All of TheDave's Comments + Replies

Concreteness Game The object of this game is to train players to generate examples for explaining concepts quickly. The game requires at least two people, but may work better with groups of three or four.

To play, one of the players (Asker) names a concept to be explained, such as "How do you traverse a linked nodal network", "Explain the law of Conservation of Energy", or "What constitutes good financial advice?"

The other player (Generator) then tries to explain the concept/skill/other by using a nearby object to assist. The ... (read more)

As an attendee, my personal data might be relevant:

I have gained practice deliberately acquiring new habits and soliciting useful feedback. Before camp I had no specific plans for self-improvement other than "work harder", and now I actually keep track of what works and what doesn't. For instance, I am deliberately improving my public speaking skills by giving talks on Minicamp material once a week to a limited audience. I would place a bet that the "alternate universe me" who instead attended Inspirational Retreat X (IRX) would not hav... (read more)

There will certainly be more meetups! My current plan is to hold something biweekly, but I need to see what the spread of visitors is before I commit to a specific time/place. Thanks for letting me know you're interested!

I've already met another LWer since I moved here a month ago, but I'm pretty excited to meet more!

2Ubiquity
I'm a LW newbie(lurker, just created this to post) in the SC/UP area, but I don't think I can make this meetup. If it works out that I can I will be there.

It might just be a browser/connection/processor speed problem on my end. Thanks for checking!

Until that sort of feature is implemented, what about footnote links to the content while having text (no link) to the references? Also helpful would be a "return to where this number is in the text" function. I anticipate this solution taking less time while being less robust.

Here's an example. The body text footnote numbers link to the bottom, and a return arrow links you back to the citation. Major problem on the linked website is that the page seems to have to reload. I don't know of any way to make citations such as these without the process... (read more)

0Sniffnoy
I'm not getting that. It seems to just be using anchors; why would that happen?
2lukeprog
Yes, if a volunteer would like to do that for finished drafts of my posts as I complete them, that would be great.

I'm not sure that heavy sarcasm like this is constructive. While I thought it was funny, I think it encourages the audience to automatically disregard and deride the subject. In my experience, heavy sarcasm tends to both make the subject angry and reinforce the subject's (erroneous?) beliefs.

My own sarcastic responses (about political or otherwise weighty matters) typically just polarize the group I'm in, making the new in-group like me and the new out-group dislike me.

That's really cool! This will really help with my journey through the sequences. Thank you!

I really like this method! It certainly seems to be far more useful than my current "wait, I just realized that I don't know as much about this subject as I think I do, and therefore I need to stop talking", which really really hurts the flow of conversation. Thanks!

For me, I tend to apply this sort of reasoning when I'm first encountering an author. If I read blatantly false statements from someone who I have no knowledge of, I've noticed that I'm very likely to put the book/article aside. If I have any experience with the author, however, I've noticed that I read sections that I disagree with very carefully, often several times.

I suspect that I'm applying the halo effect to the articles from authors I like, and anything I dislike becomes jarring and therefore much more interesting. It's been beneficial, though. I fe... (read more)

Exactly! My problem is that I read an interesting article, and when I come to a link I open it in a new tab to pick up the context before continuing. When I haven't read the article I learn something new, but when I've already seen the linked-to article I can't tell until I'm into the second paragraph or so. Then, I have to re-read the original to get back to where I was.

Perhaps better reading comprehension techniques would fix this for me, but I suspect that a lot of new readers run into this problem.

As a new reader, I would very much like to have a method for marking how far through the sequences I am. A dot next to read articles, or possibly a timestamp of last access could work, as could a button at the bottom of the article labeled "Mark as read" that would display the article title differently in the main sequence page. I feel lost when I hop around on different computers as to what articles I've read and where I have seen them before, and simply saving read articles every time is unsuitable for this.

EDIT TO ADD: Based off of what other ... (read more)

3XFrequentist
Trailmeme for the sequences has approximately what you want, I believe.
2Swimmer963 (Miranda Dixon-Luinenburg)
This is an awesome idea! I've been reading LessWrong for years, but I still fairly frequently click on links within articles that look interesting, read the first few paragraphs of the article linked to, only to realize that I've read it before (sometimes a few times before!) This might be too hard to implement, but here is the system I would like: a way to mark articles as 'unread', 'in progress', or 'read'. This information would be saved and links to articles that you marked 'read' would change colour. (Of course, maybe I'm the only one absentminded enough to need this!)
3NancyLebovitz
That seems useful. It might be good to have a notes-to-self field, too.

As someone from the southern US, I was asked (jokingly) about whether or not I was a racist when I went north for college. At first I was repulsed by the question, until I noticed that I automatically got more nervous when passing a black person on the street at night. I am going to college in Cleveland, and so I have some actual reason for this since every mugger I've seen for five years in incident reports has been black. My problem (though I only started defining it this way within the past few months of reading LW) is that I was weighting race far too ... (read more)