All of Dustin's Comments + Replies

Dustin20

Yeah, I haven't got it automated yet. Someday I'll have the time.

Another place I did this was with the mountain of onboarding docs I got.  Now I can just ask Claude stuff like "how early do I have to request time off and who do I contact?" or "What's my dental insurance deductible?"

Dustin40

I just started a new job and I've been exporting Confluence pages to PDF and putting them in a Claude project so I can just ask Claude stuff.

5Viliam
That's a great idea... that would get me fired at my current job (security reasons). :D I hope you have that automated, because you will probably want to refresh the exports in a few months, but even if you did it manually I believe the ability to get instant answers is worth it.
Dustin20

SketchUp makes it where creating these sort of drawings is pretty easy!  It's a great tool for ideation.

1jm25
Thanks! I have used SketchUp for a few larger projects, but sometimes I'm outside with the circular saw ready and realise I need to make a change, and it would be useful to be able to make reasonable sketches just with pen(cil) and paper. 
Dustin40

I live/work in a fairly rural area where there are 7 towns with the biggest having a population of ~10k and the smallest ~2k and they all have varying requirements.  I've had conversations with the single code enforcement officer or director in each of them and we all agree how aggravating it is that the requirements vary from town to town.  Three of these towns butt right up next to each other so the code requirements can vary from one side of the street to the next!

Contrary to what I would expect, the biggest town, and the county seat, has by f... (read more)

Dustin40

Yeah, I flip houses fairly often and it's something I have to be aware of when remodeling stuff.

I'm sure it's different in different areas.

2jefftk
What's the minimum horizontal dimension where you live? (There are also a lot of things which are not a good choice if you are flipping because buyers will not like them, but are not literally illegal)
Dustin40

Interestingly, and ridiculously, this bedroom would not pass city code where I live for two reasons:

 

  1. 7ft dimension
  2. No built-in closet.
4jefftk
We built this in 2017 and it passed planning review and inspection in MA. Working with the architect at the time and looking at code to confirm, it needed to be at least 7ft in the shortest direction (it is exactly) and 70sqft (it's more like 80) and there was no requirement for a closet. Are you sure about 1 and 2?
Dustin40

I'm not exactly claiming that it is or is not useful in improving outcomes, I'm just wondering if any "hard, sterilized" data exists. 

Anyway...

Your comment does make me wonder some things. Take the following more as me exploring my state of mind on a lazy Sunday afternoon and less as a retort or rebuttal.

I'm not sure that we actually disagree...it's hard to quantify the amount of skepticism we're both talking about.  You can't say "you should be skeptical level 3" and I can't say "no you should be skeptical level 4.3".  For all either of us ... (read more)

4Duncan Sabien (Deactivated)
I'm curious to hear more of your model here, even if all you have is something half-baked. Like, if you would be willing to ELI5 why this intervention seems susceptible in this way, or paint me a picture of someone thinking that it's useful but being wrong. ... I am surprised by this. Mostly, I'm surprised by you assessing those people as otherwise reasonable. I think I view people's capacity for reason as less compartmentalized, or something, and would find myself suspicious of all of their other conclusions if they talked to ghosts or loaded up on VOD17P+. Like, this wouldn't stop them from being right-for-the-wrong-reasons, but I just wouldn't be able to call them reasonable. I do note that while the set of CFAR participants is not stellar in some absolute sense, it contains a much higher base rate of healthy skepticism and epistemic diligence/hygiene than most groups. Like, CFAR participants on the whole are a self-selected "at least nominally cares about what's actually true" group, and I think I weight their self-reports accordingly? I trust the CFAR participants somewhere in between my trust for [college juniors majoring in fields that require grounding and feedback loops] and [college professors teaching in such fields], as a rough attempt to calibrate.
Dustin30

I guess I should've also stressed the difference between alumni thinking it's proven useful (which is easy to determine) and it actually being useful in accomplishing stuff (which is the more interesting and harder to determine part).

None of the things you mention seem like fool-proof methods of determining the second case.

