All of Pontor's Comments + Replies

Her podcast is really good IMHO. She does a singularly good job of challenging guests in a friendly manner, dutifully tracking nuance, steelmanning, etc. It just picked back up after about a yearlong hiatus (presumably due to her book writing).

Unfortunately, I see the lack of notoriety for her podcast to be some evidence against the prospects of the "skilled & likeable performer" strategy. I assume that potential subscribers are more interested in lower-quality podcasts and YouTubers that indulge in bias rather than confronting it. Dunno what to do about that, but I'm glad she's back to podcasting.

Dude this was pretty good, please consider posting more fictions.

Well in practical terms, libraries produce much less reward for creators than movie theaters do. In a movie theater, you pay for one movie and that is the movie you are allowed to watch. The money you pay for a ticket is in part the reason that people dedicate time and effort into creating the movie. What I hope for is an incentive mechanism that causes more good books to be written.

Are you writing your own fiction too? If so, I commend and encourage you. If not, what do you get in exchange for quitting fiction reading?

This is why rationalists so often get accused of reinventing the wheel

I've heard that criticism too, but it's hard for me to come up with specific examples that I agree with. Do any of these count as reinvented wheels?

EDIT: On second thought, whether or not rationalists already do reinvent the wheel, I strongly claim that they should reinvent wheels at least sometimes. Seems like really good practice for inventing novel things.

I did a text-search and found your #56. Good to see some culture in here!

Alright, I think it'll make me a more responsible intellectual citizen if I try to distinguish these items a bit based on how I expect to view them in a decade or two. Let's do it.

Well overall, I expect that my current attentional foci are substantially influenced by current news, political narratives, and intellectual fads. I look back at what things I was saying and paying attention to in 2010, and I see few major differences and hard reversals, but I do see a lot of noteworthy omissions, changes of emphasis, and different compressions.

I think (34) will ... (read more)

For one, maybe the responses to various terrorist attacks might have been different? Any time a terrorist attack happens, I first wonder what the immediate damage was, measured in lives and money. Then I try to see how that stacks up against whatever benchmarks I can think of. If I really want to spend the attention, I might google for more info to help put it into perspective. (I basically endorse these habits--when it comes to sensational news events, perspective is precious and difficult to find.) I dunno, terrorism might be special. Unlike auto fatalit... (read more)

Awesome lists! Those were both funny and inspiring.

I decided to mix the three prompts together. Here's my babble:
 

• Entice your directionless, mobile, remotely-employed, twenty-something friends to move to your area. Practice radical honesty with regard to what it’s like to live there.
• Find out how much of your regular diet you can replace with rice and beans before your quality of life drops too much. It might be a lot, and food is expensive.
• Have a friend visit you for a week, and goad them into expressing opinions about your town/city. See with fresh e

It seems like everyone can agree that Twitter is an awful platform and it makes people awful. I have a couple hazy ideas for solutions (maybe just bandaid solutions, but seemingly better than nothing):
I imagine an alternate world wherein one blue check can cast umbrage on another blue check by saying something like, "He's just logically rude. I will no longer argue with him without explicitly asking him to stick his neck out from the start" or "She's a cryptonormativist--notice that she hasn't spelled out her personal frame anywhere. Really, go look for it... (read more)

Giving a kid a chemistry set and helping them build a trebuchet is cool, but what if you saved up some money and gave them a ride on a zero-g plane too? https://www.gozerog.com/the-zero-g-experience/

Thanks, good questions. I had originally written "every responsible intellectual citizen" but that didn't feel quite right. I didn't want so much to morally condemn people who haven't read what I find important, but to highlight the fact that news of general intellectual progress does not seem to move as fast as news of progress in science. So I could forgive someone for not knowing about Fun Theory calculations nowadays, even if they were a circumspect philosopher in the 1980s--they've let themselves fall out of touch, but news travels slowly and communic... (read more)

Dunno if this trick will help anyone but me, but here it is anyway: go looking for Really Important news from a few years ago. The more sensational the headlines, the more portentous the tones, the better.

When I tried this, I got a mixture of boredom and disgust. This didn't replace the craving, but it did sort of overwhelm the craving and compelled me to put my attention anywhere else. I think I ended up going for a walk or something.

However, the only sustainable strategy I know of is to put together all the standard habit/addiction things in place. Find ... (read more)

I just encountered the term "semi-intentional" in a post on Everything Studies.

I think it's a decent candidate for filling the apparent lexical gap written about on SSC in Against Lie Inflation and by Zack M. Davis in Algorithmic Intent.
 

Excellent post. I especially like how you stuck to a mostly neutral perspective throughout; it felt like you were aiming to inform rather than persuade. Most or all of the main points you covered are things that have been on my mind lately, but always in a piecemeal and disorganized way, so I'm really glad you made this overview. This is the kind of thing that makes me excited to share LW with others.

I think you're kind of missing the point of the question. Even if I avoid media, other people don't, so I get exposed to some of these topics anyway. Even if they're 95% noise, I think it might be worth asking the right people which 95% it is.

All of the topics you raised are distractions from living. That is your answer.

I'm curious if the most epistemically conscientious agree with you, and if so, whether they've made the case in explicit detail. Would you happen to be a superforecaster?
 

You don't even have to ask anyone else about that, just objectiv