All of PeterBorah's Comments + Replies

This reply is extremely late, but I'm annoyed at myself for not having responded at the time, so I'll do it now in case anyone runs across this at some point in the future:

I guess I feel a little trepidation or edge-of-my-seat feeling when I first run a test (I have surprisingly often ended up crossing my fingers), but I try to write tests in a nice modular way, so that I'm never writing more than ~5-10 lines of code before I can test again. I feel a lot more trepidation when I break this pattern, and have a big chunk of new code that hasn't been tested at all yet.

(This is an entirely meta post, which feels like it might not be helpful, but I'll post it anyway because I'm trying to have weaker babble filters. Feel free to ignore if it's useless.

I generally enjoy your writing style, and think it's evocative and clear-in-aggregate. But I find this comment entirely inscrutable. I think there's something about the interaction between your "gesturing" style and a short comment, that doesn't work as well for me as a reader compared to that style in a longer piece where the I can get... (read more)

Agreed. I strongly identify with the description of the Red Knight (and somewhat the description of both the other two knights as well), and was therefore Not Interested in Dragon Army. To the point that I posted some strong critiques of the idea, though hopefully in a constructive manner.

I would be interested in a retrospective of how the people who inhabited that role ended up joining Dragon Army. What was the bug there? I though Duncan was admirably clear about how much it was a non-Red Knight-friendly zone.

I've had a similar experience. IDC was by far my favorite technique at CFAR, and I've maybe done it twice since then? I think some of it is that the formal technique fell away pretty quickly for me: once I learned to pay attention to other internal voices, I found it pretty natural to do that all the time in the flow of my normal thinking, and setting aside structured time for it felt less necessary. (And when I do set aside larger chunks of time, I usually end up just inhabiting the part that gets less "airtime" for a while, rather than having an explicit dialogue between it and another part.)

As a separate comment since it feels like a pretty different thread:

I do have a vague hypothesis that the very first part of the Looking skill might be a prerequisite for IDC and frankly a lot of CFAR techniques. I don't think you need a lot of it, but there feels like there's a first insight that makes further conversations about things downstream from it a million times easier. (For programmers: it feels similar to whatever the insight is that separates people who just can't get the concept of a function from people who can.) It annoys me ... (read more)

For me at least, the multiple agents framework isn't the natural, obvious one, but rather a really useful theoretical frame that helps me solve problems that used to seem insoluble. Something like how it becomes much easier to precisely deal with change over time once you learn calculus. (As I use it more, it becomes more intuitive, again like calculus, but it's still not my default frame.)

Before I did my first CFAR workshop, I had a lot of issues that felt like, "I'm really confused about this thing" or "I'm overwhelmed ... (read more)

It definitely doesn't take years of practicing meditation. Though I'm hesitant to speculate on how long it would take on average, because how prepared for the idea people are varies a lot. The hardest step is the first one: realizing that people are talking about things you don't yet understand.

Hmm, maybe this is part of the motivation for test-first programming? Since I was originally trained to do test-first, I don't have this problem, because there are always already tests before I write any code. And I pretty much always know my code works, because it wouldn't be done if the tests weren't passing yet.

I've stuck to no fiction. (I unthinkingly read a few paragraphs of a short story that came across my Twitter, but otherwise have been consistent.)

It's mostly been fairly easy. It's really obvious now that it's a social pica. I think some of the time I would have spent on it has been going to increased use of LessWrong and Facebook, which are also social picas, but those are both more genuinely social, and harder to lose 8 hours at a time to.

There was at least one night where I was pretty unhappy, and didn't have access to any actua... (read more)

I'm still not 100% sure I understand Val's definition of Looking, so I'm not quite willing to commit to the claim that it's the same as Kaj's definition. But I do think it's not that hard to square Kaj's definition with those quotes, so I'll try to do that.

Kaj's definition is:

being able to develop the necessary mental sharpness to notice slightly lower-level processing stages in your cognitive processes, and study the raw concepts which then get turned into higher-level cognitive content, rather than only seeing

I've been thinking about this since I posted it, and I came to similar conclusions. There are a cluster of behaviors that seem to mean discomfort and therefore low status: fidgeting, jumpiness, talking too fast, certain eye contact patterns (staring at the person and then looking away fast when they turn to look at you), ums and ers.

