One of the motivators here was actually something in a recent Sarah Constantin post (I think the monopoly one), where the initial post was “written confidently”, but where her actual level of confidence was much lower. Some people complained about this, and she noted that she found it harder to think when regulating her words through a “what will people find sufficiently modest?” lens.
And I think this is a fairly common thing in the rationalsphere – people who are doing the “Strong Opinions Weakly Held” thing which helps them build out models concrete enough to be wrong but which come across sounding as if they think they’ve found the One True Way.
And one thing you could do is ask everyone to get way better at writing, but another thing you can do is separate out the expression of confidence from the writing.
Man, mind-space is big: having to model how other people will perceive what I write is the thing that helps me think and the exercise of trying to give epistemically appropriate words to my thoughts is what helps me figure out better what I really mean rather than what I just vaguely believe might be true.
One of the motivators here was actually something in a recent Sarah Constantin post (I think the monopoly one), where the initial post was “written confidently”, but where her actual level of confidence was much lower. Some people complained about this, and she noted that she found it harder to think when regulating her words through a “what will people find sufficiently modest?” lens.
And I think this is a fairly common thing in the rationalsphere – people who are doing the “Strong Opinions Weakly Held” thing which helps them build out models concrete enough to be wrong but which come across sounding as if they think they’ve found the One True Way.
And one thing you could do is ask everyone to get way better at writing, but another thing you can do is separate out the expression of confidence from the writing.
Man, mind-space is big: having to model how other people will perceive what I write is the thing that helps me think and the exercise of trying to give epistemically appropriate words to my thoughts is what helps me figure out better what I really mean rather than what I just vaguely believe might be true.