And who wouldn’t want to get rid of negative thoughts and mental static?
That’s not what the post is describing, though.
Are you sure?
Yes, quite sure, because I can read.
Now, if you want to make the claim that doing what the post describes will result in, as a consequence / side effect / whatever, get rid of “negative thoughts and mental static”, fair enough. Is that the claim you’re making?
Let’s be clear: this would be an additional claim, one which was not contained in the post itself. In fact, the only thing that bugsbycarlin explicitly claimed (in a follow-up comment) as a benefit, was this:
The gain is an ability to capitalize on the ideas I have during the other 95%, by more effectively fixing on them during non-walk time.
Is that the same thing as “getting rid of negative thoughts and mental static”? Doesn’t sound like it to me. If this is meant to be the same thing, I’d like to hear an explanation of how they are the same.
What the post described, in any case, was getting rid, not of “negative thoughts and mental static”, but of creative thoughts, idea generation, etc.—just about the diametric opposite of “mental static”.
Meta: I am getting rather tired of the following style of discourse:
Person A:[says something inscrutable or bizarre]
Person B: You seem to be saying [inscrutable or bizarre thing], which seems inscrutable, and/or bizarre! What gives?!
Person A: Are you sure that’s what I’m saying? [raises eyebrows suggestively, doesn’t actually elaborate or explain further]
Now, there are some people who have such a long, excellent, and public track record of being insightful, intelligent, and clear-headed that when they say something seemingly inscrutable or bizarre, I think twice before I conclude that the fault is with the idea or the explanation of it, rather than with my ability to comprehend it. There are very, very few such people. If you’re wondering whether you are one of them—you’re not.
So please, folks, drop the mysterious inscrutability act. If you write something and people on Less Wrong—people who are clearly not dumb, who’ve been exposed to the ideas of the rationality meme-sphere (have read the Sequences, etc.), and are generally not “Joe off the street”—don’t get what the heck you’re talking about, then the fault is with you. Write more clearly. If someone asks for an explanation, explain. Otherwise, what was the point of writing the thing in the first place? Are you trying to communicate, or aren’t you?
Otherwise, what was the point of writing the thing in the first place? Are you trying to communicate, or aren’t you?
What if they don’t have the skill necessary to explain it more clearly, but suspect that some percentage of the reading audience is willing to do enough interpretive work to understand what they’re communicating anyway? In that case, their options are:
1) Don’t post until they’ve developed enough skill to explain themselves to 100% of the audience. (Which in practice means: don’t post ever, since the way you get the skill is by trying.)
2) Post anyway, and hope that some people get it.
#1 communicates with no one, and #2 communicates with at least some people, so if the goal is communication, #2 is the dominant strategy.
(For the record, I do think it’s possible to explain this stuff better than most people do, and that it’s annoying that this is done fairly rarely. But I also notice that it’s a relatively small subset of readers here who are consistently the ones who don’t understand.)
Is it a small subset who are the ones who don’t understand, or is it a small subset who are the ones who complain out loud that they don’t understand? I ask because I suspect the latter may be nearer the truth.
1) Don’t post until they’ve developed enough skill to explain themselves to 100% of the audience. (Which in practice means: don’t post ever, since the way you get the skill is by trying.)
Sounds good to me. It would be better if many people who do post such things, instead didn’t. (Here in particular, but also everywhere else.) Leave the explaining to people who know how to explain things—or who at least have the decency to respond to requests for clarifications with actual attempts to clarify rather than with smirking insinuations!
(By the way, you present the choice as binary, when in fact it’s anything but; you can, and should, not post until you’ve developed enough skill to explain yourself to most of the audience—not 100%, but much more than a mere handful!)
#1 communicates with no one, and #2 communicates with at least some people, so if the goal is communication, #2 is the dominant strategy.
No, no it is not. #2 adds noise. It impairs all other communication in a space / context. It muddies the waters, by confusing people, by giving them incorrect ideas about the topic in question, by inoculating them against the strongest version of the claim/argument/idea. It normalizes bad writing and muddled thinking. It ensures that double illusions of transparency become commonplace. It contributes to a degradation of norms of discussion and norms of evidence. It discourages questioning and critical inquiry as a practice and as a norm of how to respond to failures of understanding. It drives away clear thinkers and good writers, and reduces a forum’s ability to attract new such people. It is, in fact, a vastly inferior strategy to saying nothing at all.
We’ve had this discussion before, and I am not super interested in having it again right now, but on this point most of the people whose content contributions to this site I respect most, disagree with the approach you describe here, as does the current LW 2.0 team.
Allowing authors to post rough drafts and discuss initial ideas, before knowing whether they are comprehensible to others, is really important and a major goal of LessWrong 2.0. Applying the standard that you seem to be communicating here would have prevented the vast majority of good content being posted on this site, because from the inside it is very hard to know whether your perspective will make sense to others or not, and most of our top writers would respond to your comment with “sure, I guess I will just not post here then” (which most of them did).
