Programmer, rationalist, chess player, father, altruist.
cata
Karma: 3,416
Great writeup. Makes me wonder if I should do similar.
I’m a parent. Personally I’m pleased with my choice to have a kid. It’s a lot of work for a lot of reward.
Me and my wife try to split the work close to 50⁄50. However, if I had to do it by myself or almost completely by myself, it might feel like it was too much work for me to be happy. I think that’s a matter of my lazy personality and it might be different for others.
It’s extremely useful to trust my wife enough that when she is in charge of deciding stuff for our kid, I can almost always just feel comfortable that she will do her best, and not be tempted to worry or micromanage, even though she doesn’t always do the same things I would do. I think that kind of mutual trust is probably more important for parenting than romantic love, although I don’t know how separable the two really are in practice.
I was under the impression that Oliver Sacks was well regarded among his professional colleagues, so he wouldn’t just make up a bunch of important stuff out of whole cloth.
I have read about people who were skeptical of the substance of the Phineas Gage story too (i.e. that he had this big involuntary personality shift after his injury.)
I also came here to say I didn’t understand this hypothetical at all. If I choose $1000 then what happens to users who don’t want to pay $1000?
Am I supposed to imagine that I am implementing a paywall on LW and choosing what price I would set it at? Of course I would set it at $0.
I don’t think this 10% closeness makes any sense when it’s 10% of the “numeric AD year”.
Without checking a source, estimate the probability that the answer you just gave is within 10% of the true value. (So, if you guessed 1000 AD, it’s between 900 and 1100 inclusive.) Same rules for percents apply as above.
It’s a two-place function. When I go to a conference that everyone says this same stuff about, then I usually have the most fun by attending talks and taking my time thinking about the stuff related to the talks, rather than hobnobbing.
Great concept but the pacing seemed strange.
I have been frustrated every year when it’s time to vote for the local school board elections and none of the candidates bother saying how they behaved during the most impactful time for a school board in living memory. I really don’t get it.
I think the truthseeking norms on LW are specifically useful for collective sense-making and sharing ideas about things where there isn’t already a very confident consensus. As an example, during the COVID pandemic, many of the other groups of intellectuals who were trying to figure things out had various limitations:
Some had conflicts of interest with regard to their own work.
Some were published (self- or otherwise) by businesses more interested in engaging than informing.
Some considered themselves responsible for manipulating people’s behavior, rather than purely informing them.
Some were in sociopolitical situations that constrained what views were acceptable for them to hold.
That makes it difficult to use their output, at least if you are a layperson. Those constraints are less common in well-argued LW discussions about most topics.
Thanks, I was meaning to read this law but procrastinating!
I don’t think I understand the gist of this essay. It sounds like you want to claim that it didn’t make someone “knowledgeable” to read (and retain?) the contents of books like that. Why not? It sounds knowledgeable to me.
It’s subconscious so it’s hard to say but it’s clearly not “reading every word in order” and probably doesn’t involve reading every word. I think it’s a combination of being a fast but not exceptionally fast reader, plus a lot of domain knowledge so I can understand the stuff I am reading as fast as I read it, plus a ton of domain-specific skimming skill / pattern recognition to bring the interesting part to conscious attention.
I learned to program young enough that I don’t really remember the process, and I have about 25 years of experience, so I agree with the diagnosis.
I can certainly have a blind spot about logical reasoning related to a program, but I don’t recall having a “it says it right there” kind of blind spot.
How does one “read the docs?”. Sometimes I ask how a senior dev figured something out, and they say “I read the documentation and it explained it.” And I’m like “okay, duh. but… there’s so much fucking documentation. I can’t possibly be expected to read it all?”
I have a pet hypothesis that there is some skill or ability like this which comprises a huge amount of variation in programming ability. Here is an experience I had many times while working with my professional programmer colleagues:
My coworker has a confusing bug and asks me to walk over and take a look at it.
They start trying to explain the bug from their perspective while clicking around doing stuff like building the program or paging through the code.
While they do that, I am reading everything on their screen while they talk, so then I notice some random thing in their codebase that doesn’t make sense to me and point out that thing, which is something they hadn’t realized, and that solves the bug.
Alternately:
I ask some question about the bug that involves figuring out how something works.
They put some search query into Google and it opens up a bunch of search results. They take about three seconds and click one of them that doesn’t look very useful to me. I say, “why don’t you go look at the sixth result which said it was a forum post from a person wondering the exact same thing?” They just didn’t read it.
Alternately:
They run the program and it starts producing about half a page of startup log output per second.
I interrupt them and say “why did it say X?” They say “where did it say that?” I say “about two pages up in the log.” One minute later, they have found the thing in the log that I read while the log was scrolling at half a page per second.
So there is some large difference in reading ability here that seems to be doing a huge amount of work, and I actually have no clue how I would even operate if I didn’t have that ability. It seems to me like I would just never know what was going on.
You could say the same for reading for sure. I think mimicry is more reliable. Actions speak louder then words. The only issue is that you often don’t have good access to someone successful to mimic for a complex behavior. But if you do have access, then you should mimic them more than you pay attention to what they say or write.
Mimicry is at least A-tier. Every person relies purely on mimicry for the first years of their life to learn the most important behaviors for them in the world. For most skills, at most times, an hour spent trying to mimic an expert is going to pay off more than an hour spent reading or reasoning.
I don’t think there’s a conflict between the two views. They can both be true simultaneously. Since both sides can produce compelling examples, they both probably are true simultaneously.
Neither is there an obvious conflict between Cummings’ and Pahlka’s solutions. It’s easy to imagine a civil service that is both more accountable to politicians, and also has a better feedback loop to those politicians. In fact, the solutions seem synergistic, because if the civil servants may be fired for under-delivering, they should be more motivated to get problems fixed via the feedback loop.
(Of course there is still a question as to which is the “bigger problem”.)
I agree. I think “existential” basically isn’t enough common parlance for most people to not just round it off to “big”, in the same way that “literally” becomes “very”.
This post makes me feel like you have a nail in your head. If you want to relate to other people you may have to accept that it’s possible to value different things.
I think if you are an unusual person, then “imagining how you would feel if you were physically in their position” isn’t really that useful a form of empathizing, and you have to take into account a lot of the real psychology of other people in order for it to be an informative exercise. I don’t know whether that will in itself produce kindness or gentleness but it’s probably a precondition.
This is very similar to my current experience. Perhaps I’m holding it wrong, but when I try to use Claude Code, I find that it can usually implement a feature in a way that’s as correct and efficient as I would write it, but it almost never implements it such that I am satisfied with the simplicity or organization. Typically I rewrite what it did and cut the LOC in half.
I am interested in trying out the new code simplifier to see whether it can do a good job. I have been asking Claude something like “while I test it, can you read over what you wrote and think about whether anything could be better or simpler?” and that catches a non-zero amount of issues but not the kind of substantial simplifications that it’s missing.