All of Adam Zerner's Comments + Replies
Many years after having read it, I'm finding that the "Perils of Interacting With Acquaintances" section in The Great Perils of Social Interaction has really stuck with me. It is probably one of the more useful pieces of practical advice I've come across in my life. I think it's illustrated really well in this barber story:
...But that assumes that you can only be normal around someone you know well, which is not true. I started using a new barber last year, and I was pleasantly surprised when instead of making small talk or asking me questions about my l
I get the sense that autism is particularly unclear, but I haven't looked closely enough at other conditions to be confident in that.
Something I've always wondered about is what I'll call sub-threshold successes. Some examples:
- A stand up comedian is performing. Their jokes are funny enough to make you smile, but not funny enough to pass the threshold of getting you to laugh. The result is that the comedian bombs.
- Posts or comments on an internet forum are appreciated but not appreciated enough to get people to upvote.
- A restaurant or product is good, but not good enough to motivate people to leave ratings or write reviews.
It feels to me like there is an inefficiency occurring in these sor...
In A Sketch of Good Communication -- or really, in the Share Models, Not Beliefs sequence, which A Sketch of Good Communication is part of -- the author proposes that, hm, I'm not sure exactly how to phrase it.
I think the author (Ben Pace) is proposing that in some contexts, it is good to spend a lot of effort building up and improving your models of things. And that in those contexts, if you just adopt the belief of others without improving your model, well, that won't be good.
I think the big thing here is research. In the context of research, Ben propose...
Hm. On the one hand, I agree that there are distinct things at play here and share the instinct that it'd be appropriate to have different words for these different things. But on the other hand, I'm not sure if the different words should fall under the umbrella of solitude, like "romantic solitude" and "seeing human faces solitude".
I dunno, maybe it should. After all, it seems that in different conceptualizations of solitude, it's about being isolated from something (others' minds, others' physical presence).
Ultimately, I'm trusting Newport here. I think ...
That makes sense. I didn't mean to imply that such an extreme degree of isolation is a net positive. I don't think it is.
That makes sense. Although I think the larger point I was making still stands: that in reading the book you're primarily consuming someone else's thoughts, just like you would be if the author sat there on the bench lecturing you (it'd be different if it were more of a two-way conversation; I should have clarified that in the post).
I suppose "primarily" isn't true for all readers, for all books. Perhaps some readers go slowly enough where they actually spend more of their time contemplating than they do reading, but I get the sense that that is pretty rare.
Cool! I have a feeling you'd like a lot of Cal Newport's work like Digital Minimalism and Deep Work.
When I'm walking around or riding the train, I want to be able to hear what's going on around me.
That makes sense about walking around, but why do you want to hear what's going on around you when you're riding the train?
Yeah, that all makes sense. I think solitude probably exists along a spectrum, where in listening to music maybe you have 8/10 solitude instead of 10/10 but in watching a TV show you only get 2/10. The relevant question is probably "to what extent are the outputs of other minds influencing your thoughts".
Actually, now that I think about it, I wonder why we're focusing on the outputs of other minds. What about other things that influence your thoughts? Like, I don't know, bumble bees flying around you? I'm afraid of bumble bees so I know I'd have trouble fo...
Hm. I was actually assuming in this post that the podcasts in question were actually "Effective Information" as opposed to "Trivia" or "Mental Masturbation". The issue is that even if they are "Effective Information", you also need to have solitude in your "diet", and the benefit of additional "Effective Information" probably isn't worth the cost of less solitude.
But I'm also realizing now that much of the time podcasts aren't actually "Effective Information" and are instead something like "Trivia" or "Mental Masturbation". And I see that as a separate but...
The claim is that it's helpful, not that it's necessary. I certainly agree that good ideas can come from low-solitude things like conversations.
But I think solitude also has lingering benefits. Like, maybe experiencing some solitude puts you in position to have productive conversations. On the other hand, maybe if you spend weeks in solitude-debt you'll be in a poor position to have productive conversations. Something like that.
I would buy various forms of merch, including clothing. I feel very fond of LessWrong and would find it cool to wear a shirt or something with that brand.
No. DOGE didn't cross my mind. It was most directly inspired by the experience of realizing that I can factor in the journey as well as the destination with my startup.
I think it can generate negative externalities at times. However, I think that in terms of expected value it's usually positive.
In public policy, experimenting is valuable. In particular, it provides a positive externality.
Let's say that a city tests out a somewhat quirky idea like paying NIMBYs to shut up about new housing. If that policy works well, other cities benefit because now they can use and benefit from that approach.