True, but also Bayes. Be careful not to cargo-cult skepticism; when you're dealing with a set of hundreds of people all telling you that Thing X was useful for them personally (especially when Thing X came from a menu of things, and it's being highlighted particularly), the most reasonable hypothesis is that it was useful.

Like, yes, people self-deceive, and yes, people misdiagnose. But it would be genuinely silly and not particularly rational for someone in my shoes, being directly exposed to these reports, to weirdly privilege the "nuh-uh" hypothesis.

Seem... (read more)

Dustin52

has proven useful to the majority of our alumni

 

Curious as to how this was established. I can see lots of ways for confirmation bias to creep into this.

3Duncan Sabien (Deactivated)
A variety of methods all pointing in similar direction (post-workshop surveys, frequency of use and mention in one-on-ones with participants in the years afterward, takeup in the broader rationalist/EA/longtermist communities, mention in posts in other places like FB and LW, iteration and variation in content put out by alumni, etc). Dan Keys could probably say more concrete things.
Dustin61

What about something like text buttons?  

When I'm designing a UI, I try to use text if there is not a good iconographic way of representing a concept.

Something like:

AGREE (-12) DISAGREE

I'm not sure how that would look with the current karma widget. Would require some experimentation.

Dustin20

First of all, I agree with the gist of your comment.

That is uncomfortably hot.

I...do not agree.  I keep my room temperature 72-74.

keep my room temperature around 68-70 F ish. The internet tells me that this is actually the definition of a "comfortable room temperature"

Going from first four google results for "what is comfortable room temperature":

WHO according to wikipedia: 64-75

www.cielowigle.com: 68-72

www.vivint.com: 68-76

www.provicincialheating.ca: 68-76

 

Seems like both of our preferred temperatures are consistent with "normal human being".

1anonymousaisafety
I'll edit the range, and note that "uncomfortably hot" is my opinion. Rest of my analysis / rant still applies. In fact, in your case, you don't need need the AC unit at all, since you'd be fine with the control temperature.
Dustin20

Your comment describes me.

I'm not confident that this is an inherent thing about me rather than luck.

I wonder if it's just that I've lucked out and mostly avoided the bad type of situations wherein my more analytical side is seemingly suppressed to the degree Kaj describes in his post. I've had a pretty good life so far.

That's not to say I haven't had bad things happen to me. (possibly uncomfortable TMI about bad things happening in following spoiler-ed text) 

Probably the worst thing that has happened to me is that we had a child die during childbirth

... (read more)
Dustin20

Thanks!  I was to the cardiologist this week going back beginning of June for echo, treadmill, etc.

Dustin40

In January I went to the ER because I was having a lot of heart palpitations...still haven't found anything conclusive to determine the cause.  However, I had a visit with my primary care doctor and she told me to cut back on or preferably eliminate the caffeine I was drinking via hot tea.

I went from ~6 cups per day to <1 cup per day cold turkey.

It was a rough week, but now I have no desire for it and have a good amount more energy throughout my day.

(Palpitations have more or less disappeared, but I'm not sure if that's because of caffeine, the 11 pounds I've lost, and/or something else)

3HeartFailure
Similar issues, diagnosed with bicuspid aortic valve, make sure to get a cardiologist to do approiate tests for yourself (echocardiogram etc) 
Dustin60

A potential way to think about this:

I learn a lot from most projects, and I think this is a huge benefit from at least starting a project.  I then have whatever I learned to use in the projects I do end up taking to completion.

Also remember that most projects are likely to be failures in some way (at least I think this is the case, I don't have the data lined up to back this up).  Once you've squeezed much of the learning potential out of them, then it's likely you're not losing much, if anything by dropping the project.

Dustin20

Less so, but it just leads to the question of "why do you think it's suspicious?".  If at all possible I'd prefer just engaging with whether the root claim is true or false.

