All of halinaeth's Comments + Replies

So grateful to Ben, Aella, and Ronny for hosting and for all the people with whom I had lively debates with this past Saturday! Like Matt it was my first in person rat event, and I really enjoyed meeting everyone and seeing how open everyone is to friendly debate and probing questions.

I really hope these meetups continue- happy to help & support to help make it possible.

Thanks again everyone, cheers to many fun connections to come in 2025!

Even things like biological limits which turned out to be mental (the idea a 4 minute mile was impossible, for instance). 

I wonder if we just told people the problem was solved, and ask them to find the solution, would the mere fact of confidence there is a solution lead to greater chances of finding a solution? I remember the story of the mathematician to which this exact thing happened (he accidentally was assigned a famous unsolved problem as homework, and solved it). 

Someone feel free to correct if that was a myth or a real incident.

Reminds me of how @visakanv (on X) said he's very happy with a day's work if he got in 3-4 hours of good solid work. And how over the timescale of years, it compounds much more than anyone would believe. 

Definitely gives me optimism, and appreciate the two definitions of "impossible" you've outlined too.

Fascinating post, like a version of prions on an orthogonal axis, but with way more possibility to expand. 

Wonder if other fields have a version of this, where by inverting or adjusting a basic principle you unlock a whole field as rich and diverse as the original. Perhaps imaginary numbers are analogous?

I'd love to, would you be open to being a "beta reader" for my post? Appreciate the encouragement!

Loved reading this! Suspected the premise based on title, but nevertheless great to see the premise fleshed out in a short story. And the pov “plot twist” was really fun, thanks for the thought experiment!

Comments have great nuance i.e. "systems/processes greatly expand word count". 

But I'd say assuming lack of system & a randomly selected audience, the author's point stands. After all, in media there's a reason they value "sound bites" so much- and those are more like 5 syllables. 

Think, "grab em by the ****" and "nasty woman" from the 2016 election.

Would love to be corrected though!

Makes me think of the concept of "reality distortion fields" as it applies to overconfidence in leaders (I read about this applied to Steve Jobs specifically- his ability to get people to also believe in & work towards the impossible). 

Does anyone have the link to what I'm referring to? But overall, I do believe charisma has a lot to do with letting go of the need to have an accurate "map" of yourself and your strengths/shortcomings. 

Excellent summary! Would be interested in a list of corollaries to this, i.e.:

a) If "condemned" X is necessary for "prestigious" Y, people with Y will mislead and lie to the public about how they achieved Y, despite wanting others to attain success at Y too. Furthermore, the narrative of their path to achieving Y without anything to do with X will be extremely uniform & coordinated despite any huge differences amongst people with Y. For example, some Y people have X, some don't, some hope for others to attain Y, some don't- but the "public narrative" a... (read more)

Jimmy phrased it really well- the "lizardmen" don't want to let anyone know precisely because they won't be perceived by you as rational/moral humans as you would've without knowing, but rather "lizardmen". 

"how one might ever become justifiably confident a particular piece of dark matter really doesn't exist or is as rare as you'd suspect it is" - as someone in a "lizardman" community myself (commented regarding my own experience), probably one of the only ways to know for sure is to join as a lizardman. Any other way, you'll be inundated with misinf... (read more)

Okay hopefully the layering worked to hide the answer- 

The X I was talking about is being extremely thin- model thin. And the social dark matter is "anorexia".

I've always wanted to be model-thin, and slender women online would say to eat healthy, moderate portions, exercise, drink water, don't starve or be unhealthy, etc. And emphasize to avoid eating disorder behaviors (putting big red stop signs around even the borders of ED territory!) because during the height of the "fat acceptance" movement anyone even giving weight loss advice would get ED accu... (read more)

(did you guess & comment X?)

(open if you've guessed X already)

Love how you named this "Social Dark Matter", I recently came across an instance of this that you didn't mention! 

It came in the form of "group of people prestigious in X way". I really wanted to join that group with X trait, and so studied what "X people" had to say about how they got that way & their journey, advice, pitfalls to avoid, etc. Only after 10+ years did I stumble across the fact that almost all people with the highest X actually attained it through going deep into the very "pitfall" they advised to steer clear of. But because of the ... (read more)

Wow, this part really resonated with me:

This is why "build a 10% better mousetrap" is a legitimate goal, but "build a 10% better web portal for artists" is not. The 10% improvement means nothing if the community accuses you of being a greedy selfish bastard who only cares about money and not about art, and they blacklist you and everyone who cooperates with you. And yes, if you understand how the game is played, the initiators of the backlash are those who profit from the existing system. But you can't say this out loud; it would only prove that you care a... (read more)

This is so fascinating! Your "competent villain" example definitely resonates with me- I also had to learn the hard way to be assertive when it comes to tiny things like domain ownership which could have huge power dynamic impacts down the line.

