I’ve been lurking for years. I’m a lifelong rationalist who was hesitant to join because I didn’t like HPMOR. (Didn’t have a problem with the methods of rationality; I just didn’t like how the characters’ personalities changed, and I didn’t find them relatable anymore.) I finally signed up due to an irrepressible urge to upvote a particular comment I really liked.
I struggle with LW content, tbh. It takes so long to translate it into something readable, something that isn’t too littered with jargon and self-reference to be understandable for a generalist with ADHD. By the time I’ve spent 3 hours doing that for any given “8 minute” article, I’m typically left thinking, “No shit, Sherlock. Thanks for wasting another 3 hours of my life on your need to prove your academic worth to a community of people who talk like they still think IQ is an accurate way to assess intelligence.”
AI helps, but still, it’s just… ugh. How do I find the good shit? I want to LEARN MORE FASTER BETTER.
The obvious advice is of course “whatever thing you want to learn, let an LLM help you learn it”. Throw that post in the context window, zoom in on terms, ask it to provide examples in the way the author intended it, let it generate exercises, let it rewrite it for your reading level.
If you’re already doing that and it’s not helping, maybe… more dakka? And you’re going to have to expand on what your goals are and what you want to learn/make.
I’ve been lurking for not years. I also have ADHD and I deeply relate to your sentiment about the jargon here and it doesn’t help that when I manage to concentrate enough to get through a post and read the 5 substack articles it links to and skim the 5 substack articles they link to, it’s… pretty hit or miss. I remember reading one saying something about moral relativism not being obviously true and it felt like all the jargon and all the philosophical concepts mentioned only served to sufficiently confuse the reader (and I guess the writer too) so that it’s not. I will say though that I don’t get that feeling reading the sequences. Or stuff written by other rationalist GOATs. The obscure terms there don’t serve as signals of the author’s sophistication or ways to make their ideas less accesible. They’re there because there are actually useful bundles of meaning that are used often enough to warrant a shortcut.
I’ve been lurking for years. I’m a lifelong rationalist who was hesitant to join because I didn’t like HPMOR. (Didn’t have a problem with the methods of rationality; I just didn’t like how the characters’ personalities changed, and I didn’t find them relatable anymore.) I finally signed up due to an irrepressible urge to upvote a particular comment I really liked.
I struggle with LW content, tbh. It takes so long to translate it into something readable, something that isn’t too littered with jargon and self-reference to be understandable for a generalist with ADHD. By the time I’ve spent 3 hours doing that for any given “8 minute” article, I’m typically left thinking, “No shit, Sherlock. Thanks for wasting another 3 hours of my life on your need to prove your academic worth to a community of people who talk like they still think IQ is an accurate way to assess intelligence.”
AI helps, but still, it’s just… ugh. How do I find the good shit? I want to LEARN MORE FASTER BETTER.
Halp, pls.
The obvious advice is of course “whatever thing you want to learn, let an LLM help you learn it”. Throw that post in the context window, zoom in on terms, ask it to provide examples in the way the author intended it, let it generate exercises, let it rewrite it for your reading level.
If you’re already doing that and it’s not helping, maybe… more dakka? And you’re going to have to expand on what your goals are and what you want to learn/make.
No idea. My favorite stuff is cryptic and self-referential, and I think IQ is a reasonable metric for assessing intelligence statistically, for a group of people.
I’ve been lurking for not years. I also have ADHD and I deeply relate to your sentiment about the jargon here and it doesn’t help that when I manage to concentrate enough to get through a post and read the 5 substack articles it links to and skim the 5 substack articles they link to, it’s… pretty hit or miss. I remember reading one saying something about moral relativism not being obviously true and it felt like all the jargon and all the philosophical concepts mentioned only served to sufficiently confuse the reader (and I guess the writer too) so that it’s not. I will say though that I don’t get that feeling reading the sequences. Or stuff written by other rationalist GOATs. The obscure terms there don’t serve as signals of the author’s sophistication or ways to make their ideas less accesible. They’re there because there are actually useful bundles of meaning that are used often enough to warrant a shortcut.