There is a phenomenon among students of mathematics where things go from being “difficult” to “trivial” as soon as concepts are grasped. The main reason why I don’t comment many of my thoughts is that I think that since I can think them, they must not be very hard to think, so commenting them is kind of useless. I think me thinking that my thoughts aren’t very novel/insightful/good explains nearly all of the times I don’t comment—if I have a thought I think is non-trivial to think or I have access to information that I think most people do not have access to, I will likely comment it (this happens extremely rarely).
However, I agree that people should say more obvious things on the margin.
(I also think that, on the margin, people should compliment other people more. I liked this post and think it is an important problem to try and solve.).
from being “difficult” to “trivial” as soon as concepts are grasped
This reminds me of how milestones in AI go from being considered “actual AI” to “just a mechanical process” once they are achieved.
Another area where this bias manifests is when our desires become fulfilled. E.g. you might strongly desire to have a sexual partner, but once you have one, you might lose interest in having a sexual partner and begin to undervalue having one.
I don’t know if there is a well-known name for this bias. Maybe hindsight bias?
There is more to say about going from “difficult” to “trivial” in that normally it takes a good deal of building foundational background knowledge for the “trivialness” to fall out. So that puts one in a tricky situation where one second guesses if they should mention the trivial concept at all because anyone who has the foundation will likely already have gotten it and for anyone who doesn’t it might be asking a lot of them to get up to speed.
(arbital.com is making a good effort at solve this problem. I mention them for two reasons: one because its true and two because I don’t really have any conflict about signal boosting anything I enjoy that’s also useful.)
There is a phenomenon among students of mathematics where things go from being “difficult” to “trivial” as soon as concepts are grasped. The main reason why I don’t comment many of my thoughts is that I think that since I can think them, they must not be very hard to think, so commenting them is kind of useless. I think me thinking that my thoughts aren’t very novel/insightful/good explains nearly all of the times I don’t comment—if I have a thought I think is non-trivial to think or I have access to information that I think most people do not have access to, I will likely comment it (this happens extremely rarely).
However, I agree that people should say more obvious things on the margin.
(I also think that, on the margin, people should compliment other people more. I liked this post and think it is an important problem to try and solve.).
This reminds me of how milestones in AI go from being considered “actual AI” to “just a mechanical process” once they are achieved.
Another area where this bias manifests is when our desires become fulfilled. E.g. you might strongly desire to have a sexual partner, but once you have one, you might lose interest in having a sexual partner and begin to undervalue having one.
I don’t know if there is a well-known name for this bias. Maybe hindsight bias?
There is more to say about going from “difficult” to “trivial” in that normally it takes a good deal of building foundational background knowledge for the “trivialness” to fall out. So that puts one in a tricky situation where one second guesses if they should mention the trivial concept at all because anyone who has the foundation will likely already have gotten it and for anyone who doesn’t it might be asking a lot of them to get up to speed.
(arbital.com is making a good effort at solve this problem. I mention them for two reasons: one because its true and two because I don’t really have any conflict about signal boosting anything I enjoy that’s also useful.)