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All of thesilvermen's Comments + Replies

Jam is obsolete
thesilvermen40

This is exactly the sort of high quality article for which I am here. Please promptly write an article on pastry alternatives, so that I might increase my knowledge of strange foods.

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Become a person who Actually Does Things
thesilvermen-20

I would base the justification of my response in regards to the validity of your argument on these terms:

1. In your opening statement, you admit to a false premise in order to grow the size of your audience.

2. In the body of your statement, you make many claims such as ‘some people’ and ‘more people ’, without any concrete example to cite- exactly how many people can or would benefit from doing more?

3. Your argument towards increasing ‘agency’ in others is thinly defined, without clearly stating whether or not th... (read more)

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2Logan Riggs
I'm very confused about your interpretation of the post. I read the post as saying: But I've also installed this habit before (noticing the risks were much smaller in reality than in my head!), so maybe that's why the purpose/message was clear to me? My personal standard for LW posts would prefer more specific examples, so that it's more fun, clear, and vivid in my mind. What benefits do you think this post would gain if it fit your standard of (1-4) in your comment?
Using books to prime behavior
thesilvermen-10

This seems like an awful way to read. Do you go to art museums to train your eyeballs? Do you flavor your meals so that your tongue will know the difference between spices? Why does your reading need any purpose, at all? What is the purpose of breath?

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3ryan wong
Good question. I used to read for the love of books and building a fictional world in my head. I do enjoy that from time to time now, but the nature of the value I derive from reading has shifted. Using your analogy, it's just that instead of frequenting art museums like I had before, now I have expanded my interests to business presentations, hackathons. Both generally provide audiovisual material, but we go to each of them for very different reasons.
Become a person who Actually Does Things
thesilvermen00

I think this is bad advice. Further, I think that the worldview the author espouses is inherently false, and that she acknowledges this in the opening statement, which is about as good an example of Satre’s “bad faith” as I can think of, on the internet.

A thought exercise, taken from a recent podcast- a guru tells her followers to ‘do something’. The followers, in their existential modernist angst, agree to do the something that the guru says to do. In doing ‘the something’ the followers pay tens of thousand... (read more)

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4Neel Nanda
Hmm, I'm wondering if the law of equal but opposite advice is applying here? I completely agree that some people do too many things, and that moderation is important! Sky-diving without a parachute is an example of doing something, and obviously dumb. I think the important question is, on the margin, are people better off doing things more? And in my personal life, and in the people I see around me, the answer is overwhelmingly yes. I see a lot of people paralysed by perfectionism, indecision, anxiety etc. Who always wait for the perfect opportunity, and never deviate from the path of least resistance. And I think those people have too much moderation and not enough agency, and that a post exhorting them to be more agenty is exactly what they need. I think there are also people who are great at being agenty and really need to learn moderation. And it's approximately impossible to write a post catered to both at once. My post is very much aimed at the people I have in mind. And I'm implicitly making the empirical claim that most people, on the margin, would benefit from being more agenty. Which is true in my experience, but I definitely live in a bubble. I think "inherently false" is an extremely strong assertion against this post, and I'd be interested in hearing more justification for that.
"Can you keep this confidential? How do you know?"
thesilvermen80

It seems likely to me that when a person is saying 'can you keep a secret', to some level they are saying 'here is a piece of gossip'. Gossip seems to be one of the backbones of any society, enforcing social norms, and possibly disciplining otherwise impervious leaders/rulers who violate those norms. The 'secret' then is really, 'please keep it secret that I told you this from anyone who might punish me, or use this against me in any way.'

If you have a true secret that must be shared, a real threat of repercussions (violence) is all that may enforce this. Or not.

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1ilm
Very true. I think "can you keep a secret", in the context of true secrets, is a bit of a non-question. What kind of secret? Sometimes, even revealing the type of the secret in question reveals bits about the secret itself (sometimes through multiple layers). How do you communicate about the meta-parts of said secret? What are your skills in behaving around true-secret material? Doing a " Can you keep a secret?" "Yeah I can keep a secret!" interaction doesn't really tell you much at all and seems to me more just a social dance to initiate gossip (or a similar interaction).
6Raemon
Sort of a meta response: So, I went back and forth on whether to title this post "can you keep a secret" vs "can you you keep this confidential?" or "can you keep this private?", which each have slightly different connotations. "Secret" pattern-matches most to "gossip", and it's not actually what I meant to focus on necessarily. (I do mean to include gossip as a subset of what I'm talking about, but not the central example) The original published version (which you were replying to) had the title "can you keep a secret?", partly because "can you keep a secret?" is a more common phrase, and partly because it was a little more clickbaity a title that I thought people would actually click on. But, this comment made me kinda regret that choice. That didn't really address your comment, but I wanted to clarify first that I think "gossip" isn't necessarily the right frame here. I do think it is often the case that when people ask for confidentiality, the most important thing they care about is information not being shared in contexts that will damage them. (And, indeed, people are often much more okay with you sharing something outside of the original social circle)
Self-sacrifice is a scarce resource
thesilvermen-10

I’m very interested in your perspective. Mostly, because I find it so alien from my own. A little background- I work in law enforcement, and before that served in the American military. In these backgrounds I have come to see human suffering as the norm, and not a problem to be fixed. If I were to make a big-picture worldview of things, I would say that the ‘natural’ state of the universe is randomness and chaos. Human beings are a thing that make shaky structures-sometimes literally, but most often some sort of society that breeds mor... (read more)

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