2Pattern
That's fair. I initially looked at (the root claim) as a very different move, which could use critique on different grounds. 'Yet another group of people thinks they are immune to common bias. At 11, we will return to see if they, shockingly, walked right into it. When will people (who clearly aren't immune) going to stop doing this?'
Dustin20

I think I see a way towards mutual intelligibility on this, but unfortunately I don't think I have the bandwidth to get to that point. I will just point out this:

But as I understood it, we were discussing existence, not possibility per se.

Hmm, I was more interested in the possibility.

Dustin30

I find "AR" more difficult to actually say out loud than "EA". 

Just think like a pirate.

Dustin20

Er… I think there’s been some confusion.

I was referring to this part of your text:

(Awfully convenient, isn’t it? This trait that already gave us cause to feel superior to others, happens also to make us the only people who can learn the terrible secret thing without going mad! Yeah, right…)

It seemed to me like your parentheticals were you stepping out of the hypothetical and making commentary about the standpoint in your hypotheticals.  I apologize if I interpreted that wrong. 

My point is that before we can even get to the stage where we’re talki

... (read more)
2Said Achmiz
That was indeed not my intention. I don’t see how that can be. Surely, if you ask me whether some category of thing exists, it is not an orthogonal question, to break that category down into subcategories, and make the same inquiry of each subcategory individually? Indeed, it may be that the original question was intended to refer only to some of the listed subcategories—which we cannot get clear on, until we perform the decomposition! The bearing is simple. Do you think my enumeration of scenarios exhausts the category you describe? If so, then we can investigate, individually, the existence or nonexistence of each scenario. Do you think that there are other sorts of scenarios that I did not list, but that fall into your described category? If so, then I invite you to comment on what those might be. True enough. I agree that what you describe breaks no (known) laws of physics or logic. But as I understood it, we were discussing existence, not possibility per se. In that regard, I think that getting down to specifics (at least to the extent of examining the scenarios I listed, or others like them) is really the only fruitful way of resolving this question one way or the other.
Dustin40

Hard to answer that question given how much work the clause ‘for some definition of “safely”’ is doing in that sentence.

 

I think the amount of work that clause does is part of what makes the question worth answering...or at least makes the question worth asking.

Awfully convenient, isn’t it? This trait that already gave us cause to feel superior to others, happens also to make us the only people who can learn the terrible secret thing without going mad! Yeah, right…

I'm not a fan of inserting this type of phrasing into an argument.  I think it'd be... (read more)

2Pattern
Do you have the same reaction to: "This claim is suscpicious."
2Said Achmiz
Er… I think there’s been some confusion. I was presenting a hypothetical scenario, with hypothetical examples, and suggesting that some unspecified (but also hypothetical) people would likely react to a hypothetical claim in a certain way. All of this was for the purpose of illustrating and explaining the examples, nothing more. No mapping to any real examples was intended. My point is that before we can even get to the stage where we’re talking about which of your cases apply, we need to figure out what sort of scenario (from among my four cases, or perhaps others I didn’t list?) we’re dealing with. (For instance, the question of whether Group A is right or wrong that they’re the only ones who can know a given idea safely, is pretty obviously ridiculous in my scenario #4, either quite confused or extremely suspect in my case #1, etc. At any rate, scenario #1 and scenario #2—just to take one obviously contrasting pair—are clearly so different that aggregating them and discussing them as though they’re one thing, is absurd!) So it’s hard to know how to take your question, in that light. Are you asking whether I think that things like Langford’s basilisk exist (i.e., my scenario #2), or can exist? (Almost certainly not, and probably not but who knows what’s possible, respectively…) Are you asking whether I think that my scenario #3 exists, or can exist? Even less likely… Do you think that such things exist?
Dustin40

Is part of your claim that such ideas do not exist?  By "such ideas" I mean ideas that only some people can hear or learn about for some definition of "safely".