Some of them feel hard to disentangle. Whether you hold your head high seems mostly about status, but also a little about size. This seems like it might be inherent in the territory: There's a fine line between credibly signaling that you're powerful and implicitly threatening to use that power. (Schelling's The Strategy of Conflict comes to mind here.)

This is really interesting and helpful, thank you.

My original introduction to status was in Impro, which describes it in the context of an improv scene. This means (as I recall) that it mostly focuses on things that are directly observable in body language, like eye contact and taking up space.

Since you suggest we think of most of those things as being about "size" rather than "status", I'm curious whether you think there are body language indicators of high/low status, or whether that's inherently contextual and based on actual power.

(One hypothesis: signs of nervousness like talking too quickly or fidgeting might be markers of low status?)

This is excellent, thank you for writing it.

I'm not as advanced as you, but I've gotten many of the earlier benefits you describe and think you've described them well. That said, I have some confusion about how stuff like this paragraph works:

And because those emotions no longer felt aversive, I didn’t have a reason to invest in not feeling those things - unless I had some other reason than the intrinsic aversiveness of an emotion to do so.

What does it mean to have another reason beyond the intrinsic aversiveness of an emotion? Who's th... (read more)

I am really happy that this post was written, and mildly annoyed by the same things you're annoyed by.

To explain rather than excuse, there's a good reason that meditation teachers historically avoid giving clear answers like this. That's because their goal is not to help you intellectually understand meditation, but rather to help you do meditation.

It's very easy to mentally slip from "I intellectually understand what sort of thing this is" to "I understand the thing itself", and so meditation teachers hit this prob... (read more)

Otherwise, what was the point of writing the thing in the first place? Are you trying to communicate, or aren’t you?

What if they don't have the skill necessary to explain it more clearly, but suspect that some percentage of the reading audience is willing to do enough interpretive work to understand what they're communicating anyway? In that case, their options are:

1) Don't post until they've developed enough skill to explain themselves to 100% of the audience. (Which in practice means: don't post ever, since the way you get the sk... (read more)

This model assumes that truth and politeness are in a simple tradeoff relationship, and if that were true I would absolutely agree that truth is more important. But I don't think the territory is that simple.

Our goal is not just to maximize the truth on the website at this current moment, but to optimize the process of discovering and sharing truth. One effect of a comment is to directly share some truth, and so removing comments or banning people does, in the short term, reduce the amount of truth produced. However, another effect of a comment is to ... (read more)

Wordpress seems like a very apt comparison, since LessWrong is also being conceptualized as a bunch of individual blogs with varying moderation policies.

… which once again points to the critical necessity of being able to tell when (and how often, etc.) someone is using such a power; hence the need for a moderation log.

Does Wordpress have such a system?

(To be clear, I support the idea of a moderation log. I'm just curious whether it's actually as necessary as you claim.)

And that problem is exactly what Scott refers to as Moloch.

This sounds like a really good idea. For my personal tastes, I think this would hit the sweet spot of getting to focus attention on stuff I cared about, without feeling like I was being too mean by deleting well-intentioned comments.

That doesn't address the fact that Qiaochu has a different instinctive reaction.

The goal of this proposal is to deal with the fact that different people are different.

(I super-duper doubt it, though. This is actually just classic hindsight bias.)

I'm not in Val's head, but I didn't get the sense that he was claiming this was the best way to meet Shaolin monks. Rather, his aim was to find a way to build on his moment of Kensho in a way that progressed his growth and development.

He could just as easily have missed the monk, and then he would have by chance run into another form of teacher, and that would have been the story instead. Or he would have learned something from his aimless wanderings that he could... (read more)

Ok, then that's the crux of this argument. Personally, I value Eliezer's writing and Conor Moreton's writing more than I value a culture of unfettered criticism.

This seems like a good argument for the archipelago concept? You can have your culture of unfettered criticism on some blogs, and I can read my desired authors on their blogs. Would there be negative consequences for you if that model were followed?

Meditations on Moloch is not an argument. It's a type error to analyze it as if it were.

I like your vision of a perfect should world, but I feel that you're ignoring the request to deal with the actual world. People do in fact end up disincentivized from posting due to the sorts of criticism you enjoy. Do you believe that this isn't a problem, or that it is but it's not worth solving, or that it's worth solving but there's a trivial solution?

Remember that Policy Debates Should Not Appear One-Sided.