So then, shouldn't there be some sort of subsidy for cities that test out new policy ideas? Isn't it generally a good thing to subsidize things that provide positive externalities?
I'm sure there is a lot to consider. I'm not enough of a public policy person t...
Pet peeve: when places close before their stated close time. For example, I was just at the library. Their signs say that they close at 6pm. However, they kick people out at 5:45pm. This caught me off guard and caused me to break my focus at a bad time.
The reason that places do this, I assume, is because employees need to leave when their shift ends. In this case with the library, it probably takes 15 minutes or so to get everyone to leave, so they spend the last 15 minutes of their shift shoeing people out. But why not make the official closing time is 5:...
I wonder how much of that is actually based on science, and how much is just superstition / scams.
In basketball there isn't any certification. Coaches/trainers usually are former players themselves who have had some amount of success, so that points towards them being competent to some extent. There's also the fact that if you don't feel like you're making progress with a coach you can fire them and hire a new one. But I think there is also a reasonably sized risk of the coach lacking competence and certain players sticking with them anyway, for a variety ...
I was just watching this Andrew Huberman video titled "Train to Gain Energy & Avoid Brain Fog". The interviewee was talking about track athletes and stuff their coaches would have them do.
It made me think back to Anders Ericsson's book Peak: Secrets from the New Science of Expertise. The book is popular for discussing the importance of deliberate practice, but another big takeaway from the book is the importance of receiving coaching. I think that takeaway gets overlooked. Top performers in fields like chess, music and athletics almost universally rece...
Wow, I just watched this video where Feynman makes an incredible analogy between the rules of chess and the rules of our physical world.
You watch the pieces move and try to figure out the underlying rules. Maybe you come up with a rule about bishops needing to stay on the same color, and that rule lasts a while. But then you realize that there is a deeper rule that explains the rule you've held to be true: bishops can only move diagonally.
I'm butchering the analogy though and am going to stop talking now. Just go watch the video. It's poetic.
One thing to keep in mind is that, from what I understand, ovens are very imprecise so you gotta exercise some judgement when using them. For example, even if you set your oven to 400°F, it might only reach 325°F. Especially if you open the oven to check on the food (that lets out a lot of heat).
I've also heard that when baking on sheet pans, you can get very different results based on how well seasoned your sheet pan is. That shouldn't affect this dish though since the intent is for the top to be the crispy part and that happens via convection rather than conduction. But maybe how high or low you place the baking dish in your oven will affect the crispiness.
As another variation, I wonder how it'd come out if you used a sheet pan instead of a baking dish. I'd think that you'd get more crispy bits because of the increase in surface area of potato that is exposed to heat. Personally I'm a big fan of those crispy bits!
You'd probably need to use multiple sheet pans, but that doesn't seem like much of an inconvenience. You can also vary the crispiness by varying the amount of exposed surface area. Like, even if you use a sheet pan you can still kinda stack the potatoes on top of one another in order to reduce the exposed surface area.
I have not seen that post. Thank you for pointing me to it! I'm not sure when I'll get to it but I added it to my todo list to read and potentially discuss further here.
Scott's take on the relative futility of resolving high-level generators of disagreement (which seems to be beyond Level 7? Not sure) within reasonable timeframes is kind of depressing.
Very interesting! This is actually the topic that I really wanted to get to. I haven't been able to figure out a good way to get a conversation or blog post started on that topic though, and my attempts to do so lead me to writing this (tangential) post.
I could see that happening, but in general, no, I wouldn't expect podcast hosts to already be aware of a substantial subset of arguments from the other side.
My impression is that podcasters do some prep but in general aren't spending many days let alone multiple weeks or months of prep. When you interview a wide variety of people and discuss a wide variety of topics, as many podcasters including the ones I mentioned do, I think that means that hosts will generally not be aware of a substantial subset of arguments from the other side.
For the sake of argument, I'll accept your points about memes, genes, and technology being domains where growth is usually exponential. But even if those points are true, I think we still need an argument that growth is almost always exponential across all/most domains.
The central claim that "almost all growth is exponential growth" is an interesting one. However, I am not really seeing that this post makes an argument for it. It feels more like it is just stating it as a claim.
I would expect an argument to be something like "here is some deep principle that says that growth is almost always in proportion to the thing's current size". And then to give a bunch of examples of this being the case in various domains. (I found the examples in the opening paragraph to be odd. Bike 200 miles a week or never? Huh?) I also think it'd be helpful to point out counterexamples and spend some time commenting on them.
[This contains spoilers for the show The Sopranos.]