7Said Achmiz
Hard to answer that question given how much work the clause ‘for some definition of “safely”’ is doing in that sentence. EDIT: This sort of thing always comes down to examples and reference classes, doesn’t it? So let’s consider some hypothetical examples: 1. Instructions for building a megaton thermonuclear bomb in your basement out of parts you can get from a mail-order catalog. 2. Langford’s basilisk. 3. Langford’s basilisk, but anyone who can write a working FizzBuzz is immune. 4. The truth about how the Illuminati are secretly controlling society by impurifying our precious bodily fluids. Learning idea #1 is perfectly safe for anyone. That is, it’s safe for the hearer; it will do you no harm to learn this, whoever you are. That does not, however, mean that it’s safe for the general public to have this idea widely disseminated! Some ne’er-do-well might actually build the damn thing, and then—bad times ahead! If we try to stop the dissemination of idea #1, nobody can accuse us of “saviorist fuckery”, paternalism, etc.; to such charges we can reply “never mind your safety—that’s your own business; but I don’t quite trust you enough to be sure of my safety, if you learn of this (nor the safety of others)!” (Of course, if it turns out that we are in possession of idea #1 ourselves, the subject might ask how comes it that we are so trustworthy as to be permitted this knowledge, but nobody else is!) Ok, what about #2? This one’s totally unsafe. Anyone who learns it dies. There’s no question of us keeping this idea for ourselves; we’re as ignorant as anyone else (or we’d be dead). If we likewise keep others from learning this, it can only be purely altruistic. (On the other hand, what if we’re wrong about the danger? Who appointed us guardians against this threat, anyway? What gives us the right to deny people the chance to be exposed to the basilisk, if they choose it, and have been apprised of the [alleged] danger?) #3 is pretty close to #2, except that
Dustin50

It's been my experience that many more people think they're immune to woo than actually are. I'm not sure the risk is worth the reward.

Dustin60

It's not as pithy, but it seems likely that it's better said that some optimists make money, no?

Of course, this doesn't have any direct bearing on this interesting post.

8omegastick
100% this. Some optimists make money, some get scammed.
Dustin30

Thanks, I found this very helpful!  My daughter is taking guitar lessons and I think now I can maybe talk a bit more intelligently with her about it.

The standard notes used in Western music differ in pitch by a factor of the 12th root of 2 (~1.06x).

I was going to ask "why?" here and in some other places. But I'm guessing you answer the "why" later when you say:

This is all very silly, but it's what we're stuck with for historical reasons.

8lalaithion
 As other commenters have said, approximating integer ratios is important. * 1:2 is the octave * 2:3 is the perfect fifth * 3:4 is the perfect fourth * 4:5 is the major third * 5:6 is the minor third and it just so happens that these ratios are close to powers of the 12th root of 2.  * 2^(12/12) is the octave * 2^(7/12) is the perfect fifth * 2^(5/12) is the perfect fourth * 2^(4/12) is the major third * 2^(3/12) is the minor third You can do the math and verify those numbers are relatively close. It's important to recognize that this correspondence is relatively recently discovered; it was developed independently in china in 1584 and in europe in 1605, and coexisted with other schemes for finding approximations of those ratios for hundreds of years, and there are still people who think that this system sucks and we should use a different one, because of minor differences in pitch. (Also, the Chinese system actually used 24th roots of 2, not 12th roots.) This system is called "Equal Temprament", and there any many other tuning systems that make slightly different choices. Why not just use the exact integer ratios instead of the approximate ones? Well, if you're playing on a violin or singing, you can use exact integer ratios. But if you're using a fixed-note instrument, like a guitar (with frets) or a piano, then you have to deal with the issue that if you go up 1 octave and 1 minor third from a note, and also go up three perfect fourths, you get two notes that are almost identical, but different enough to go out of tune. (This is called the Syntonic comma.) So which one do you put on the piano? If you choose one, the other will sound a little wrong. Or, you could choose the average, and they'll both sound a little wrong.
4TAG
Even temparement, the twelth root of two thing, was introduced to allow different instruments of be played together, and to create a finite set of notes who keys. Under the previous system, you get to use exact simple ratios like 3:2 , which even temperament can only approximate, but repeatedly multiplying by 3:2 generates and infinite number of notes, not a cycle of twelve. Even temperament is always slightly off, but evenly so, hence the name. Guitars are naturally even tempered..a Pythagorean guitar would have frets zig zagging instead of parallel and evenly spaced.
8Samuel Hapák
The thing here is, that ancient people discovered that notes which have frequencies in a ratio of small integers sound good together. Eg. 2:3. For a long time, people were creating scales trying to have as many nice ratios as possible. This has problems. I’ll let you think about those yourself. Then some guy figured out that human ear is not perfect and we can’t really tell whether we hear 2:3 or 2:2.9966. And came up with idea of doing those 12th rootes of 2. Now, try to do 2^(7/12). Try also 2^(4/12). You see ?
Dustin30

