If you search the text of the book, e.g. with Google Books, you can see the four places where it appears and get a sense of the context and meaning. His talk of pyramids is similar to Eliezer’s Void or Musashi’s nameless virtue or God; seeing that connection should I think be enough to figure the rest out? Maybe? It’s a pretty deep piece of wisdom though so a lot of the meaning might not be immediately obvious. Hence my trepidation about explaining it; it’d take too long.
If it’s too deep to be understandable without explanation, and you don’t think it’s feasible to explain it here, then why did you put the quote up in the first place?
Heterogeneous audience and asymmetric costs/benefits to reading it: people who don’t get it aren’t harmed much by its presence, the few people who do get it should benefit quite a bit.
Shouldn’t a good pithy saying work in the opposite way ? The people who don’t get it walk away enlightened (or, at least, filled with curiosity regarding the topic), while the ones in the know are unharmed.
What’s the point of telling the chosen few something which they already know ?
It’s something that you could have derived if you’d thought to but didn’t, like Bayes’ rule. Once it’s pointed out you immediately see why it’s true and gain a fair bit of insight, but first you have to understand basic algebra. It’s basically like clichés like “be the change you want to see in the world” but on a higher level; most normal people don’t have enough knowledge to correctly interpret “be the change you want to see in the world”, and most smart people don’t have enough knowledge to correctly interpret “interpret every phenomenon as a particular dealing of God with your soul”, but the few who do should benefit a lot.
In that case I’m voting down your quote, because, not being one of the Elect, I see no particular meaning in it. But if you wrote some sort of a Sequence on the topic, I might vote it up.
I think that’s the correct choice; the quote and quotes like it should be voted down to minus ten or so, because most people will get no benefit from it.
I am more likley to read heavily downovted quotes, simply for the sake of novelty, than quotes voted at −2 to 4 karma. I don’t think I’m in the benefit-receiving subset though.
I read strongly downvoted posts as well, but perhaps they have more than just novelty value. For a post that is merely bad, people usually stop downvoting it once it’s negative. But something voted to −10 or below is often bad in a way that serves as an example of what not to do. Heavily downvoted comments can be educational.
Yes, especially if I point them to it. Having it already sitting there with links is useful. There’s also a non-negligible subset of people that read my comments from my user page.
Could you explain what you mean by that?
If you search the text of the book, e.g. with Google Books, you can see the four places where it appears and get a sense of the context and meaning. His talk of pyramids is similar to Eliezer’s Void or Musashi’s nameless virtue or God; seeing that connection should I think be enough to figure the rest out? Maybe? It’s a pretty deep piece of wisdom though so a lot of the meaning might not be immediately obvious. Hence my trepidation about explaining it; it’d take too long.
If it’s too deep to be understandable without explanation, and you don’t think it’s feasible to explain it here, then why did you put the quote up in the first place?
Heterogeneous audience and asymmetric costs/benefits to reading it: people who don’t get it aren’t harmed much by its presence, the few people who do get it should benefit quite a bit.
Shouldn’t a good pithy saying work in the opposite way ? The people who don’t get it walk away enlightened (or, at least, filled with curiosity regarding the topic), while the ones in the know are unharmed.
What’s the point of telling the chosen few something which they already know ?
It’s something that you could have derived if you’d thought to but didn’t, like Bayes’ rule. Once it’s pointed out you immediately see why it’s true and gain a fair bit of insight, but first you have to understand basic algebra. It’s basically like clichés like “be the change you want to see in the world” but on a higher level; most normal people don’t have enough knowledge to correctly interpret “be the change you want to see in the world”, and most smart people don’t have enough knowledge to correctly interpret “interpret every phenomenon as a particular dealing of God with your soul”, but the few who do should benefit a lot.
In that case I’m voting down your quote, because, not being one of the Elect, I see no particular meaning in it. But if you wrote some sort of a Sequence on the topic, I might vote it up.
I think that’s the correct choice; the quote and quotes like it should be voted down to minus ten or so, because most people will get no benefit from it.
Do you consider it more than negligibly likely that the benefit-receiving subset will read a comment voted down to −10 or so?
I am more likley to read heavily downovted quotes, simply for the sake of novelty, than quotes voted at −2 to 4 karma. I don’t think I’m in the benefit-receiving subset though.
I read strongly downvoted posts as well, but perhaps they have more than just novelty value. For a post that is merely bad, people usually stop downvoting it once it’s negative. But something voted to −10 or below is often bad in a way that serves as an example of what not to do. Heavily downvoted comments can be educational.
Yes, especially if I point them to it. Having it already sitting there with links is useful. There’s also a non-negligible subset of people that read my comments from my user page.