Eliezer, Scott G., Nate and a lot of the other top writers we’ve talked to (or who commented about the LessWrong culture somewhere publicly) have reported that LessWrong is a place that feels too hostile to post to, because of attitudes like the one you describe in this comment. Almost every major author we’ve interviewed has explicitly asked for some way to create content on LessWrong that is lower stakes and that allows for an explorative discussion instead of everyone just focusing on tearing apart their ideas. There has to be a place and a stage for exposing your idea to intense scrutiny, but we also need a place for explorative discussion and I am not happy about you trying to enforce a frame of intense scrutiny on every single post.
Said, I appreciate your contributions and think you often make good points, and I was particularly happy about your contributions and concerns in the recent moderation discussion. But both the fact that you never created any top-level posts and are not actively contributing to the idea-generation of this community, lead me to think that you vastly underestimate the stress and cost associated with having every idea of yours exposed to intense scrutiny from the very beginning. You are welcome to enforce your norms of constant intense scrutiny on your own personal blog, but right now, I am not happy with you enforcing this in every single nook and cranny of this page. I think you yourself are driving away many clear thinkers and good writers, and that this is making the site worse overall.
If a post is in curated, or the author explicitly asks for detailed scrutiny, then I think your scrutiny is well-placed and should continue (and I do soon want to have a better structure that communicates more clearly in what parts of the site authors should expect their ideas to come under intense scrutiny).
If the post is just on the frontpage or on someone’s personal page, I think it would be better for the site overall if you would change the way you comment to be significantly less harsh, more welcoming to new users, and to generally include more effort on your side to try to understand the point the author is making (and otherwise to abstain from commenting).
I would like to discuss this more, but it is definitely the case that I’ve spent a really massive amount of time over the last month being involved in meta-discussion, and that this has been delaying a lot of important engineering work on the site. I hope I can get around to giving this whole topic a more thorough treatment at some later point in time, but for the sake of us finally launching the meetup system, I will have to keep it at this comment and won’t be available to discuss further. I do really apologize for that, and it sucks, and I wish I had more time to do all the things that need to get done.
I very much agree in principle with your last section, but I disagree with you that this was an instance of the OP saying something inscrutable or bizarre. My intuitive reaction is that you are being willfully obtuse/uncharitable/hostile—though I realize this is very possibly false, and that it is simply the case that different things are more or less clear/helpful to different people. But that should be a reason for you not to insist that if you personally don’t understand or benefit from something, then nobody else does and the post is Objectively Bad!
There is such a thing as assumed common knowledge. When two psychiatrists discuss Xanax, they are probably not going to say “Xanax, which by the way is a tranquilizer, ….”
Yes, quite sure, because I can read.
Now, if you want to make the claim that doing what the post describes will result in, as a consequence / side effect / whatever, get rid of “negative thoughts and mental static”, fair enough. Is that the claim you’re making?
Let’s be clear: this would be an additional claim, one which was not contained in the post itself. In fact, the only thing that bugsbycarlin explicitly claimed (in a follow-up comment) as a benefit, was this:
Is that the same thing as “getting rid of negative thoughts and mental static”? Doesn’t sound like it to me. If this is meant to be the same thing, I’d like to hear an explanation of how they are the same.
What the post described, in any case, was getting rid, not of “negative thoughts and mental static”, but of creative thoughts, idea generation, etc.—just about the diametric opposite of “mental static”.
Meta: I am getting rather tired of the following style of discourse:
Person A: [says something inscrutable or bizarre]
Person B: You seem to be saying [inscrutable or bizarre thing], which seems inscrutable, and/or bizarre! What gives?!
Person A: Are you sure that’s what I’m saying? [raises eyebrows suggestively, doesn’t actually elaborate or explain further]
Now, there are some people who have such a long, excellent, and public track record of being insightful, intelligent, and clear-headed that when they say something seemingly inscrutable or bizarre, I think twice before I conclude that the fault is with the idea or the explanation of it, rather than with my ability to comprehend it. There are very, very few such people. If you’re wondering whether you are one of them—you’re not.
So please, folks, drop the mysterious inscrutability act. If you write something and people on Less Wrong—people who are clearly not dumb, who’ve been exposed to the ideas of the rationality meme-sphere (have read the Sequences, etc.), and are generally not “Joe off the street”—don’t get what the heck you’re talking about, then the fault is with you. Write more clearly. If someone asks for an explanation, explain. Otherwise, what was the point of writing the thing in the first place? Are you trying to communicate, or aren’t you?
What if they don’t have the skill necessary to explain it more clearly, but suspect that some percentage of the reading audience is willing to do enough interpretive work to understand what they’re communicating anyway? In that case, their options are:
1) Don’t post until they’ve developed enough skill to explain themselves to 100% of the audience. (Which in practice means: don’t post ever, since the way you get the skill is by trying.)
