For instance, I recently came up with a complex plan to achieve one of my goals. Then I strawmanned myself; the strawman version of why this plan would fail was simply “large and complicated plans don’t work.” I thought about that for a moment, concluded “yep, large and complicated plans don’t work,” and came up with a simple, elegant plan to achieve the same ends.
You even mention an example and then still fail to actually give it. That annoyed me because it would have been nice to see this abstract idea grounded.
You even mention an example and then still fail to actually give it. That annoyed me because it would have been nice to see this abstract idea grounded.
In general I think LessWrong cares far too much about this sort of detail. I posted this in Discussion rather than Main precisely because I didn’t want to write up a bunch of examples to express a straightforward principle.
Thing is, it’s not straightforward to me what exactly I have to imagine, and I don’t seem to be alone with this. (See e.g. Nectanebo’s comment below.) In general, the established practice on LessWrong is to give examples to illustrate what you mean, and I disagree that this is “caring far too much about that sort of detail”.
This approach 80/20s the point I want to convey. Writing up a bunch of examples is more work than the entire rest of the post combined and IMO adds substantially less utility, so I’m not doing it here. I’ll probably do so when/if I write this up for Main.
You even mention an example and then still fail to actually give it. That annoyed me because it would have been nice to see this abstract idea grounded.
In general I think LessWrong cares far too much about this sort of detail. I posted this in Discussion rather than Main precisely because I didn’t want to write up a bunch of examples to express a straightforward principle.
Thing is, it’s not straightforward to me what exactly I have to imagine, and I don’t seem to be alone with this. (See e.g. Nectanebo’s comment below.) In general, the established practice on LessWrong is to give examples to illustrate what you mean, and I disagree that this is “caring far too much about that sort of detail”.
This approach 80/20s the point I want to convey. Writing up a bunch of examples is more work than the entire rest of the post combined and IMO adds substantially less utility, so I’m not doing it here. I’ll probably do so when/if I write this up for Main.