Hi Eneasz, I'm not sure what controls the front page map. My guess would have been that posting the meetup to the regular meetup system would be enough, perhaps there's a delay.
Please include the location of the meetup in the meetup titles, which lets people more readily determine if the meeting is relevant to them. Thanks!
Thanks for the heads up!
Please include the meetup location (Utrecht) in the meetup names, ideally at the beginning. Otherwise people have to click through in order to determine if the meetup is relevant to them. Thanks!
The most up-to-date times will be on the meetup posts themselves (sometimes the times are changed after these summaries are posted).
Which meeting is this?
The best way to announce it is to click the "Add new meetup" button, right under "Create new article". Every Friday morning (around 9 AM PST) I scan the list of upcoming meetups and add them to the weekly summary.
Great to hear, and thanks for the heads up! I've moved London to the list of regular meetups.
I haven't tried a virtual LW meetup, or heard of one, but it seems worth trying if it fits your situation.
Can you provide a clarification on the date? Is this supposed to be Dec 4th 2012?
Glad to help get awareness back out, that's what these posts are for. How does it sound to schedule a meetup and post it? I'll put it in the list, and I put meetups for the following week into the headline.
Hey Emile, thanks for keeping an eye on this. In this case it's expected though. These summaries are originally posted to LW main. When I post the new one, I move the old one to discussion, adding a note at the top about the original post date.
For some reason the Austin meetups keep getting posted as occurring in 2018. Have any ideas why?
Shannon really is a long-time and hugely contributive rationalist, hosting a ton of meetups in a great space and making a lot of other contributions as well. Thumbs up.
Yeah, there was a salt shortage, it was pretty tragic.
Though I am surprised as to the move (my model had been that by providing summary cuts, the posts would be easy to skip for the uninterested, and sufficiently unobtrussive), this is a fine move which I don't oppose.
For whatever credibility this statement has now, I had actually changed my mind just yesterday on my posting plans - while previous posts were met with reasonable writing critiques, and this last post was remarked as a vast improvement and received no such critiques, it too was little-voted. Future posts therefore also seemed likely to be little-voted, whereas previously I thought I may be able to change that.
While being a bit anti-thetical to the point of the post, I recall a Slytherin motto that we become ourselves by following our desires wherever they lead us. In my own history, it was my desires to become super focused and productive that lead me to a lot of stuff I really value now. Was kind of a goal that defeated itself, in that to best achieve it I gave up the goal, but even so.
But a datum you might find useful is that most of these were some of my favorite media for years, I absorbed myself in them, and they mostly made me ignore everything except fo...
Unfortunately I'm guessing that you already put in some really solid thinking on this, and that there's not anything easy I can offer to either suggest a desirable thing you've overlooked or to provide more evidence for achievability. I put together the supplementary post but I'm guessing (if you're asking this question) that you read it and it didn't help much, and that you have good reason to expect that LOTR won't help (and that for a variety of reasons it might well not).
But a few ideas that seem fairly easy for us to see the appeal in, and that we can...
Well, it has 1 downvote. In answering, I went too straight for giving a functional description of what I do, rather than 1) sufficiently pointing out how it's done (e.g. going out of my way to tell someone when it's neither helpful nor wanted is not decreasing stigma, though that's the more natural map thing to map my answer to) and 2) writing my answer such that the answer itself helped to reduce stigma, make people comfortable, etc.
...but thank you for answering in a manner consistent with your theory.
You're welcome! However, I didn't select these strategies so that I could write consistent comments on LW, I selected them because I really like their results.
By the power of Greyskull! I noticed this tastefully funny comment and go to the context to find no less than 6 comments analyzing my hyphenation of ice creams!
Indeed it's mostly random. I didn't even notice I was typing it differently - looks like my brain just wasn't sure how to write it, and gave me different answers at different times.
I think you are referring to ice-cream discussions.
Also, ice cream is trivial and not something I would probably ever bring up, unless we were specifically on the topic of "our ideas on the healthiness of ice-cream" (and then I'd only mention my ideas on the healthiness of ice-cream, not whether they should eat it). In the original comment I was answering in form of something that seemed important enough to be an issue.
(Upvoted)
That would not be a way to say it respectfully. Or desirably!
Probably the best way to think about what I mean by doing it respectfully is "would this make the person unhappy or uncomfortable?" If yes, that's not what I mean (this is a hard point for me to convey - I can say "respectfully" but it's hard to map to a case where the person isn't displeased, though that is what I'm talking about).
So what I would do (and was imagining). The person is comfortable with their weight. Ideally, they're happy, outgoing, achieving good th...