What is an example of having an opinion that is an image of an image?

1Magnus
I replied to this and a bit more below, in noggin-scratcher's comment. p.s thanks for commenting
Dustin60

The rain in Spain stays mainly in the plain. 

This is a famous line from the play Pygmalion by George Bernard Shaw. In the play, a character named Henry Higgins is teaching a lower-class woman named Eliza Doolittle how to speak proper English. He tells her that the rain in Spain stays mainly in the plain in order to help her remember the correct pronunciation of the word "plain."

3philh
Incidentally this is wrong. The line is from a movie adaptation, not the original play. And at least in the song (which came still later), "plain" wasn't singled out; there are five copies of that vowel in the phrase and she couldn't get any of them at first. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Rain_in_Spain
Dustin40

Your suggestion is way easier to implement, and I like it, but just dreaming here...

It'd be neat to have functionality like Google Docs with commenting and edit suggestions within the text and margins specifically for editor-type of stuff. The post author could set some sort of permissions on who could do edit suggestions and who could view them.

This has the benefit of keeping comments for commenting on the content and putting editing in to a common editing paradigm.

3MondSemmel
That's a good suggestion. Fortunately for us, this already exists since a couple of weeks (albeit in beta).
Dustin40

I agree with you.

I've found that I've lessened this experience of reading something I've wrote and being horrified at its tone by going back and reading my comments at various sites.  At least once a year I find myself going to my profile page at LW or some other site and just spending a couple of hours reading what I've wrote in the past.  I think this has helped me be more aware of what my tone is conveying.

Dustin30

For what it's worth, in my experience there is a wide delta in accuracy between bad fitbit-style sleep trackerse and good fiftbit-style trackers.  

I do not know if this study used good or bad devices.

Dustin30

I'm somewhat confused on what you actually feel here

 

If I was to immerse myself in postrat, I would not like it because I prefer to be doing things that I enjoy and think are good and useful.  If I was forced to be immersed in postrat I'd be bored, bemused, indifferent.  I have a hard time thinking of a way that the word "disgust" would be used to describe my reaction.

I'm allergic to being bored.

Dustin40

Hmm.  So, what I was attempting to say was not that Jacob's post would convince you to like the postrat scene.

More that it would help you to understand the postrat scene.  

Moreover, I can imagine two categories of people who have negative opinions about the scene:  

  1. People who think it's stupid because it's shallow (not sure shallow is the right word here).
  2. People who think it's stupid because it appears shallow but know that the decoder ring for stuff like the QAnon post exists.

I'd say that when I said:

On the other hand, it feels like it it i

... (read more)
1Stephen Bennett
I see, thanks for clarifying. I think it helped me understand the postrat scene (although I have no interest in verifying that), so in that sense the post was successful. I'm somewhat confused on what you actually feel here, since "allergic reaction" seems very similar to my reaction: aversive for yourself. To be clear, I'm perfectly happy with the postrat scene doing its thing so long as it leaves the things I care about alone. I'm a strong supporter of liberalism in the sense of letting others do whatever they want so long as it isn't directly harmful to people who are not themselves involved.
Dustin20

I made the parent comment while sick and tired. This morning I'm just sick and while in the shower I started worrying that maybe the comment I made while being sick and tired didn't make any sense or would be taken as an attack.

This morning I'm relieved to see it wasn't downvoted into oblivion.

Dustin180

I liked this in an anthropological sort of way.

