All of meedstrom's Comments + Replies
Counterpoint: This sort of thing seems more efficient for my brain to take in, compared to if it were phrased in a more "friendly" way. At least if that'd mean a long-winded and less passionate phrasing that relies more on the reader's own motivation to pay attention.
It's true that this quote is more suitable for informal chat than the front page, but also, a community must be free to be caustic about some things it finds sufficiently basic, else it gets watered down. Sometimes a caustic tone serves a purpose for the current readers.
So there's a balancing...
I recognize myself. Thank you for putting that into words. Out of curiosity, do you have an ADHD diagnosis or consider getting one?
Thanks for the first link, it led me to demand avoidance, where caregivers/friends can make it easier with declarative language. I've been working on similar thoughts about "how to talk to someone with ADHD". E.g. I find it more comfortable to hear "let me know if you want support with that", rather than be asked "do you need support with that?". Somehow, no demand for response makes it easier to think and respond.
Zooming in on one of your examples,
Eating something tasty, or going to a party, or otherwise “indulging” yourself, every time you do something that contributes to your long-term aspiration.
AFAICT, this classic indulgence-as-a-reward can aim at one of two things:
- it can be something you only think to do after having completed a task, to build positive assocations for the future
- it can be something you think of to motivate yourself to start on a task to begin with
I believe that the first thing is generally good advice, but that a lot of people can't d...
2It is currently in a somewhat awkward hybrid state.
And you may see it that way for the rest of your life. Using CLI is like having a taste in coffee, there's always new frontiers. I'd advise embracing the "hybrid state" you've got at any given time as Your System, rather than always be enduring an awkward state of transition.
1
1Wow, blast from the past! |n|n|cfffcc00 is in many tooltip strings in Warcraft 3 (with the result of coloring the following text some light gold hue).
Lots of examples: https://www.hiveworkshop.com/threads/tooltip-tutorial.51966/ (archived)
Saw it so many times making custom maps, cffffcc is burned into my memory. I guess the first "c" stands for "color"; it's not part of the hex code.
I'm getting the sentiment "just sort the signal from the noise, same as always", and I disagree it's the same as always. Maybe if you already had some habits of epistemic hygiene such as default to null:
...The mental motion of “I didn’t really parse that paragraph, but sure, whatever, I’ll take the author’s word for it” is, in my introspective experience, absolutely identical to “I didn’t really parse that paragraph because it was bot-generated and didn’t make any sense so I couldn’t possibly have parsed it”, except that in the first case, I assume that
Basically agree, but not an useful comment.
I'd nuance that as that being alive and energetic is fun -- but when my body no longer grants energy, it's like death already. Say I'm trying to take notes about the content of this thread, but I'm so tired I barely produce anything. If the terms of my body are such that I must first do a timeskip to tomorrow to get more energy, then I want the timeskip.
I guess I understand becoming sleep-deprived and staying up anyway if you don't notice your IQ dropping...
I think some Rationalists believe everything is supposed to fit into one frame, but Frames != The Truth. [...] we should be able to pick up and drop frames as needed, at will.
Aye - see also In Praise of Fake Frameworks. It's helped me interface with a lot people that would've otherwise befuddled me. That gives me a more fleshed-out range of possible perspectives on things, which shortcuts to new knowledge.
But perhaps it's worth thinking twice when or at least how to introduce this skill, because it looks like a method of doing Salvage Epistemology and s...
Gonna reuse the term "fluency escape velocity"!
A major point of the workshop is to just grind on making cruxy-predictions for 4 days, and hopefully reach some kind of "fluency escape velocity", where it feels easy enough that you'll keep doing it.
Fits my experience with a lot of mental skills, because it often takes me many months or years after reading about a skill that I actually reach a point where I've stacked up enough experience with it that it becomes fluent / natural / a tool in my toolkit.
Disclaimer: I am not sure I've done what you think of as Looking, but all your metaphors make sense to me.
If I "get" the general thing, then would you agree that aside from Fake Frameworks, experience with Focusing must help? Especially for people who haven't yet meditated much or find the idea of a "non-verbal thought" elusive.
I'm thinking of Focusing as targeting something that can also happen in meditation, but could take some beginner meditators a long time until they get direct experience with. It's the way that your mind can suddenly produce a new a...
I can't really see where this line of inquiry is going, so I'm not the right person to comment, but the list seems to be missing at least one thing:
- Ask people to do you a favor
Oddly that makes people like you more, even though there is nothing obvious traded in return. I got that from either Dale Carnegie or Robert Cialdini.