Yeah. To your founder point, it's very very possible as they are VC backed and even the VCs' interests aren't very well aligned with the community.

In terms of coup, given VC backed nature + other factors it's nearly impossible to take over. But a ideological split/fork might certainly be possible!

Now I'm curious as ... (read more)

Ah, good point! Over a long enough time period, not promising anything denies you the opportunity to showcase that you have a low "breaking promises" rate- hadn't factored that into the false negative/positive scenarios.

I see, these are great examples "destruction paths", thank you! What I'm hearing is essentially:

- in communities which gain prestige, infighting which causes collapse
- members dying out over time

I think these are different than what I'm observing in my community. Thinking about it, two patterns jump to mind:

- as our community gained prestige, members would start tearing down or attacking "rival" communities to gain in-group points. But this gives us a bad reputation & deters new members from wanting to join, so community doesn't gain "new blood" and ca... (read more)

Yes to both! The lying model is great to have especially on the internet where everyone trolls for fun. But to Nathan's point especially as cost of intellectual labor goes to zero, the net benefits of investigating these cases would keep increasing. Seems worth a try to find some obscure low hanging fruit!

 

True or not, wouldn't you say the idea it illustrates is sound? No matter how small a percentage of the time, a nonzero number of people claiming ridiculous things are telling the truth (just framing it in a ridiculous way with wrong correlations).

If as a society we investigated these cases more often instead of dismissing them, would it lead to a net positive for humanity? For example, if everyone heard "drinking mud soup in this specific part of the world consistently cures X affliction", and dismissed it- wouldn't most pharmaceutical companies not have ... (read more)

Love this example! 

Reminds me of the "haunted apartment" case in Korea, where dogs kept going insane near a certain spot by the entrance of the apartment complex, and eventually investigators realized there was a malfunction that caused an electric current on the entrance floor, which the dogs' paws could feel but humans with shoes couldn't detect.

I wonder what other phenomena we're too quick to dismiss because they're framed in a way that sounds absurd.

How to Poison the Water?

I think we've all heard the saying about the fish and the water (the joke goes, and old fish asks young fish about the water, and the the young fish ask "what's water?).

I'm curious the key failure modes or methods that tend to "poison the water", or destroy/alter an organization/scene's culture or norms negatively. Are there major patterns that communities tend to fall into as they self destruct? 

Would love for anyone to share resources or general reflections on this- I'm currently part of a (unrelated) community where I see th... (read more)

This example is super helpful! When people might take your information and act on it as assurance aka a "promise", you should stick to purely "information" style phrasing or be vague to avoid "promising".

Can you think of any instance where a "false negative" has been an issue, i.e. where people take an assurance as information, and that caused problems? Or is the main failure mode to look out for the "false positive"?

This a super helpful framework, thank you! 

How often would you say to stare at the abyss regarding job/career trajectory in general? Is annually too often? And how can you tell if your failure mode is staring too often vs not enough (staying somewhere too long vs not investing enough time to succeed)?

In general, if you're not happy with your level of success/achievement in life thus far and have tried several paths (about a year each), would you say generally one should keep pivoting each year? In other words, generally if you're not happy with the ve... (read more)

Makes sense, thanks for the new vocab term!

Hi! New to the forums and excited to keep reading. 

Bit of a meta-question: given proliferation of LLM-powered bots in social media like twitter etc, do the LW mods/team have any concerns about AI-generated content becoming an issue here in a more targeted way?

For a more benign example, say one wanted to create multiple "personas" here to test how others react. They could create three accounts, and respond to posts always with all three accounts- one with a "disagreeable" persona, one neutral, and one "agreeable".

A malicious example would be if someone

Thank you for this detailed process outline! I've been wanting to "learn by writing" for quite a while now (inspired by PG essays actually), yet never took the time out thus far. Your outline is extremely helpful to cut down time wondering "is my process any good/how will I learn through writing", and go straight to the learning (and writing)!

Regarding step 8 "get[ing] to the point where I can no longer easily tear apart my own hypothesis", I'm curious what your level of "Openness" is in your Big 5 personality traits. As someone with nearly off the charts ... (read more)

Thanks for linking these! Found my next reading list :)

Good point about how LLMs making "brain dumping" on a computer very different than before. 

I can see how your proposal might be helpful for heads of nation states/billionaires/CEOs who worry about espionage, but for the average person writing in a journal & storing it in a safe place seems sufficient, no?

Even for myself, I'd probably write all my non-journaling notes (those I'd like to be able to search & organize & refer to later) in one of the usual solutions (notes app, maybe Google drive for more organization). Even if all my notes wer... (read more)

Thank you! So much to explore :))

Found this site when I was a kid (hi HPMOR) & realized it wasn't all a fever dream when I got onto X a decade later! Really excited to read through posts, learn new things, and hopefully build a thinking-deeply-through-writing habit myself.