I do feel like it sort of hovered around a level of "explaining the twitter postrat scene" that would not be super helpful for people coming from two almost opposing standpoints:

  1. People who want to get into the scene. Who do I follow, what buttons do I click...what's the actions I should take?
  2. People who don't understand why anyone would care about the scene.

Reading between the lines a little bit, I think this is probably intentional.

On the other hand, it feels like it it is helpful explaining to people who already have some sort of idea that the scene exists and posts and already have some sort of at least slightly negative opinion about it.

6Jacob Falkovich
>Who do I follow, what buttons do I click... Twitter shows you not only what someone posted, but also who they follow and a list of the tweets they liked. You can start from there for me or the people I linked to, find enough follows to at least entertain you while you learn the norms and see if you like the vibe enough to stay long-term. You won't find a clearer set of instructions for joining something as nebulous as the Twitter ingroup than what I wrote up here.

On the other hand, it feels like it it is helpful explaining to people who already have some sort of idea that the scene exists and posts and already have some sort of at least slightly negative opinion about it.

As someone in this bucket, Jacob's post was weird to read, and so I'm surprised to see that you believe I'm the intended audience (I expect a better audience to be someone who has heard about it but had a slightly positive opinion on it). My main takeaway from the post was that I want nothing to do with the postrat scene, and while that's valuab... (read more)

2Dustin
I made the parent comment while sick and tired. This morning I'm just sick and while in the shower I started worrying that maybe the comment I made while being sick and tired didn't make any sense or would be taken as an attack. This morning I'm relieved to see it wasn't downvoted into oblivion.
Dustin30

Not Jeff, but I usually have:

  • at least a couple of terminals with SSH sessions.
  • one or two running language tools (like a blackd server for python)
  • Since everything using web tech requires building nowadays a terminal building whatever project
  • A terminal open in my current project directory to run project-specific commands.

Then I usually have a terminal or two open in my Jetbrains IDE....running the software I'm working on.

Dustin30

For anyone on Windows, the newish Windows Terminal is really nice.  Give it a try.

Windows has become a really nice development platform over the past several years.  

2Nanda Ale
Yeah for anyone who haven't seen it, it's not a minor revision, it's a completely new piece of software and insanely customizable. Combined with NVIDIA GPU CUDA Support in Windows Subsystem for Linux 2 and you will hardly notice you're still in Windows. Note that Windows 10 WSL isn't feature complete with Windows 11. 
Dustin50

There's a difference between

the complete material reductionist memeplex

and

the material reductionist memeplex is complete.

Having all of a thing that is incomplete is to completely have that thing.

Dustin80

Just remember that (I think, not an expert!) exercise is much less important than diet when it comes to losing weight.  An hour run that burns 300 calories is swamped by having a double cheeseburger instead of a salad.

Dustin20

Are the black or the red supposed to be the minuteman silos on that map?

Dustin20

Oh man, that is it!  I didn't quite remember that it was about logic more than electronics in general.  Brings back some cool memories...

Thanks for helping me remember, gwern.

Dustin40

This makes me think about a game I played on a Tandy CoCo 30+ years ago that was all about learning electronics.  I wish I could remember the name of it, I really enjoyed it at the time.

8gwern
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rocky's_Boots ?
Dustin20

If they're randomly picking from a list of possible political positions, I'd agree.  However, I suspect that is not the realistic alternative to parroting their parents political positions.  

Maybe ideally it'd be rational reflection to the best of their ability on values and whatnot.  However, if we had a switch to turn off parroting-parents-political-positions we'd be in a weird space...children wouldn't even know about most political positions to even choose from.

Dustin40

without answering the original questions

 

It seems unreasonable to me to expect all comments on a post to directly answer the explicit questions raised in the post. 

Sometimes people highlight unexamined premises in your question that resolve your own confusion!  I think such comments are very helpful!

I do not know if AllAmericanBreakfast is correct, but it does not seem implausible to me that wars in the past were confusing to intelligent people living at the time.