Appreciate the impolitic question. :) I think I was doing some sort of social move that was trying to reset the burden of proof, rather than actually sharing data, but of course sharing data is better. (I do think people too often assume that their status quo bias is some sort of principled wisdom, so asking "are you sure the burden of proof is on your side?" is moderately useful. But data is better.)

I'm more confident on the independent action side than the independent thought side, so I'll start with that: I am taking more concrete st... (read more)

Hmm, I don't really see it that way? This post is trying to describe the category of which Meditation on Moloch is an instance. If Meditation on Moloch is good, surely trying to understand the thing that it's an instance of could also be good.

I'm definitely a bit worried about the milder one, but I'm so inefficient with my use of time currently that I doubt it could hurt too badly.

I don't really worry about the first two, because we have powerful myths (e.g. Steve Jobs) warning us against those things, so paying attention to myth seems like a good way to avoid them.

This seems right to me, as far as it goes. But for the same reason they're dangerous, they're powerful. Why should the forces of evil and ignorance be the only ones who get to have powerful weapons?

I would feel pretty comfortable betting that Meditations on Moloch is one of the top 5 most effective posts produced by the LW-sphere, in terms of leading to people pursuing good in the world. That's a direct result of it choosing to harness myth in a way selected for usefulness.

I have done a decent amount of "woo" (meditation, a bit of Val-style mythic mode) in the past years, and my ability for independent thought and especially independent action seem to have gone way up.

I'd be interested to hear more about what specifically bothers you. I agree that it "sounds like" The Secret, but just saying it "sounds like it" seems like a version of The Worst Argument in the World.

What are the negative effects you feel will come from doing this?

This seems good. I was definitely getting the sense there were at least two axes, and these seem to capture a lot of it.

Could Abstract/Methodical be something like Russell and Whitehead's Principia Mathematica?

Also, I'm interested that Concrete/Methodical is analysis, given the Corn post. I would have expected it to be Intuitive? (I don't actually do higher math, so I don't know from personal experience.)

This almost seems too obvious to say, but one reason to be bothered by the move from "tall" to "leader" is that sometimes you want your group to have a leader with skills that cause the group to succeed, and the most optimal choice for that might not be the tallest person.

That post is hilarious, and fascinating.

I eat corn like an analyst, vastly prefer Lisp to Haskell, use Vim, identify much more strongly with the personality description of the analyst, and while I haven't done much higher math, have a deep and abiding love for the delta-epsilon definition of a limit.

Very curious to hear other results, either successful or not.

I had an extremely nerdy friend group in college, which led to weird effects since we couldn't all be "the nerd". One of my friends still gets annoyed at the fact that she became the "jock" and the "sensible person", just because she was slightly less helpless at life than the rest of us. Her reaction seems to be something like, "I'm for real actually a nerd, why are you making me play this other role??"

This feels like a really useful framing. It meshes with other fake frameworks I sometimes use, but the emphasis on the web pulling you back in if you don't break with it hard enough feels true and important.

If anyone remembers the r/place experiment Reddit did, similar dynamics were extremely apparent. (In brief, /r/place was a blank 1000x1000 pixel canvas, where anyone with a Reddit account could place one colored pixel anywhere they wanted every 5 minutes.) It was actually really hard to randomly vandalize anything, because wrong pixels looked out o... (read more)

@Ben, this post has already had a measurable positive impact on my life. I hadn't heard of these before, and I've since purchased and used them to help with important decisions. Thanks!

Isn't that implicit in all disagreements? You're implicitly (or actually explicitly, in many cases) claiming social/moral/epistemic superiority over people who think NVC and related concepts are good and useful.

I'm not sure why you assume social awareness and connection requires a lack of consent.

It's extremely common, in my experience, for someone to request what you're calling "social manipulation". For example, the entire industry of therapy is people paying money to receive effective social manipulation that helps them be happier and more effective.

My experience is that the cluster of experiences around "cry and hug and shudder" are what it feels like to become aware of something that's important to my system 1, and that those moments are intervention points for shifting system 1's heuristics. Progress on reducing akrasia, unendorsed social anxiety, etc. has often come from moments like that.

I don't know you well, but I model you as someone with strong willpower and a general "mind over matter" attitude. This may make it less salient what your system 1 is up to?

I would compare circling to meditation, rather than lucid dreaming. It's not quite the same thing as rationality, and it has a lot of built up culture and tradition, some of which we disagree with, but it's a demostrably powerful tool that we would be impoverished if we ignored.

