Meta: I find the tone of your LW posts and comments to be really good in some way and I want to give positive feedback and try to articulate what I like about the vibe.

I’d describe it as something like: independent thinking/somewhat original takes expressed in a chill, friendly manner, without deliberate contrarianism, and scout mindset but not in a performative way. Also no dunking on stuff. But still pushing back on arguments you disagree with.

To my tastes this is basically optimal. Hope this comment doesn’t make you overthink it in the future. And maybe this can provide some value to others who are thinking about what style to aim for/promote.

Edit: maybe a short name for it is being intellectually disagreeable while being socially agreeable? Idk that’s probably an oversimplification.

seems to me to be a crux between "man, we're probably all going to die" and "we're really really fucked"

Sorry, what's the difference between these two positions? Is the second one meant to be a more extreme version of the first?

What’s the difference between “Alice is falling victim to confusions/reasoning mistakes about X” and “Alice disagrees with me about X”?

I feel like using the former puts undue social pressure on observers to conclude that you’re right, and makes it less likely they correctly adjudicate between the perspectives.

(Perhaps you can empathise with me here, since arguably certain people taking this sort of tone is one of the reasons AI x-risk arguments have not always been vetted as carefully as they should!)

I learned maths mostly by teachers at school writing on a whiteboard, university lecturers writing on a blackboard or projector, and to a lesser extent friends writing on pieces of paper.

There was a tiny supplement of textbook-reading at school and large supplement of printed-notes-reading at university.

I would guess only a tiny fraction learn exclusively via typed materials. If you have any kind of teacher, how could you? Nobody shows you how to rearrange an equation by live-typing latex.

In Texas Hold ‘Em, the most popular form of poker, there is no drawing or discarding, just betting and folding.

This seems like strong evidence that those parts are where the skill lies — somebody came up with a version that removed the other parts, and everyone switched to it.

Not sure how that affects the metaphor. For me I think it weakened the punch, since I had to stop and remember that there exist forms of poker with drawing and discarding.

Right, I understand it now, thanks. I missed the labels on the x axis.

I found your bar chart more confusing than illuminating. Does it make sense to mark the bottom 20% of people, and those people’s 43% probability of staying in the bottom 20%, as two different fractions of the same bar? The 43% is 43% of the 20%, not of the original 100%.

If many more people are extremely happy all the time than extremely depressed all the time, the bunch of people you describe would be managing their beliefs rationally. And indeed I think that’s probably the case.

Can anybody confirm whether Paul is likely systematically silenced re OpenAI?

I’m an adult from the UK and learnt the word faucet like last year