Hmm. About 50% of my note pile can be browsed on https://edstrom.dev/. I have some notes on the method under https://edstrom.dev/zvjjm/slipbox-workflow.
How large did your note pile get before it felt overwhelming?
It's true that sometimes I see things I wrote that are clearly outdated or mistaken, but that's sort of fun because I see that I leveled up!
It's also embarrassing to have published mistakes online, so I've learned to make fewer unqualified claims and instead just document the path by which I arrived to my current conclusion. Such documentations ...
I can understand that, since you keep the handwritings as they are.
Just sharing my own process, but I like the notepad because it's ephemeral... I scribble what I learn, almost illegibly, and later type it up more nicely in my org-roam knowledge base, driven by sheer motivation to liberate myself from that stack of loose scribblings.
That way I get the upside of writing on paper (you learn better), but skip the downside that they're hard to look up.
There is much bikeshedding about eyestrain. I've seen convincing arguments, especially from older hackers, that a white background is actually less strainful for the eyes. I forgot what the arguments were---will write them down next time---but I don't think it's as simple as the amount of light hitting the eye. Currently I'd advise just trusting in personal experience.
And maybe experiment with increasing ambient light rather than reduce light from the screen.
One problem with the Kindle Scribe is that I couldn’t switch from the note-taking application to the book I was reading very quickly. It would take about 5 to 10 seconds in total to press all the menu buttons
Ah, yes! With the reMarkable (another e-reader), I have a trick: I installed an app switcher so I could merely use a gesture to switch between a writing app and reading app.
I quite appreciated having a single slate to read and write on, in environments like the bus and the beach. Anyway, the software was somewhat buggy... and then I lost my stylu...
Just a thought: I experience discomfort with only being able to sign up via a Google account. I can get over it personally, but we should observe I'm probably not the only one, so there are people out there for whom this is an insurmountable hump that stops them from getting started. I dunno how many in actuality, but there are definitely bubbles where it's normal not to have used a Google service for years.
Alas, I dunno what alternative sign-up would be quickest and easiest to implement.
I'm no historian, but I cannot fit your exiling/killing theory to any recent society I know of.
I know the most about Sweden, so I'll discuss that society. Thinking about Sweden made several things obvious:
- First, an alternative mechanism with similar effect as exiling/killing: simply making the next generation better, and watching the stats improve over time.
- It's not just a question of good norms or correct education, as if these could develop in any direction independent of the government and system in general. Sweden underwent a transformation over ma
Even when you build alone. Let's say you'll redo the tapestry in one room, with four nice regular walls, but in one corner there's an ornamental stone pillar. Then you can spend one day doing the four walls, and three days just getting the details right near the pillar.
Regularities save time. Each irregularity is a massive delay.
Although every building is "novel" even today, they're not "improvements on an existing building". It's a new site every time with a new blueprint. So your novelty point should apply, yet skyscrapers build slower now.
I do think the Burj Khalifa is also an outlier, and not representative of typical building speed, at least in the West.
Because I know, it’s something that can hold me back, thinking “ohhh it’s so obvious what I’m going to say, it would be pretentious to think I’m provinding any value by saying it”.
Katja Grace explains how she got over that: Typology of blog posts that don’t always add anything clear and insightful
When you study practical rhetoric, you learn to hold speeches without any written memory-aid. Instead, you use something like the method of loci to remember a sequence of concepts that you want to lay out to the audience, but you do not memorize any exact phrasings.
The first time you pull it off is almost magical, because the benefits are immense and obvious. You have full freedom to walk around, stand in front of the lectern or wherever you like, look everyone in the eyes and ascertain whether they're following along with you, and to change the speech on...
Nice, I note that Foam is open source and uses markdown, the same as https://logseq.com/!
I wonder if the markdown documents are compatible? I know Logseq's markdown documents are compatible with Obsidian, so some people use both. At least back in ~2021, several commenters (on another website I forgot) found Logseq nicer for quick idea-generation and Obsidian nicer for exploration.
I've often had the thought that controversial topics may just be unknowable: as soon as a topic becomes controversial, it's deleted from the public pool of reliable knowledge.
But yes, you could get around it by constructing a clear chain of inferences that's publicly debuggable. (Ideally a Bayesian network: just input your own priors and see what comes out.)