Is this a social worry ("people will use it as a blugeon") or an epistemic worry ("people will incorrectly think there's a hierarchy, but actually they're all useful frames")?

I don't have strong feelings about shell/shield/staff, but I've gotten a lot of value out of Kegan levels, and I think the hierarchy is actually a loadbearing part of the theory. (Specifically, it matters that each level is legible to the one after it, but not vice versa.) I endorse being careful about the social implications, but I wouldn't want that to become a generalized claim that there aren't skill hierarchies in the territory.

I strongly endorse reading Impro. It's short, well-written, and packs a very high insight-to-text ratio.

I tried this exercise and found it extremely interesting. My report is rot-13'ed to respect the blinding. I highly recommend taking five minutes to try it yourself before reading.

(One more line break for further encouragement to break your train of thought and try it.)

Ok, here:

V gevrq guvf fvggvat ng zl qrfx ng jbex. V'ir cerivbhfyl unq gebhoyr jvgu rkrepvfrf gung nfxrq zr gb zbir gur ybpngvba bs "zr"/zl rtb/zl crefcrpgvir bhg bs zl urnq naq vagb zl obql, fb V jnf fxrcgvpny V jbhyq fhpprrq. Ohg Dvnbpuh'f qrfpevcgvba va grezf bs &qu... (read more)

Sure, so now there are two bags:

1) 1000000 white balls and 10 black balls, numbered 1-10.

2) 5 black balls, numbered 1-5.

And now the question is: Bob drew a ball from a bag. Which is more likely?

1) It was a black ball with a number between 1 and 5.

2) It was a black ball with a number between 1 and 10.

~~~

I considered submitting the above as my full response, but here is another approach.

You seem to be substituting a question about the process of choosing for the original question, which was about outcomes. An example where your approach would actually be cor... (read more)

This seems to be a problem of partitioning.

In your analogy, no ball that is in the second bag is also in the first bag. However, all mathematician-plumbers are also mathematicians.

In other words, your analogy is comparing these options:

1) Bob is a mathematician and Bob is not a plumber.

2) Bob is a mathematician and Bob is a plumber.

In that comparison, it is indeed possible that #2 is more likely.

But the actual problem asks you to compare these options:

1) Bob is a mathematician, and Bob either is a plumber or is not a plumber.

2) Bob is a mathematician, and Bob is a plumber.

Since all Bobs in #2 are also in #1, #2 cannot be more likely than #1.

Upvoted for an interesting idea that feels promising. I'd be down to try this experiment, though an hour a day feels like a large time commitment (and regular commitments like that are harder for me to maintain, since my schedule varies wildly).

Proposed alternative:

Once per week you receive an email with a link to a scheduling tool (something like Doodle), where you input your availability for that week. You're matched with a random partner who has overlapping availability, and you both get an email with the date/time, and a link to a video confe... (read more)

Oh, and an important piece of evidence I forgot to include:

I have a close friend who has a strong "romantic fanfic" habit, and based on observation and conversation it's extremely clear to me that this is a pica/coping mechanism for them, to imperfectly replace real emotional intimacy/social safety/etc.

The similarity between their behaviors around fanfic and my behaviors around scifi are too strong for me to ignore, so that updates me in the direction of thinking it's important to uncover what's going on here.

I would be interested hearing more details about your experiences around exceptions. My inner simulator is confused about how to categorize this particular example.

On the one hand, "no Reddit at home" is a fairly clear rule that I wouldn't anticipate too much trouble implementing. On the other hand, if the goal is to break the dopamine cycle associated with Reddit, it might be better training for your brain to stop entirely rather than "teasing" it with exceptions?

For the record, even though I'm giving up fiction for Rationalist Lent, I would pretty much agree with that. I intend to use it as an opportunity to break what I consider to be bad habits around it and reevaluate its place in my life, not as a prelude to a permanent ban.

I chose to give up fiction for Rationalist Lent (before reading the comments and before seeing this exchange).

I've been observing my fiction (particularly sci-fi) habits for the past year or so, and have tried to reduce/improve them, including making it a major focus both times I attended a CFAR workshop. This has been only marginally successful. The behavior feels addictive in both the sense that I lose sleep or forget other important things due to it, and in the sense that it's hard to stop.

When I investigate the desire to read scifi, it seems ... (read more)