This is going to be controversial unless everybody somehow agrees that their wish is "wrong" by some standard.
Currently, even implying that someone is wrong makes a person look bad. For the person to be comfortable, it's very helpful to look after their reputations. This is part of why I wouldn't bring up the ice-cream thing in public. (The ice-cream isn't actually something I would care about - to my personal diet views, it's probably healthier than bread. But if you mapped it to a more serious analogous case.)
...I cannot think of any objectiv
Yeah, it's one of the trade-off cases. In general, I try to change the person's mind if I can, respectfully pointing out that my own belief is that that's going to harm them, but sure if they want more ice cream I'll support their decision. Broadly, I try to change people's minds and do what good I can for them, but avoid getting in the way of what they think they want now.
In the actual ice cream case, I'd likely just give them more ice cream while working to avoid any stigma attached to their weight or eating habits. If it were just us alone, and if I k...
Your weakness as a writer (IMHO) is verbosity and generality (the two are often related).
I've been thinking about this, and I think that is my biggest problem. It actually seems related to the way I talk as well - I often recall over-informing in person.
The most recent post is something of a different style, hopefully shorter and easier to read. I look forward to getting feedback.
- Supergoals and goals known, but unconscious affective death spirals or difficulties in actioning a far goal are interfering with the supergoals.
- Supergoals and goals known, goal is suboptimal.
- Supergoals not known consciously, subgoal known but suboptimal given knowledge of supergoals.
You bring up a really good point here. I would say that my unconscious thinking was making oversights and unexamined assumptions in the pursuit of goals. For example, thinking "Okay there's a bunch of stuff that I want, but if I just become super effective at reachi...
I have indeed been considering other routes. At the same time, there are some upvotes - a few people seem to be gaining something. If even one or two people can find ways to reach their goals significantly better, I would be happy with that. But even if the ideas bounce off LW completely, I still support some of the things LW does, and I don't want to get in the way of that. I'll see how it goes, but yes this is something I'm considering.
I appreciate your thinking here, but I'm worried that this is just going to turn into a thread where people list random songs they like. I mean, if "a cool love song" qualifies...
Great point, and a concern. At least for me, these songs are very particular. I have about 5000 songs in my collection, and about 300 made it into this list. Distinguishing this kind of song was something I found time-intensive, and there are many songs I enjoyed but that didn't actually make me motivated to go do things. My hope is that these particular songs are lik...
I am primarily referring to the unconscious drives underlying our actions, not our verbal goals. No matter what term I used to describe it, when I imagined myself doing very well in general relative to other people, spending every moment in focused and topical optimization, I was excited and driven to pursue the things I expected to make me like that. If I anticipated outcomes that did NOT involve me being that kind of person, there was far less unconscious drive to act.
Being hyper-competent was not a subgoal of programming or business, and if it were I w...
I really appreciate the very thoughtful nature of your continued feedback. Thanks!
I think I may attempt to include fewer examples in future posts; this post had 4, which is quite a lot.
It seems likely that my difficulty writing posts that don't feel long/uninteresting is something systemic; I think one of the more likely candidates is aiming to include more material than most people want/require-for-understanding. Whether I'm right or not, I feel I have a very good handle on which parts of the new mindset are important. I think the problem may be adding too much detail to each of the individual points in that presentation.
The point is that your personal thoughts and experiences leading up to the useful ideas actually detract from your presentation of the ideas.
Yes, I agree that can happen. But, per the the topic of this post, there are cases where personal thoughts and experiences are very relevant, namely when the topic under discussion is personal thought and experience. If one is attempting to get inside the head of another, information about the content of that head is quite topical. We would lose something if were to model every form of human expression off of the appeals courts.
This was actually posted on the 27th of April. I believe the date at the top indicates the last time the post was changed (when I moved it to discussion).
Interesting, I hadn't remembered him saying that.
One of the most helpful tools I can think of for the upcoming strategy is to put one's self into other people's minds and experiences, and the posts on that strategy are partly built for doing that. I wanted to explain to people why that extra material is there (and that it's not just a case of needless and unreflected-upon over-elaboration), and also to give an idea of how that material might best be used.
...The material you linked me to had four paragraphs of talking about how you interact with other people in a very general way before even attempting yo
The avoidance of 'I', 'my' and 'me' is good advice, and something I've kept an eye out for. In this post it looks like they mostly show up when actually describing personal anecdotes, so the way to cut down on them would be to remove or reduce the anecdotes.
As for sharing the mental process, that information exists as an instruction and guide to doing this kind of thing - it's actually fairly central to the point of the post.