In the realm of epistemics, it is a sin to double-count evidence. From One Argument Against An Army:
...I talked about a style of reasoning in which not a single contrary argument is allowed, with the result that every non-supporting observation has to be argued away. Here I suggest that when people encounter a contrary argument, they prevent themselves from downshifting their confidence by rehearsing already-known support.
Suppose the country of Freedonia is debating whether its neighbor, Sylvania, is responsi
I spent the day browsing the website of Josh W. Comeau yesterday. He writes educational content about web development. I am in awe.
For so many reasons. The quality of the writing. The clarity of the thinking. The mastery of the subject matter. The metaphors. The analogies. The quality and attention to detail of the website itself. Try zooming in to 300%. It still look gorgeous.
One thing that he's got me thinking about is the place that sound effects and animation have on a website. Previously my opinion was that you should usually just leave 'em out. Focus...
1I just came across That's Not an Abstraction, That's Just a Layer of Indirection on Hacker News today. It makes a very similar point that I make in this post, but adds a very helpful term: indirection. When you have to "open the box", the box serves as an indirection.
When I was a student at Fullstack Academy, a coding bootcamp, they had us all do this (mapping it to the control key), along with a few other changes to such settings like making the key repeat rate faster. I think I got this script from them.
My instinct is that it's not the type of thing to hack at with workarounds without buy in from the LW team.
If there was buy in from them I expect that it wouldn't be much effort to add some sort of functionality. At least not for a version one; iterating on it could definitely take time, but you could hold off on spending that time iterating if there isn't enough interest, so the initial investment wouldn't be high effort.
I think this is a great idea, at least in the distillation aspect.
Thanks!
Having briefer statements of the most important posts would be very useful in growing the rationalist community.
I think you're right, but I think it's also important to think about dilution. Making things lower-effort and more appealing to the masses brings down the walls of the garden, which "dilutes" things inside the garden.
But I'm just saying that this is a consideration. And there are lots of considerations. I feel confused about how to enumerate through them, weigh them, and fig...
Sometimes when I'm reading old blog posts on LessWrong, like old Sequence posts, I have something that I want to write up as a comment, and I'm never sure where to write that comment.
I could write it on the original post, but if I do that it's unlikely to be seen and to generate conversation. Alternatively, I could write it on my Shortform or on the Open Thread. That would get a reasonable amount of visibility, but... I dunno... something feels defect-y and uncooperative about that for some reason.
I guess what's driving that feeling is probably the thought...
1I would like to see people write high-effort summaries, analyses and distillations of the posts in The Sequences.
When Eliezer wrote the original posts, he was writing one blog post a day for two years. Surely you could do a better job presenting the content that he produced in one day if you, say, took four months applying principles of pedagogy and iterating on it as a side project. I get the sense that more is possible.
This seems like a particularly good project for people who want to write but don't know what to write about. I've talked with a variety o...
I recently started going through some of Rationality from AI to Zombies again. A big reason why is the fact that there are audio recordings of the posts. It's easy to listen to a post or two as I walk my dog, or a handful of posts instead of some random hour-long podcast that I would otherwise listen to.
I originally read (most of) The Sequences maybe 13 or 14 years ago when I was in college. At various times since then I've made somewhat deliberate efforts to revisit them. Other times I've re-read random posts as opposed to larger collections of posts. Any...
I assume you mean wearing a helmet while being in a car to reduce the risk of car related injuries and deaths. I actually looked into this and from what I remember, helmets do more harm than good. They have the benefit of protecting you from hitting your head against something but the issue with accidents comes much moreso from the whiplash, and by adding more weight to (the top of) your head, helmets have the cost of making whiplash worse, and this cost outweighs the benefits by a fair amount.
1Yes! I've always been a huge believer in this idea that the ease of eating a food is important and underrated. Very underrated.
I'm reminded of this clip of Anthony Bourdain talking about burgers and how people often put slices of bacon on a burger, but that in doing so it makes the burger difficult to eat. Presumably because when you go to take a bite you the whole slice of bacon often ends up sliding off the burger.
...Am I making this more enjoyable by adding bacon? Maybe. How should that bacon be introduced into the question? It's an engineer and structural
I've noticed that there's a pretty big difference in the discussion that follows from me showing someone a draft of a post and asking for comments and the discussion in the comments section after I publish a post. The former is richer and more enjoyable whereas the latter doesn't usually result in much back and forth. And I get the sense that this is true for other authors as well.
I guess one important thing might be that with drafts, you're talking to people who you know. But I actually don't suspect that this plays much of a role, at least on LessWrong. ...
