchers to manipulate these systems.
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Here's a similar story.
Yup, sounds about right. The phrases 'snide intellectualism' and 'ivory tower' are things I've heard more than once. From my significant other, no less. I know his response is an aversion to the site and not to intellectualism in general, or else, well, he wouldn't be my significant other, but it's incredibly frustrating. I try to bring up topics in a general sense instead of 'I read this really great article on Less Wrong...' but it's always difficult to avoid using references from people here if it's a topic that LW deals with often.
I suppose this would be a good point to say I'm interested in advice from anyone who has successfully converted a friend or family member's opinion of the site from knee-jerk negative to neutral or positive, given that I spent most of yesterday fuming about something absolutely ridiculous and insulting that was said in response to me bringing up the topic of cryonics.