Regarding the defense of ideas rather than one's personality, it might be nice if we existed in an idealized setting in which ideas...
Unfortunately I wasn't very clear there - I was referring to the general ideas I'm using, the content of previous and future posts, rather than the particular topic of this post.
...you think you are an excellent example because you seem to be performing very well in some areas.
In this post I just used personal examples because I had them, and also because I've probably done this somewhat more than average.
The good performance I'm seeing is my larger reason for posting at all. This post is meant both to point out a generally useful phenomenon and to prepare for other material. The other material contains the primary causes of the benefits I'm seeing.
As for what those benefits are, they're listed in more detail here.
Sigh, there are many things for me to avoid with these posts. Yes, I also don't want these posts to become narcissistic. Indeed I would hate that, and a narcissistic rant would be useless. But at the same time, there are some things that I seem to be doing very well (through no innate strengths of my own), and my goal here is to share those things with other people so that they can do them too.
For whatever my own assertion is worth, I really am just a guy, will always be, and will also continue to defend this fact. Right now I seem to have some unique ins...
Agreed, and unfortunately many memories are difficult to test. A few ideas that leap to mind:
I expect that my brain is making some mistakes, ...
By "the unconscious" I mean the mental operations we perform without getting internal mental feedback about the process of the operation.
That's not very concrete. The most widely recognized extension of this part of reality is emotions we don't understand the reasons for, along with other mysterious-by-default things like why we spend a long time mentally reviewing our stated positions. We can simply ask "Why do I feel that way, and why do I spend my time that way?" This question doesn't require any mention of unconscious thinking, or t...
This is what I am more familiar with myself.
Cool!
The key thing is this: when a rationalist is investigating a bias or some irrational behavior, they may notice that there seems to be a social influence on their thinking, think to themselves "well that's obviously silly and wrong", and then stop there. They go on believing that rationality has to be painful, that we have to do something to overpower these instincts, and that the only way to succeed is to look for ways to trick their unconscious mind into having a belief that seems more appropriate.
An alternative to this approach is to keep goin...
I would summarize the main points as:
The remainder is unsupported folk psychology, repetition, and superfluous elaboration.
There should be a "looks like" in there somewhere, at least ...
One exercise that I found extremely helpful when learning how to condense my writing was:
This forces you to confirm that each of your major points has substantive, useful content. "The process behind deprecation" is an excellent 'note to self' to remind you of what your topic is, but a person can write that note without having the faintest idea what the process behind deprecation is. My Bayesian prior ...
Your feedback on skimmability seems potentially really useful - that wasn't even something I was thinking of before. I'm going to try to improve on that point, though I also suspect that I'm not going to succeed as much and as quickly as I would like. I may do some research on writing styles and tips. Thanks very much for pointing this out.
Was there an obvious way to cut it to 1/3 the length? If a professional editor was able to do so and you were willing to send it to me, that would probably be really helpful for me.
Was there an obvious way to cut it to 1/3 the length? If a professional editor was able to do so and you were willing to send it to me, that would probably be really helpful for me.
1/3 the length would still be far too long. Does the following leave anything out?
To improve your performance in any sphere:
Observe and learn what works.
Most goals are subgoals of higher goals. Conflicts among them can often be resolved by looking for the higher goals and asking what will really serve them.
There. 41 words instead of 4388. The remainder is unsupporte...
(Upvoted) [Is it poor etiquette to say so? I recall seeing it in the past but I'm not familiar with online LW etiquette.]
Yeah, I think that's a very good point. The things a model should be built on include actual uses of that model, some weight that it's lifting. In this case I'm not actually sure that starting with the overview was not the way to go; it may well not have been, but many of the particular points draw from a larger model that might differ from some common beliefs, such as that people are intrinsically incoherent kludges or that our unconsci...
Hmm, a good point :)
That...would be why I posted the first two posts :)
But I think you mean that it would be good to have something short at the beginning of this post. That would probably be a good idea.
There's a lot of very interesting stuff here. But I only figured that out after reading the comments, copying your post to a local editor to see if there was an obvious way to cut it to 1/3 the length, and then reading carefully. Your writing is... unskimmable to me. Usually I can skim a paragraph, get the gist, and go back to an individual sentence or two if I feel I missed something. I could not do that with this article.
So you're hoping people will read two other long articles so they know that this long article will be worth their time?
Cool. When the a regular meetup is included in the list I make it a link to an entry on the wiki meetup page (e.g. https://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Less_Wrong_meetup_groups#Hamburg.2C_Germany). I don't see one for Cologne, can you or someone else in the group create an entry?