...false? I just opened it in an incognito window and it worked fine. All my posts are public.
But anyway here’s the text:
Nate on Twitter, h/t Logan (transcribed for the non-avians):
Thread about a particular way in which jargon is great:
In my experience, conceptual clarity is often attained by a large number of minor viewpoint shifts.
(A complement I once got from a research partner went something like “you just keep reframing the problem ever-so-slightly until the solution seems obvious”.
<3)
Sometimes a bunch of small shifts leave people talking a bit differently, b/c now they’re thinking a bit differently. The old phrasings don’t feel quite right—maybe they conflate distinct concepts, or rely implicitly on some bad assumption, etc.
(Coarse examples: folks who think in probabilities might become awkward around definite statements of fact; people who get into NVC sometimes shift their language about thoughts and feelings. I claim more subtle linguistic shifts regularly come hand-in-hand w/ good thinking.)
I suspect this phenomenon is one cause of jargon. Eg, when a rationalist says “my model of Alice wouldn’t like that” instead of “I don’t think Alice would like that”, the non-standard phraseology tracks a non-standard way they’re thinking about Alice.
(Or, at least, I think this is true of me and of many of the folks I interact with daily. I suspect phraseology is contagious and that bystanders may pick up the alt manner of speaking w/out picking up the alt manner of thinking, etc.)
Of course, there are various other causes of jargon—eg, it can arise from naturally-occurring shorthand in some specific context where that shorthand was useful, and then morph into a tribal signal, etc. etc.
As such, I’m ambivalent about jargon. On the one hand, I prefer my communities to be newcomer-friendly and inclusive. On the other hand, I often hear accusations of jargon as a kind of thought-policing.
“Stop using phrases that meticulously track uncommon distinctions you’ve made; we already have perfectly good phrases that ignore those distinctions, and your audience won’t be able to tell the difference!”
No.
My internal language has a bunch of cool features that English lacks. I like these features, and speaking in a way that reflects them is part of the process of transmitting them.
Example: according to me, “my model of Alice wants chocolate” leaves Alice more space to disagree than “I think Alice wants chocolate”, in part b/c the denial is “your model is wrong”, rather than the more confrontational “you are wrong”.
In fact, “you are wrong” is a type error in my internal tongue. My English-to-internal-tongue translator chokes when I try to run it on “you’re wrong”, and suggests (eg) “I disagree” or perhaps “you’re wrong about whether I want chocolate”.
“But everyone knows that “you’re wrong” has a silent “(about X)” parenthetical!”, my straw conversational partner protests. I disagree. English makes it all too easy to represent confused thoughts like “maybe I’m bad”.
If I were designing a language, I would not render it easy to assign properties like “correct” to a whole person—as opposed to, say, that person’s map of some particular region of the territory.
The “my model of Alice”-style phrasing is part of a more general program of distinguishing people from their maps. I don’t claim to do this perfectly, but I’m trying, and I appreciate others who are trying.
And, this is a cool program! If you’ve tweaked your thoughts so that it’s harder to confuse someone’s correctness about a specific fact with their overall goodness, that’s rad, and I’d love you to leak some of your techniques to me via a niche phraseology.
There are lots of analogous language improvements to be made, and every so often a community has built some into their weird phraseology, and it’s *wonderful*. I would love to encounter a lot more jargon, in this sense.
(I sometimes marvel at the growth in expressive power of languages over time, and I suspect that that growth is often spurred by jargon in this sense. Ex: the etymology of “category”.)
Another part of why I flinch at jargon-policing is a suspicion that if someone regularly renders thoughts that track a distinction into words that don’t, it erodes the distinction in their own head. Maintaining distinctions that your spoken language lacks is difficult!
(This is a worry that arises in me when I imagine, eg, dropping my rationalist dialect.)
In sum, my internal dialect has drifted away from American English, and that suits me just fine, tyvm. I’ll do my best to be newcomer-friendly and inclusive, but I’m unwilling to drop distinctions from my words just to avoid an odd turn of phrase.
Thank you for coming to my TED talk. Maybe one day I’ll learn to cram an idea into a tweet, but not today.
Huh, I see the post plus a big “log in” bar at the bottom on Safari 15612.1.29.41.4 (Mac), and the same without the bar in an incognito tab Chrome 94.0.4606.71 (Mac). These don’t overlap with any of the things you tried, but it’s strange to me that our results are consistently different.
Yes, sorry, I got too excited about the absurd hypothesis supported by two datapoints, posted too soon, then tried to reproduce, and it no longer worked at all. I had the time to see the page in firefox incognito window on the same system where I’m logged in and in a normal firefox window from a different Linux username that never had facebook logged in.
Edit: Just now it worked again twice, and after that it no longer did. Bottom line: Public facebook posts are not really public, at least today, they are only public intermittently.
...false? I just opened it in an incognito window and it worked fine. All my posts are public.
But anyway here’s the text:
In a regular window (Firefox): https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/s/jyxf86t5hah9lbc/Screen%20Shot%202021-11-08%20at%203.12.59%20AM.png?dl=0
In a private window (Firefox): https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/s/33i7ben66877zaz/Screen%20Shot%202021-11-08%20at%203.13.46%20AM.png?dl=0
In a regular window (Opera): https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/s/bd4uu7iu0rctizl/Screen%20Shot%202021-11-08%20at%203.14.32%20AM.png?dl=0
In a private window (Opera): https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/s/5i3oi2przg85jbr/Screen%20Shot%202021-11-08%20at%203.15.14%20AM.png?dl=0
Firefox 78.5.0esr (Mac); Opera 80.0.4170.63 (Mac).
EDIT: Tested also with Firefox 94.0.1 (Windows) and Chrome 95.0.4638.69 (Windows), with identical results.
Your posts are not accessible without a Facebook account.
Huh, I see the post plus a big “log in” bar at the bottom on Safari 15612.1.29.41.4 (Mac), and the same without the bar in an incognito tab Chrome 94.0.4606.71 (Mac). These don’t overlap with any of the things you tried, but it’s strange to me that our results are consistently different.
I can no longer see it when not logged in, even though I did before. Maybe we triggered a DDoS mitigation thingie?
Edit: Removed incorrect claim about how this worked (before seeing Said’s response).
No, this is not correct. All of my tests were conducted on a desktop (1080p) display, at maximum window width.
Yes, sorry, I got too excited about the absurd hypothesis supported by two datapoints, posted too soon, then tried to reproduce, and it no longer worked at all. I had the time to see the page in firefox incognito window on the same system where I’m logged in and in a normal firefox window from a different Linux username that never had facebook logged in.
Edit: Just now it worked again twice, and after that it no longer did. Bottom line: Public facebook posts are not really public, at least today, they are only public intermittently.