I now sent the following message to niplav, asking them if they wanted me to take the dialogue down and republish as shortform. I am slightly embarrassed about not having considered that it’s somewhat inconvenient to receive one of these dialogue-things without warning.
I just didn’t think through that dialogue-post thing at all. Obviously it will show up on your profile-wall (I didn’t think about that), and that has lots of reputational repercussions and such (which matter!). I wasn’t simulating your perspective at all in the decision to publish it in the way I did. I just operated on heuristics like:
“it’s good to have personal convo in public”
so our younglings don’t grow into an environment of pluralistic ignorance, thinking they are the only ones with personality
“it’s epistemically healthy to address one’s writing to someone-in-particular”
eg bc I’m less likely to slip into professionalism mode
and bc that someone-in-particular (𖨆) is less likely to be impressed by fake proxies for good reasoning like how much work I seem to have put in, how mathy I sound, how confident I seem, how fewerrors I make, how aware-of-existing-research I seem, …
and bc 𖨆 already knows me, it’s difficult to pretend I know more than I do
eg if I write abt Singular Learning Theory to the faceless crowd, I could easily convince some of them that I like totally knew what I was talking about; but when I talk to you, you already know something abt my skill-level, so you’d be able to smell my attempted fakery a mile away
“other readers benefit more (on some dimensions) from reading something which was addressed to 𖨆, because
“It is as if there existed, for what seems like millennia, tracing back to the very origins of mathematics and of other arts and sciences, a sort of “conspiracy of silence” surrounding [the] “unspeakable labors” which precede the birth of each new idea, both big and small…” — Alexander Grothendieck
---
If you prefer, I’ll move the post into a shortform preceded by:
[This started as something I wanted to send to niplav, but then I realized I wanted to share these ideas with more people. So I wrote it with the intention of publishing it, while keeping the style and content mostly as if I had purely addressed it to them alone.]
I feel somewhat embarrassed about having posted it as a dialogue without thinking it through, and this embarrassment exactly cancels out my disinclination against unpublishing it, so I’m neutral wrt moving it to shortform. Let me know! ^^
In this particular instance, I’m completely fine this happening—because I trust & like you :-)
In general, this move is probably too much for the other party, unless they give consent. But as I said, I’m fine/happy with being addressed in a dialogue—and LessWrong is better for this than schelling.pt, especially for the longer convos we tend to have. Who knows, maybe I’ll even find time to respond in a non-vacuous manner & we can have a long-term back & forth in this dialogue.
I now sent the following message to niplav, asking them if they wanted me to take the dialogue down and republish as shortform. I am slightly embarrassed about not having considered that it’s somewhat inconvenient to receive one of these dialogue-things without warning.
I just didn’t think through that dialogue-post thing at all. Obviously it will show up on your profile-wall (I didn’t think about that), and that has lots of reputational repercussions and such (which matter!). I wasn’t simulating your perspective at all in the decision to publish it in the way I did. I just operated on heuristics like:
“it’s good to have personal convo in public”
so our younglings don’t grow into an environment of pluralistic ignorance, thinking they are the only ones with personality
“it’s epistemically healthy to address one’s writing to someone-in-particular”
eg bc I’m less likely to slip into professionalism mode
and bc that someone-in-particular (𖨆) is less likely to be impressed by fake proxies for good reasoning like how much work I seem to have put in, how mathy I sound, how confident I seem, how few errors I make, how aware-of-existing-research I seem, …
and bc 𖨆 already knows me, it’s difficult to pretend I know more than I do
eg if I write abt Singular Learning Theory to the faceless crowd, I could easily convince some of them that I like totally knew what I was talking about; but when I talk to you, you already know something abt my skill-level, so you’d be able to smell my attempted fakery a mile away
“other readers benefit more (on some dimensions) from reading something which was addressed to 𖨆, because
“It is as if there existed, for what seems like millennia, tracing back to the very origins of mathematics and of other arts and sciences, a sort of “conspiracy of silence” surrounding [the] “unspeakable labors” which precede the birth of each new idea, both big and small…”
— Alexander Grothendieck
---
If you prefer, I’ll move the post into a shortform preceded by:
[This started as something I wanted to send to niplav, but then I realized I wanted to share these ideas with more people. So I wrote it with the intention of publishing it, while keeping the style and content mostly as if I had purely addressed it to them alone.]
I feel somewhat embarrassed about having posted it as a dialogue without thinking it through, and this embarrassment exactly cancels out my disinclination against unpublishing it, so I’m neutral wrt moving it to shortform. Let me know! ^^
P.S. No hurry.
In this particular instance, I’m completely fine this happening—because I trust & like you :-)
In general, this move is probably too much for the other party, unless they give consent. But as I said, I’m fine/happy with being addressed in a dialogue—and LessWrong is better for this than schelling.pt, especially for the longer convos we tend to have. Who knows, maybe I’ll even find time to respond in a non-vacuous manner & we can have a long-term back & forth in this dialogue.