All of Kisil's Comments + Replies

I may be late in the game here, but I found this chapter much less effective than the previous four, and I updated hard from "This book might resonate outside the LW community" towards "This will definitely not resonate outside the LW community." Maybe the community is the target, full stop, but that seems unnecessarily modest. The thing that most bothered me was that the conversations are full of bits that feel like Eliezer unnecessarily personalizing, which reads like bragging, e.g.:

When I try to explain a phenomenon, I’m also implici
... (read more)

Flipping this around: this seems like yet another data point in favor of investing at least moderately in signalling. Heuristically, people won't distinguish your lack of caring-about-signalling from lack of ability-to-signal.

Sure. The biggest one is that when someone has poor social skills, we treat that as a thing to tolerate rather than as a thing to fix. E.g. someone shows up to a meetup and doesn't really get how conversation flow works, when it's time to talk and when it's time to listen, how to tell the difference between someone being interested in what ze has to say and someone just being polite. We're welcoming, at least outwardly, and encourage that person to keep showing up, so ze does. And the people who are both disinclined to be ranted to and who have the social ... (read more)

2a here seems like a major issue to me. I've had an essay brewing for a couple of months, about how the range of behaviors we tolerate affects who is willing to join the community. It's much easier to see the people who join than the people who are pushed away.

I argue that the way we are currently inclusive goes beyond being a safe space for weirdness, and extends into being anti-normal in a way that frightens off anyone who already has strong mainstream social skills. And that we can and should encourage social skill development while remaining a safe space.

If there's interest, I'll finish writing the longer-form argument.

1Lumifer
Any quick examples before the long-form essay?

This crystallization really resonated with me. I've recently noticed a social norms divide, where some people seem to perceive requests for more information as hostile (attacking their status), rather than as a sign of interest. "I do not understand your world view, tell me more" can translate as "I like you and am interested in understanding you better", or as "you are obviously wrong, please show me some weakness so that I can show how much smarter I am." Or related, consider:

A: I'm working on X.

B: I've heard Y about X, wh

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"Comment epistemic status" would work.

I think I can make this! Any tips for identifying the group?

0Leonhart
Apologies for no response; I vaguely assumed I would get a notification if anyone commented. I think we'll start in the Shakespeare's Head as it's a bit cloudy. There will be a sign up. Otherwise, climb the nerd gradient until you find us; we're usually in the back third past the bar.

Data point: I would love to come to something like this, but I'm out of town.

Stop reading this.

Did you stop? So I don't think the difficulty is avoiding compliance with commands in general. Rather, it's switching between the mental modes of "complying" and "not complying" under time pressure.

2[anonymous]
The very fact that there is a "compliance mode" rather than individual acts of hearing each command and deciding whether or not to obey each command one at a time I think demonstrates that all is not in accordance with our folk model of voluntary action, according to which each action is willed. Rather, the mental path from thought to action is only imperfectly under voluntary control. By the way the book The Illusion of Conscious Will deeply explores the limitations of voluntary control, which as Wegner demonstrates is in some sense a fiction.

I'm also going, and would also like to meet other LW-ers. Let's wander towards Grendel's Den around 6.

If a couple people reply to this, I'll come up with more explicit logistics, but I can't plan at 1am.

0thomblake
Sounds good. Adding to the post.

Hi.

I've posted comments twice, I think, but my read/write ratio is high enough that I think I still count here.

Thanks for writing this article. If the feedback helps, I found your self-disclosure much more illustrative than "gooey."

I made a point of noting non-sadness deficiencies in my status

Did you formally track your mental state at any point? The luminosity series, among other things, has gotten me thinking about the fact that my overall historical impression of my mood status has been a pretty poor indicator of my day-to-moment mood status. I can get fuzzy snapshots by reading through my scattered past writing, but am missing a lot of data. S... (read more)

2[anonymous]
I have tried the data-hog approach in the past (about a year ago I stopped, after 5 months keeping daily logs of a few basic things), and a) it did nothing to help me (back then my error was to not know what to actually do with the data; well, I had one idea, but it came out negative) b) I collected data once per day; for me this was already quite a burden c) I thought to write a tool for this, but for what I was interested in, any spreadsheet app was sufficient Now my experience is, if you know what you want to change, the "attentiveness" approach (I hope I got the correct word from the dict, without some stupid connotation) is much more successful. Also, for longer-term mood-cycles, referring to my own notes of the corresponding time seems as good as I can make use of it now. I never got back looking at any numbers or graphs from the detailed-log. At your edit: AFAIK this re-calculation of past experiences is well studied, though I do not know for which experience-domains this has been researched. If I do remember correctly, there was a Kahneman TED presentation linked here a few weeks ago, giving a side-note on this, and funny and short enough to fill a coffee break. Maybe from there you can find further references.

An excellent parable! The argument against the Nazism meme is quite well laid out, though Colonel Frank comes off a bit like a straw man.

Unfortunately, I think this argument misses the main difficulty the General faces. It's easy to see that it would be better to replace the movement with something more sound. But policy makers cannot simply decide whether to preserve the Nazism meme. Actually changing dominant cultural ideas is a tremendously difficult problem, especially when the belief framework includes a sense of persecution. You cannot simply ... (read more)

6MBlume
Agreed. All discussions where? Who are 'we'? What did Yvain know, precisely? This last remark could be somewhat clearer...