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All of TrudosKudos's Comments + Replies

Monthly Roundup #26: January 2025
TrudosKudos10

Also I am considering renaming the tiers from 1-5 to S/A/B/C/F as per custom

Can I ask for a short overview of the attributes for each Tier and your overall grading process? If you have discussed it elsewhere, a link would be very appreciated. 

Thank you for the great content, as always.  

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Tips On Empirical Research Slides
TrudosKudos54

This was incredibly informative. I really appreciate you all taking the time to share. I'm going to be using a lot of the information here immediately! I'd love to read any additional insights on slide design or thoughts you all have on other communication styles as well. 

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2Ted Sanders
Management consulting firms have lots of great ideas on slide design: https://www.theanalystacademy.com/consulting-presentations/   Some things they do well: * They treat slides as documents that can be understood standalone (this is even useful when presenting, as not everyone is following every word) * They employ a lot of hierarchy to help make the content skimmable (helpful for efficiency) * They put conclusions / summaries / action items up front, details behind (helpful for efficiency, especially in a high trust environments)
Social events with plausible deniability
TrudosKudos10

Fair question - I guess that a certain discussion doesn't necessarily have to be "heavy" but I believe that humans are far less skilled at communication, especially in social settings, for the majority of these interactions to not flare up some level of insecurity, human bias, or offend someone's held beliefs. 

I personally would say that I'm quite good at navigating a social context while also being able to broach traditionally taboo'd topics, but I do not think this I represent the norm. The general heuristic of avoiding potentially controversial top... (read more)

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Social events with plausible deniability
TrudosKudos20

Fair point. I think I agree with this distinction!

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Social events with plausible deniability
TrudosKudos2-7

It's a creative idea and would be an interesting experiment. That being said, I can't help but wonder why the focus is on sharing such heavy opinions. I'll be honest in that it's not been a major challenge for me in my life to not avoid talking about things that could likely spell discomfort. It's not even been intentional, because to me, it's a party and I want to be talking about things that are fun for myself and for others. 

If you are deliberately getting into heavy discussions about a potential socially dangerous topic, I'd ask why you feel the n... (read more)

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romeostevensit154

Many people have no context in their life where they can get feedback on socially undesirable ideas from thoughtful people so that they can potentially update them. E.g. you hear socially undesirable thing online that you suspect has some truth to it, you can't have any reasonable discussion about which aspects might be true, which might be false, and even amongst the more true parts how to navigate having that belief or what would be a wholesome framework to use to work with it, bc no feedback.

I'll give an egregious example. At one time, iodizing salt in ... (read more)

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7Maxwell Peterson
If OP were advocating banning normal parties, in favor of only having cancellable parties, I would agree with this comment.
2mako yass
What makes a discussion heavy? What requires that a conversation be conducted in a way that makes it heavy? I feel like for a lot of people it just never has to be, but I'm pretty sure most people have triggers even if they're not aware of it and it would help if we knew what sets this off so that we can root them out.
Am I ethically obligated to extend the life of my dog with life-extension treatments about to hit the market?
TrudosKudos10

Just returning to this -- Thank you for your comment. I think I need to do a bit more epistemological legwork before I can truly give you a response. Suffice it to say for now that I'm not really torn up about the issue and asked more out of boredom/general curiosity, but I see now that my question was asked lazily. 

Perhaps one day soon I'll comment on this with the relevant context/information. 

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Highlights from Lex Fridman’s interview of Yann LeCun
TrudosKudos518

His view on AI alignment risk is infuriating simplistic. To just call certain doomsday scenarios objectively "false" is a level of epistemic arrogance that borders on obscene. 

I feel like he could at least acknowledge the existence of possible scenarios and express a need to invest in avoiding those scenarios instead of just negating an entire argument. 

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2Anders Lindström
Good that you mention it and did NOT get down voted. Yet. I have noticed that we are in the midst of an "AI-washing" attack which is also going on here on lesswrong too. But its like asking a star NFL quarterback if he thinks they should ban football because the risk of serious brain injuries, of course he will answer no. The big tech companies pours trillions of dollars into AI so of course they make sure that everyone is "aligned" to their vision and that they will try to remove any and all obstacles when it comes to public opinion. Repeat after me: "AI will not make humans redundant." "AI is not an existential risk." ...
Is a PhD necessary to contribute meaningfully to a field?
TrudosKudos30

I will review these. Thank you for your input! 

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2DirectedEvolution
On reading them back over, here's my updated take (partly informed by the fact that I am now an MS student and work with PhD students daily): A PhD is two things: a way to support research, and a way to reward it with a sheepskin. Budding researchers just tend to see academia as a marginally more useful and attractive place to build their career than the next best alternative. The fact that a PhD program is mostly the only way to get the most widely recognized signal of being a qualified researcher is a bonus. If they're going to do weird groundbreaking research anyway, why not do it in an environment that's relatively open to it, and that will provide them with a credential at the end of the process? If I was doing this over again, then, I might reframe the question. Instead of asking "is a PhD necessary," I might ask questions like: * "Why do excellent early-career researchers so often see a PhD as attractive?" * "What are some of the practical barriers to doing a certain type of research outside the academic system?" * "What is the next most logical alternative to building a research career without getting a PhD?" * "Why and how do some excellent early-career researchers choose to build their research career outside the normal academic system?" * "What exactly does it mean to 'contribute' to a field?" As an example, if you're going into cogsci, you might need to run experiments on people or animals. When we do animal research in our BME lab, we have all kinds of support and regulation and procedures for making sure it doesn't create a fiasco with government, administrators, or activists. Outside the academic system, I expect that trying to do animal research would be extremely difficult or impossible, not to mention publishing it and getting it taken seriously. It's not just a question of whether the research findings were any good. It's the perception. Academia is as sensitive to perception as anybody, and you want your research to not just be ethical
For Better Commenting, Stop Out Loud
TrudosKudos30

Really fantastic conflict mitigation advice. Many people do not often stop to think about why they are communicating and with this lack of organized direction, it is easy to fall into more emotional patterns of communicating. People's desires to appeal to others come out more and constructive discourse is no longer possible. Stopping Out Loud does a great job of recognizing these types of things and organizing it into words in a way that really halts what otherwise often becomes a runaway train. 

One point I would add that is I feel that when it comes ... (read more)

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3DirectedEvolution
I'm glad you like it! I agree with you that employing SOL means that you're giving up the ability to have the last word. My thought is that you already lack that control in most cases. SOL is about recognizing that fact, then responding to it as best you can prior to extricating yourself from the conversation.