I did change the post on the blog as well, not only the LW version, to the new version. This wasn’t a case of ‘I shouldn’t have to change this but Raemon is being dense’ but rather ‘I see two of the best people on this site focusing on this one sentence in massively distracting ways so I’m clearly doing something wrong here’ and reaching the conclusion that this is how humans read articles so this line needs to go. And indeed, to draw a clear distinction between the posts where I am doing pure model building, from the posts with action calls.
I got frustrated because it feels like this is an expensive sacrifice that shouldn’t be necessary. And because I was worried that this was an emergent pattern and dilemma against clarity, where if your call to clarity hints at a call to action people focus on the call to action, and if you don’t call to action then people (especially outside of LW) say “That was nice and all but you didn’t tell me what to do with that so what’s the point?” and/or therefore forget what said. And the whole issue of calls to action vs. clarity has been central to some recent private discussions recently. where very high-level rationalists have repeatedly reacted to calls for clarity as if they are calls to action, in patterns that seem optimized for preventing clarity and common knowledge. All of which I’m struggling to figure out how to explain.
There’s also the gaslighting thing where people do politics while pretending they’re not doing that, then accuse anyone who calls them out on it of doing politics (and then, of course, the worry where it goes deeper and someone accuses someone of accusing someone of playing politics, which can be very true and important but more frequently is next-level gaslighting).
We also need to do a better job of figuring out how to do things that require a lot of groundwork—to teach the hard mode advanced class. There was a time when everyone was expected to have read the sequences and understand them, which helped a lot here. But at the time, I was actively terrified of commenting let alone posting, so it certainly wasn’t free.
Right.
I did change the post on the blog as well, not only the LW version, to the new version. This wasn’t a case of ‘I shouldn’t have to change this but Raemon is being dense’ but rather ‘I see two of the best people on this site focusing on this one sentence in massively distracting ways so I’m clearly doing something wrong here’ and reaching the conclusion that this is how humans read articles so this line needs to go. And indeed, to draw a clear distinction between the posts where I am doing pure model building, from the posts with action calls.
I got frustrated because it feels like this is an expensive sacrifice that shouldn’t be necessary. And because I was worried that this was an emergent pattern and dilemma against clarity, where if your call to clarity hints at a call to action people focus on the call to action, and if you don’t call to action then people (especially outside of LW) say “That was nice and all but you didn’t tell me what to do with that so what’s the point?” and/or therefore forget what said. And the whole issue of calls to action vs. clarity has been central to some recent private discussions recently. where very high-level rationalists have repeatedly reacted to calls for clarity as if they are calls to action, in patterns that seem optimized for preventing clarity and common knowledge. All of which I’m struggling to figure out how to explain.
There’s also the gaslighting thing where people do politics while pretending they’re not doing that, then accuse anyone who calls them out on it of doing politics (and then, of course, the worry where it goes deeper and someone accuses someone of accusing someone of playing politics, which can be very true and important but more frequently is next-level gaslighting).
We also need to do a better job of figuring out how to do things that require a lot of groundwork—to teach the hard mode advanced class. There was a time when everyone was expected to have read the sequences and understand them, which helped a lot here. But at the time, I was actively terrified of commenting let alone posting, so it certainly wasn’t free.