A friend once shared an essay with me for feedback. It struck me as mistaken and terribly naive, and I said so, which they did not take well. (They didn't say it, but a standard LessWrongian response here would have been "instead of insulting me, why don't you provide an...
Content note: this is written as part of a daily writing challenge for myself. I have a comrade in rationalist event organizing, who once explained his theory of apologies. He said if you hurt someone, it only makes sense to apologize if you should have known better. If, looking back,...
Last night I slept poorly, so today's post is some rationality quotes. I include quotes when I find they are relevant and interesting, and not always because I straightforwardly agree with them. I would be glad to read more quotes in the comments! "Women were expected to have weak opinions;...
Content note: this is written as part of a challenge to publish a daily essay. Once upon a time, people in quarrels could challenge one another to a duel, and the loser would die. This was certainly an escalation. Nowadays we have a society which has set that option down,...
Content note: this is part of a challenge of writing a blogpost per day for a week. Epistemic status: this is a series of vignettes written as-though diary entries. While substantially grounded in specific and real experiences, the writing ended up being more impressionistic and inaccurate in places; I was...
Content note: this is written as part of a daily publishing challenge. Warning: contains heavy spoilers for late HPMOR. Do not read if you have not completed HPMOR. The Hogwarts wards had said that the Defense Professor had killed her. This didn't make any sense. He'd seen the troll do...
Parkinson's Law states that work expands to fit the space allotted. The idea being, if you give someone a month to write a report, they'll take a month, but if you give them a week, they'll take a week, and then they'll have three weeks to do three other reports!...