I also(?) have a sort of intuitive sense that this post is Not Less Wrong, in some sense. (Probably because “contemporary politics, boo.”
At the same time, I’m glad you wrote it, glad I read it, and I got useful things from it. Since I wouldn’t have read it if you hadn’t posted it here, that kind of commits me to thinking it’s lucky for me that you did.
I don’t find the categories confusing, I’d speculate that this is because there’s a lot of overlap in the ontologies being used by you, me, and Nerst- these feel like clusters-I-recognize-and-care-about rather than gerrymandered-feeling ones. But this is interestingly subjective- a lot of people mentally carving reality in ways that seem gerrymandered to me are doing that because they care about different features of category membership than I do, not being dishonest or disingenuous or even making any kind of mistake. This leaves me without any principled way to determine how much rigor is really needed- any level less than “infinite” is gonna confuse some people.
I’m trying to keep the content enumerated in this comment to LW-approved/LW-typical topic areas- I get a lot of value out of this place, getting banned would suck, and I really do owe the people running it a certain amount of consideration. This is also why my comment says things like “I’m glad I read this, and I guess I’m glad you posted it here so I could” rather than “AWESOME ARTICLE! Thanks so much, I have all kinds of thoughts about this!” but I do wanna convey my sincere gratitude.
I’m interested in how you think this fits the trajectory we’ve seen since you wrote it- a few things jumped out to me, there- but I think I’m gonna wait and ask you about that somewhere I can be sure I’m not violating norms. (I’m not great at intuiting ambiguous or unarticulated social norms, so I try to leave myself a lot of slack- there’s a decent chance I may need it later). I think I actually know you from twitter- I’m like 97% confident you’re the same person, both based on username and conversational content- so venue-shuffling doesn’t seem likely to present much practical difficulty.
One more marginal comment: I have the strong sense you’re doing truthseeking here- trying to actually model the physical world. I’ve just come from an argument about politics on another blog that I gradually realized was… not about that, at all, after I’d already emotionally invested in it some. That’s locally a very disheartening experience- it doesn’t last, but you feel pretty bad for the next hour. This kinda pulled me out of it, and I’m thankful.
Retrospectively, I’d say that I was doing counterintuitiveness-seeking. “Hey, look at this, the commonly used extremely simple model says that definitely P, while this more complex model (which seems to me to be more descriptive of the world) says that maybe not P.” This is mildly dangerous on its own, because while it runs on truthseeking, it also subordinates that to contrarianism. And doing this on a political topic was particularly stupid of me.
I also(?) have a sort of intuitive sense that this post is Not Less Wrong, in some sense. (Probably because “contemporary politics, boo.”
At the same time, I’m glad you wrote it, glad I read it, and I got useful things from it. Since I wouldn’t have read it if you hadn’t posted it here, that kind of commits me to thinking it’s lucky for me that you did.
I don’t find the categories confusing, I’d speculate that this is because there’s a lot of overlap in the ontologies being used by you, me, and Nerst- these feel like clusters-I-recognize-and-care-about rather than gerrymandered-feeling ones. But this is interestingly subjective- a lot of people mentally carving reality in ways that seem gerrymandered to me are doing that because they care about different features of category membership than I do, not being dishonest or disingenuous or even making any kind of mistake. This leaves me without any principled way to determine how much rigor is really needed- any level less than “infinite” is gonna confuse some people.
I’m trying to keep the content enumerated in this comment to LW-approved/LW-typical topic areas- I get a lot of value out of this place, getting banned would suck, and I really do owe the people running it a certain amount of consideration. This is also why my comment says things like “I’m glad I read this, and I guess I’m glad you posted it here so I could” rather than “AWESOME ARTICLE! Thanks so much, I have all kinds of thoughts about this!” but I do wanna convey my sincere gratitude.
I’m interested in how you think this fits the trajectory we’ve seen since you wrote it- a few things jumped out to me, there- but I think I’m gonna wait and ask you about that somewhere I can be sure I’m not violating norms. (I’m not great at intuiting ambiguous or unarticulated social norms, so I try to leave myself a lot of slack- there’s a decent chance I may need it later). I think I actually know you from twitter- I’m like 97% confident you’re the same person, both based on username and conversational content- so venue-shuffling doesn’t seem likely to present much practical difficulty.
One more marginal comment: I have the strong sense you’re doing truthseeking here- trying to actually model the physical world. I’ve just come from an argument about politics on another blog that I gradually realized was… not about that, at all, after I’d already emotionally invested in it some. That’s locally a very disheartening experience- it doesn’t last, but you feel pretty bad for the next hour. This kinda pulled me out of it, and I’m thankful.
Retrospectively, I’d say that I was doing counterintuitiveness-seeking. “Hey, look at this, the commonly used extremely simple model says that definitely P, while this more complex model (which seems to me to be more descriptive of the world) says that maybe not P.” This is mildly dangerous on its own, because while it runs on truthseeking, it also subordinates that to contrarianism. And doing this on a political topic was particularly stupid of me.