PJEby is just someone who happens to be monetising the product too.
I would brag about being more-instrumental-than-thou, except that I generally spend more time obsessing over getting things right than I have spent on actually making money.
LessWrong is actually a bit of a mixed bag for my business—participation here has challenged me in lots of interesting ways, and I do end up with the odd customer or two (no pun intended), but for a long time it also had some very nasty negative effects on my ability to communicate confidently or effectively outside LW… not to mention being an attractive place to waste time.
Apologies for tempting you to spend more time here, but what difficulties have you picked up in communicating outside LW?
Mostly , a severe limitation on what I was able to contemplate saying without hearing an internal chorus of critical nitpicking, dismissive, and fully-general counterarguments.
To put it another way, participation in LW greatly strengthened my mental muscles of “defense against learning anything new”… and caused me to waste considerable amounts of time trying to devise workarounds for the defenses.
For communication outside LW, this is a waste of time, since most people’s anti-learning defenses are not quite at that “more intelligence makes you stupid” level. (Also, non-LW persons are somewhat less likely to have brains that give them status reward pings for coming up with clever arguments for not learning anything new.)
Of course, for communication on LW, it’s also a waste of time. The main difference is that there are plenty of ideas I don’t need to communicate here: the loss if I don’t say them here is LW’s, not mine. Outside LW, though, it’s a different story, since I need to be able to teach those ideas to my customers, even if some of them happen to also be LW participants!
So, time wasted on trying to make those communications LW-friendly is a loss for me and my customers—and even more so if the time wasted doesn’t result in any actual creative output. (Which is what usually happens when you engage self-criticism during creative output.)
LW overemphasizes epistemic rationality at the expense of instrumental rationality. But the usefulness of epistemic rationality in helping people actually change is quite limited, since the function of “truth” is only useful if it convinces someone to take effective instrumental actions. (Worse still, if only a person’s logical mind is convinced of the “truth”, this may not have any effect on their behavior except to increase their frustration with their own behavior!)
So, if you only need to use a technology (not invent or improve on it), then you don’t need a “true” theory, just a good enough intuition pump. I’ve wasted time trying to find ways to demonstrate “truth”, that I should’ve used to build better intuition pumps, instead.
The flip side, of course, is that some of my best intuition pumps in the last couple years have come about in part as a side-effect of (things learned through, or arguments spurred by) LW participation. So, like I said, it’s a bit of a mixed bag. ;-)
you don’t need a “true” theory, just a good enough intuition pump. I’ve wasted time trying to find ways to demonstrate “truth”, that I should’ve used to build better intuition pumps, instead
Disclaimer: I am willing to play such tricks on myself in order to get results I want (e.g. - loosely related but too tired to think of a better example—allowing myself to think ‘sour grapes’). I’m about to attack that part of us both. Also, I appreciate your honesty.
What you’re saying seems to amount to: if you want to make a sale (convince someone to act/believe), don’t confuse them with the whole truth.
I think this is the right way for you to operate if you want only to increase the amount of satisfied customers you have (I presume they’ll be satisfied as long as they can feel that you’re making them feel/think/act differently than they would have had you not sold them on new practices).
But you then make it harder for those who are truth-hygienic to listen to you. Of course, you haven’t confessed to anything that wasn’t already apparent in your attempts to help and/or convince people here (while sometimes, like all of us, protecting your feeling of being clever and wise, sometimes in an unwise way).
I would brag about being more-instrumental-than-thou, except that I generally spend more time obsessing over getting things right than I have spent on actually making money.
LessWrong is actually a bit of a mixed bag for my business—participation here has challenged me in lots of interesting ways, and I do end up with the odd customer or two (no pun intended), but for a long time it also had some very nasty negative effects on my ability to communicate confidently or effectively outside LW… not to mention being an attractive place to waste time.
Apologies for tempting you to spend more time here, but what difficulties have you picked up in communicating outside LW?
Mostly , a severe limitation on what I was able to contemplate saying without hearing an internal chorus of critical nitpicking, dismissive, and fully-general counterarguments.
To put it another way, participation in LW greatly strengthened my mental muscles of “defense against learning anything new”… and caused me to waste considerable amounts of time trying to devise workarounds for the defenses.
For communication outside LW, this is a waste of time, since most people’s anti-learning defenses are not quite at that “more intelligence makes you stupid” level. (Also, non-LW persons are somewhat less likely to have brains that give them status reward pings for coming up with clever arguments for not learning anything new.)
Of course, for communication on LW, it’s also a waste of time. The main difference is that there are plenty of ideas I don’t need to communicate here: the loss if I don’t say them here is LW’s, not mine. Outside LW, though, it’s a different story, since I need to be able to teach those ideas to my customers, even if some of them happen to also be LW participants!
So, time wasted on trying to make those communications LW-friendly is a loss for me and my customers—and even more so if the time wasted doesn’t result in any actual creative output. (Which is what usually happens when you engage self-criticism during creative output.)
LW overemphasizes epistemic rationality at the expense of instrumental rationality. But the usefulness of epistemic rationality in helping people actually change is quite limited, since the function of “truth” is only useful if it convinces someone to take effective instrumental actions. (Worse still, if only a person’s logical mind is convinced of the “truth”, this may not have any effect on their behavior except to increase their frustration with their own behavior!)
So, if you only need to use a technology (not invent or improve on it), then you don’t need a “true” theory, just a good enough intuition pump. I’ve wasted time trying to find ways to demonstrate “truth”, that I should’ve used to build better intuition pumps, instead.
The flip side, of course, is that some of my best intuition pumps in the last couple years have come about in part as a side-effect of (things learned through, or arguments spurred by) LW participation. So, like I said, it’s a bit of a mixed bag. ;-)
Disclaimer: I am willing to play such tricks on myself in order to get results I want (e.g. - loosely related but too tired to think of a better example—allowing myself to think ‘sour grapes’). I’m about to attack that part of us both. Also, I appreciate your honesty.
What you’re saying seems to amount to: if you want to make a sale (convince someone to act/believe), don’t confuse them with the whole truth.
I think this is the right way for you to operate if you want only to increase the amount of satisfied customers you have (I presume they’ll be satisfied as long as they can feel that you’re making them feel/think/act differently than they would have had you not sold them on new practices).
But you then make it harder for those who are truth-hygienic to listen to you. Of course, you haven’t confessed to anything that wasn’t already apparent in your attempts to help and/or convince people here (while sometimes, like all of us, protecting your feeling of being clever and wise, sometimes in an unwise way).