2) Post anyway, and hope that some people get it.
#1 communicates with no one, and #2 communicates with at least some people, so if the goal is communication, #2 is the dominant strategy.
(For the record, I do think it’s possible to explain this stuff better than most people do, and that it’s annoying that this is done fairly rarely. But I also notice that it’s a relatively small subset of readers here who are consistently the ones who don’t understand.)
Is it a small subset who are the ones who don’t understand, or is it a small subset who are the ones who complain out loud that they don’t understand? I ask because I suspect the latter may be nearer the truth.
Sounds good to me. It would be better if many people who do post such things, instead didn’t. (Here in particular, but also everywhere else.) Leave the explaining to people who know how to explain things—or who at least have the decency to respond to requests for clarifications with actual attempts to clarify rather than with smirking insinuations!
(By the way, you present the choice as binary, when in fact it’s anything but; you can, and should, not post until you’ve developed enough skill to explain yourself to most of the audience—not 100%, but much more than a mere handful!)
No, no it is not. #2 adds noise. It impairs all other communication in a space / context. It muddies the waters, by confusing people, by giving them incorrect ideas about the topic in question, by inoculating them against the strongest version of the claim/argument/idea. It normalizes bad writing and muddled thinking. It ensures that double illusions of transparency become commonplace. It contributes to a degradation of norms of discussion and norms of evidence. It discourages questioning and critical inquiry as a practice and as a norm of how to respond to failures of understanding. It drives away clear thinkers and good writers, and reduces a forum’s ability to attract new such people. It is, in fact, a vastly inferior strategy to saying nothing at all.
We’ve had this discussion before, and I am not super interested in having it again right now, but on this point most of the people whose content contributions to this site I respect most, disagree with the approach you describe here, as does the current LW 2.0 team.
Allowing authors to post rough drafts and discuss initial ideas, before knowing whether they are comprehensible to others, is really important and a major goal of LessWrong 2.0. Applying the standard that you seem to be communicating here would have prevented the vast majority of good content being posted on this site, because from the inside it is very hard to know whether your perspective will make sense to others or not, and most of our top writers would respond to your comment with “sure, I guess I will just not post here then” (which most of them did).
Eliezer, Scott G., Nate and a lot of the other top writers we’ve talked to (or who commented about the LessWrong culture somewhere publicly) have reported that LessWrong is a place that feels too hostile to post to, because of attitudes like the one you describe in this comment. Almost every major author we’ve interviewed has explicitly asked for some way to create content on LessWrong that is lower stakes and that allows for an explorative discussion instead of everyone just focusing on tearing apart their ideas. There has to be a place and a stage for exposing your idea to intense scrutiny, but we also need a place for explorative discussion and I am not happy about you trying to enforce a frame of intense scrutiny on every single post.
Said, I appreciate your contributions and think you often make good points, and I was particularly happy about your contributions and concerns in the recent moderation discussion. But both the fact that you never created any top-level posts and are not actively contributing to the idea-generation of this community, lead me to think that you vastly underestimate the stress and cost associated with having every idea of yours exposed to intense scrutiny from the very beginning. You are welcome to enforce your norms of constant intense scrutiny on your own personal blog, but right now, I am not happy with you enforcing this in every single nook and cranny of this page. I think you yourself are driving away many clear thinkers and good writers, and that this is making the site worse overall.
If a post is in curated, or the author explicitly asks for detailed scrutiny, then I think your scrutiny is well-placed and should continue (and I do soon want to have a better structure that communicates more clearly in what parts of the site authors should expect their ideas to come under intense scrutiny).
If the post is just on the frontpage or on someone’s personal page, I think it would be better for the site overall if you would change the way you comment to be significantly less harsh, more welcoming to new users, and to generally include more effort on your side to try to understand the point the author is making (and otherwise to abstain from commenting).
I would like to discuss this more, but it is definitely the case that I’ve spent a really massive amount of time over the last month being involved in meta-discussion, and that this has been delaying a lot of important engineering work on the site. I hope I can get around to giving this whole topic a more thorough treatment at some later point in time, but for the sake of us finally launching the meetup system, I will have to keep it at this comment and won’t be available to discuss further. I do really apologize for that, and it sucks, and I wish I had more time to do all the things that need to get done.
I very much agree in principle with your last section, but I disagree with you that this was an instance of the OP saying something inscrutable or bizarre. My intuitive reaction is that you are being willfully obtuse/uncharitable/hostile—though I realize this is very possibly false, and that it is simply the case that different things are more or less clear/helpful to different people. But that should be a reason for you not to insist that if you personally don’t understand or benefit from something, then nobody else does and the post is Objectively Bad!
The complaint in the grandparent was aimed at TAG, not at the OP.
Oh, I see, that was unclear to me.
There is such a thing as assumed common knowledge. When two psychiatrists discuss Xanax, they are probably not going to say “Xanax, which by the way is a tranquilizer, ….”