Thanks Marvin! I'm glad to hear that you enjoyed the post and that it was helpful.
Imho your post should be linked to all definitions of the sunk cost fallacy.
I actually think the issue was more akin to the planning fallacy. Like when I'd think to myself "another two months to build this feature and then things will be good", it wasn't so much that I was compelled because of the time I had sunk into the journey, it was more that I genuinely anticipated that the results would be better than they actually were.
It isn't active, sorry. See the update at the top of the post.
See also: https://www.painscience.com/articles/strength-training-frequency.php.
Summary:
...Strength training is not only more beneficial for general fitness than most people realize, it isn’t even necessary to spend hours at the gym every week to get those benefits. Almost any amount of it is much better than nothing. While more effort will produce better results, the returns diminish rapidly. Just one or two half hour sessions per week can get most of the results that you’d get from two to three times that much of an investment (and that’s a deliberately cons
Oh I see, that makes sense. In retrospect that is a little obvious that you don't have to choose one or the other :)
So does the choice of which type of fiber to take boil down to the question of the importance of constipation vs microbiome and cholesterol? It's seeming to me like if the former is more important you should take soluble non-fermentable fiber, if the latter is more important you should take soluble fermentable fiber (or eat it in a whole food), and that insoluble fiber is never/rarely the best option.
Funny. I have a Dropbox folder where I store video tours of all the apartments I've ever lived in. Like, I spend a minute or two walking around the apartment and taking a video with my phone.
I'm not sure why, exactly. Partly because it's fun to look back. Partly because I don't want to "lose" something that's been with me for so long.
I suspect that such video tours are more appropriate for a large majority of people. 10 hours and $200-$500 sounds like a lot. And you could always convert the video tour into digital art some time in the future if you find the nostalgia is really hitting you.
Hm. I hear ya. Good point. I'm not sure whether I agree or disagree.
I'm trying to think of an analogy and came up with the following. Imagine you go to McDonalds with some friends and someone comments that their burger would be better if they used prime ribeye for their ground beef.
I guess it's technically true, but something also feels off about it to me that I'm having trouble putting my finger on. Maybe it's that it feels like a moot point to discuss things that would make something better that are also impractical to implement.
I just looked up Gish gallops on Wikipedia. Here's the first paragraph:
The Gish gallop (/ˈɡɪʃ ˈɡæləp/) is a rhetorical technique in which a person in a debate attempts to overwhelm an opponent by abandoning formal debating principles, providing an excessive number of arguments with no regard for the accuracy or strength of those arguments and that are impossible to address adequately in the time allotted to the opponent. Gish galloping prioritizes the quantity of the galloper's arguments at the expense of their quality.
I disagree that focusing on the centr...
I actually disagree with this. I haven't thought too hard about it and might just not be seeing it, but on first thought I am not really seeing how such evidence would make the post "much stronger".
To elaborate, I like to use Paul Graham's Disagreement Hierarchy as a lens to look through for the question of how strong a post is. In particular, I like to focus pretty hard on the central point (DH6) rather than supporting and tangential points. I think the central point plays a very large role in determining how strong a post is.
Here, my interpretation of th...
What would it be like for people to not be poor?
I reply: You wouldn't see people working 60-hour weeks, at jobs where they have to smile and bear it when their bosses abuse them.
I appreciate the concrete, illustrative examples used in this discussion, but I also want to recognize that they are only the beginnings of a "real" answer to the question of what it would be like to not be poor.
In other words, in an attempt to describe what he sees as poverty, I think Eliezer has taken the strategy of pointing to a few points in Thingspace and saying "here a...
Note that I don't think this dynamic needs to be very conscious on anyone's part. I think that humans instinctively execute good game theory because evolution selected for it, even if the human executing just feels a wordless pull to that kind of behavior.
Yup, exactly. It makes me think back to The Moral Animal by Robert Wright. It's been a while since I read it so take what follows with a grain of salt, because I could be butchering some stuff, but that book makes the argument that this sort of thing goes beyond friendship and into all types of emotions a...
I've been doing Quantified Intuitions' Estimation Game every month. I really enjoy it. A big thing I've learned from it is the instinct to think in terms of orders of magnitude.
Well, not necessarily orders of magnitude, but something similar. For example, a friend just asked me about building a little web app calculator to provide better handicaps in golf scrambles. In the past I'd get a little overwhelmed thinking about how much time such a project would take and default to saying no. But this time I noticed myself approaching it differently.
Will it take ... (read more)