(I do agree that there is something about the tone of AllAmericanBreakfast's comment that can illicit a feeling of irritation.  Maybe the last sentence has a bit of condescension to it?)

0superads91
"It seems unreasonable to me to expect all comments on a post to directly answer the explicit questions raised in the post." It seems arrogant to me to diagnose someone with a flawed world model and in need for Rationality 101 just based on a few paragraphs of what I consider to be uncontroversial statements (others might have different opinions but I don't think my arguments are outlandish), and then just leave it at that, when the post asks for opinions (all other commenters gave opinions). Mortals have doubts.
Dustin20

How do you use these without squinting all the time?

I've tried a couple of 7k lumen corn bulbs in my ceiling-mounted light fixture in my office, but I find myself squinting all the time.

Maybe it's something to do with it being point sources?

Dustin50

I've found that the more I use Github CoPilot the more time I give to thinking how to write comments and function names to prompt good code recommendations.

Answer by Dustin10

There's a lot of results in this Google search for "ai prediction 2022" limited to between 3-20 years ago.  Try manipulating that search to narrow down what you're looking for.

One problem I see with a lot of the results is that the predictions are too vague to be able to grade...à la "2022 will see more usage of AI technologies". 

Gee, thanks a lot prognosticator.  So useful.

(Just in case you didn't think to use a custom dates search filter on Google)

6Tomás B.
Yeah, I have done a bit of googling, but would be more interested in posts by people in and around the rat-sphere. 
1A_donor
Fixed, thanks.
Dustin20

I don't really have any specific advice on how to write in this way. I don't think I consistently write in this way either, but not through lack of trying.

I'm talking about getting people to respond to the content of your post rather than responding to more nebulous social or emotional stuff that they take away from the phrasing, tone and subject matter of what you write...specifically if the social/emotional context is not intentional.

Some quick thoughts:

  1. Is the style of your text confrontational?  I think some people are able to get away with being c
... (read more)
3Viliam
Thanks, will try this.
Dustin100

Often when I see someone puzzled about why their factually and logically sound post or comment is responded to so negatively it's because their tone does not encourage people to take their thoughts seriously.  Unfortunately, the tone of your post matters and the tone you need varies based upon your target audience.

 

(Not saying this applies to you, dynomight!)

2Viliam
I'm curious, because this may be a mistake I often make. How specifically do you "encourage people to take your thoughts seriously"? Do you mean the style of the text, or inserting links to supportive papers, or some kind of disclaimer like "hey everyone, this is serious", or...?
Dustin20
  1. Socialization in games does exist, but is way off normal. You may be interacting with a 40 year old dude thinking he's a 12 year old and vice versa. That it is possible shows how unreal the social part of gaming is.

 

I made online gaming friends 15 years ago and I'm still good friends with some of them today.

Not that this makes you wrong, and the social part of gaming is different today, but it's at least possible to have good social interactions via online gaming.

I think maybe it was easier to make long-lasting friends in the past?  In the past a... (read more)

Dustin170

People like being alive. They show this by their actions. Very few people kill themselves.

 

This reminds me of a couple of comments I made on another post. I think the most appropriate quote from my comments is this:

 

I don't think I agree that suicide is a sufficient proxy for whether an entity enjoys life more than it dislikes life because I can imagine too many plausible, yet currently unknown mechanisms wherein there are mitigating factors. For example:

I imagine that there are mental processes and instincts in most evolved entities that adds a

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2David Hugh-Jones
Yes, I wouldn't say suicide is the be-all and end-all indicator, though it is quite suggestive. I'd also lay weight on simple common sense and intuition here. Most people today like life. If you read about ordinary people from 200 years ago or before, it doesn't seem like unremitting misery. (Piers Plowman, the "rude mechanicals" in Shakespeare, the peasants in the Georgics or in medieval Books of Hours, the ordinary people in the Old and New Testaments. Maybe these were just elites idealizing peasants? Hmm... up to a point.) Reporters and anthropologists who live with peasants and the poor today similarly paint a picture with light as well as shade.
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