But that invites a new kind of adversary, because a treasure map to the truth also works in reverse: it's a treasure map to exactly what facts need to be faked, if you want to fool many smart people. I worry we'd end up back on square one.
I agree, although I sense there's some disagreement on the meaning of "learning by rote".
Learning by rote can be tactical move in a larger strategy. In introductory rhetoric, I wasn't retaining much from the lectures until I sat down to memorize the lists of tropes and figures of speech. After that, every time the lectures mentioned a trope or other, even just in passing, the whole lesson stuck better.
Rote memorization prepares an array of "hooks" for lessons to attach to.
Also Nate's Replacing Guilt sequence. I'm still reading it, but I predict it'll be the single most important sequence to me.
I think I was unfair. I concede it's possible to have legible argumentation that people won't understand in a short time, even if it's perfectly clarified in your head. But in my experiences interrogating my own beliefs, I think it's common that they are actually not clear (you just think they are) until you can explain them to someone else, so the term "illegible belief" may help some people properly debug themselves.
Regarding your question about math and the like... The point of having the concept of epistemic legibility is that we want to be able to "...
Paraphrasing from How to Take Smart Notes by Sönke Ahrens: we easily get away with unfounded claims when we speak orally. We can distract from argumentative gaps with a "you know what I mean", even if on introspection we would find that we don't know what we mean. Writing permanent notes will make these gaps obvious.
Thank you for writing this out. Don't lose heart if the response isn't what you'd hoped--some future post could even be curated into the featured section. Why I say that? The bits about ineffective self-talk:
...He notices that he made a mistake by not trusting his gut instinct earlier enough, and then decides once again that he made another mistake. This is not, actually, the only reaction one could have. One could instead react in the following way: “Oops, I guess I didn’t make a mistake after all.” These two different reactions calibrate the mind in tw
It happens, but you can't exchange complex ideas this way. You know when someone's talking and you nod or say "Yeah" to show you get it without interrupting? There's a number of other short phrases you could say if you wanted, like "I know" or "Impossible" or "Dunno", and that's mostly what we deafies in Sweden do IME. It's rare that hearing people do this, breaks a norm I guess, but it's in principle you could do it. With sign you can also say a bit more complicated things without breaking flow like "That's a misunderstanding" or "You're lying" or so...
As a deaf person, I'm always teaching people to sign, like when I move into a new house, and I do see a difference between learners. Some people don't know what to do with their hands and end up "tangling their elbows together", as you so vividly describe, while others have a talent as if they'd been waiting to sign all their lives. But this gap mostly closes after 3-5 months of living together. Even people who were pretty bad at the beginning end up being able to interpret a group conversation for me.
Not to diminish the difficulty -- to do anything like...
I might have legible argumentation, but I don’t expect it to be understandable without a bunch careful explanation and backtracking to prerequisites
That fits great with my definition of illegibility. This case sounds like you've clarified it enough to make it legible to yourself but not yet enough to cross inferential gaps, thus it remains illegible to other people.
Not knocking your idea, but usually when you want to complain that "no one has upvoted me" it's good to think again whether you really want to blame other people.
I can guess at a reason why people may not have read that post you linked. I found it long-winded, like a page out of your diary where you're still developing the idea, thinking aloud by writing -- which is excellent to do, but it doesn't seem like something you wrote from the start for other people to read, so it's hard to follow. At least, I'm still puzzled about what you wanted to put forward in it.
I’m a pretty slow reader and I really get frustrated and distracted with not-correctly written text, so I see the subsequent editing of the text as something really threatening and time-consuming for me.
I've become a fast reader in recent years, but like you, I also get disturbed by incorrectly written text.
To me it sounds like you will get used to these issues in time. You know it's (1) your own words, (2) dictated by an imperfect program, and (3) mostly meant to be deleted. 1 would help me read faster, and 2 and 3 would help me tolerate the "writing...
It was a perfect analogy for me. One carves up new concepts the same way one always does. A decoupler will carve up a concept differently from a contextualizer. Similar analogy: If someone's knowledge can be seen as a massive mind-map, a feminist will structure a hierarchy in that mind-map quite differently from a Mormon, even if the leaf nodes are the same in the end. When you have a hierarchy in place, more knowledge added will tend to follow that hierarchy and thus subtly influence understanding.
But I've had experiences with people who interpret things ...
... I'm getting the takeaway that you can influence policy by just emailing good papers to your local policymaker.