LESSWRONG
LW

All of Ace Delgado's Comments + Replies

Write the Worst Post on LessWrong!
Ace Delgado50

You, sir, are a true inspiration! I cannot yet claim to have a post with as much negative karma as this one, but it is the sum of my hopes and dreams that one day I might surpass it!

And indeed, if I may be so bold, I think there is much I might be able to improve upon here! "I am hopping on a mountain, falling down because I am so juicy" is clearly much too poetic, meaningful, and remarkable to be a part of truly the worst possible LessWrong post!

Maybe a post full of Lorem Ipsum could work , or perhaps a full reposting of A Pickle For the Knowing Ones. Bot... (read more)

Reply
1Johannes C. Mayer
The goal of writing the worst LessWrong post is to set the standard by which you will measure yourself in the future. You want to use it as a tool to stop handicapping your own thought processes by constantly questioning yourself: "Is this really good enough?", "Should I write about this?", "Would anyone care?" Asking these questions is not necessarily a problem, in fact, they are probably good questions to consider. But in my experience, there is a self-deprecating way that you can ask these questions, which will just be demotivating, which I think is better to avoid. The point of this post is to argue that you should lower your standards and just push out some posts when you start out writing. Nothing makes you better at writing than writing a lot. Don't worry about the quality of your posts too much in the beginning. Putting out many posts is more important. And there is some merit in them being bad because once you start to measure yourself against your past self, it will be easy to see how you improved and count that as a success.
Notes on writing
Ace Delgado20

That's a good summary of the main thrust of my comment. I am very glad to have had an influence on your position here!

On these steps being vague and perhaps arbitrary, I think this primarily arises from the difficulties we experience in observing the functions of our own mind. Using examples, though, I think we can discover some aspects of these steps in our thought-formation (sorry if this is getting a little far from the initial topic of writing advice!).

If I see a mug precariously perched on the edge of a table, and that table then shakes, causing the m... (read more)

Reply
Notes on writing
Ace Delgado81

Interesting points. I think the specific advice here is particularly useful for eliminating mistake in expression. That is, to ensure that your reader is receiving from the page the impression you are intending him to, and that you are actually communicating what you think you are. I suppose that is quite precisely what you intend to assist with when noting that this advice is aimed at fulfilling your posited 2nd objective in writing well.

However, I can't help but feel there is a bit of a leap occuring within this article, between the intro and the provisi... (read more)

Reply
RP127

My main takeaway from your comment is that not all thoughts are of an expressible form, and that there’s a pre-writing step where inexpressible thoughts sometimes become expressible ones.

Before your comment, I would’ve considered the step you discuss part of step (1) of the intro (‘have a thought’). But, I think you make a good point about the end of idea formation being separable from the end of clarifying that idea into a potentially communicable thing—and about both being separable from the act of actually communicating the thing (e.g. writing). 

Ob... (read more)

Reply
The Fable of the AI Coomer: Why the Social Prowess of Machines is AI's Most Proximal Threat
Ace Delgado50

I think you may have missed my point here. I was not principally talking about the threat posed by AI to existing industries and commercial ventures such as the production of pornographic literature. My point was to highlight that AI could bring on voluntary social atomization as in, for example, "WALL-E". The protagonist of the story becomes frustrated by and uninterested in his friends because he cannot order them around on a whim like he can chatGPT, nor can they converse on any topic of his choosing. 

Once given a taste of something sweeter and ric... (read more)

Reply
5Marco P
I agree entirely that the formation of you’re here-stated idea in the post was lackluster. But it remains, to an extent, an idea of some interest—particularly to the general public. On that note: I highly recommend you read Ishiguro’s Klara and the Sun.
2the gears to ascension
Hmm. Fair point, yeah. AI will need to give good lessons to humans. I think we'll find we want to interact with each other even if AI can be satisfying, though. And AI that can help with that will be of particular interest. You're right that some will get addicted to ai even in a world without any catastrophically unsafe agents. But what about humans interacting with ai together at the same time... hmmm. I still don't personally like the writing; I changed my strong downvote to a normal downvote, though.