Right. This kind of awesome individual is exactly why I try and avoid commenting on weblogs outside my own :-) The goal too often becomes to seem super-smart and be all bad-ass with quips. Most of this would be eliminated if people used their real names, but that isn't going to happen.
Hugh,
I've been blogging for 7 years. In that time there was a significant period when I was working 60-70 hours a week, as well as managing to read, have a relationship, and, running two weblogs (since I didn't run GNXP as a diary, and pre-scheduled many of my posts, I assume you weren't aware of this). So I got used to making the particular trade-offs you see. In the comments I focused on quantity and not so much on quality. As for the posts themselves, I tried to focus on substance and not care too much about style (e.g., I did a quick once over but then...
Hm... well, the lack of capitalization didn't much bother me because I know you. But I do think sentences are easier to read when capitalized, and that it is generally economical for one author to save a thousand readers the effort. Maybe don't capitalize on your own blog, but capitalize on blog comments on blogs where there's a high standard of commenting?
Though I actually am pretty sympathetic to your basic plea here, because the whole reason I started blogging was in an effort to write faster, and critical to that effort is learning to hold your writi...
right. i see stupidity as a more pressing issue than craziness. i see the latter as more soluble than the former. but yeah, you mentioned craziness not stupidity, though my takeaway was more about the problem of stupidity in heuristics & biases. see my blog response (nominal that it is).
AngryParsley, no. i won't. i don't plan on being a regular contributer here, so apologize for whatever faux pas i made re: capitalization (didn't read the style guide), but you won't see me around very much anyhow :-) and you're free to avoid me at the next OB meetup if i ever manage to make those again too!
Exactly - craziness is far more soluble than stupidity at our present state of technology. What does it accomplish to complain that someone is stupid? Are you going to teach them to be smart?
As for which is worse, it depends on how crazy you are, doesn't it? "Intelligent people sometimes do things more stupid than stupid people are capable of," said Phil Goetz.
Even with intelligence enhancement tech, by the time someone had been brought up to modern-equiv IQ 180 it would probably be more of a favor to them to teach them a little basic rationality than to bring them up further to IQ 190.
I don't mean to offend or sound confrontational. Assuming a large audience, the extra effort required of a writer to punctuate and capitalize is much less than the total extra effort spent by people reading unpunctuated or uncapitalized text.
i don't know if this is a joke or not :-) perhaps i was projecting? in any case, sure, the people you mention (e.g., von neuman) were wrong about a lot of things. so was isaac newton. definitely not stupid. i agree.
in any case, let me elaborate. i recall the higher your IQ, the less likely you are to fall into the traps of cognitive biases and heuristics which lead you to the wrong conclusion (i think bryan caplan reports this data). of course, smart people still tend to fall into these traps (especially when they have ideological blinkers), but my experie...
re: BHTV, let's get in touch in a few months. I think the disagreement is strong enough to satisfy the overlords in this case.