To change something, you must first describe it. To describe something, you must first see it. Hold still in one place for as long as it takes to see something
-- Diane Duane
Error
Karma: 3,312
Also, meta decisions take time to bring fruit at the object level, so when you make plans, you should spend the following days executing the plans instead of adjusting them; otherwise you decide without feedback.
Execution is Actual Work, though! Noooooooooooooooo!
(I’m adding that to my fortune file. I could use the reminder from time to time.)
I wonder what distinguishes sphexishness from a simple habit. They’re both unreflective, automatic, default behaviors, and “bad habits” are just habits that fail to achieve goals. But they feel different to me. The best I can come up with is something like: habits are in theory changeable, whereas an actual sphex wasp will never change its behavior based on experience. Habits are acting sphexish.
But we need habits. I’m reminded of this:
Civilization advances by extending the number of important operations which we can perform without thinking about them. Operations of thought are like cavalry charges in a battle -- they are strictly limited in number, they require fresh horses, and must only be made at decisive moments.
-- Alfred North Whitehead
So I think I agree with you about noticing and agency. Agency isn’t the opposite of sphexishness. But it does seem to require choosing when to act so, and that requires noticing when you’re doing it.
(somewhere in my unposted-blog-notes folder is something about noticing that horrible mental loop where I click random links all over the web, no matter how much I’m not-enjoying-myself, because I can’t seem to context-switch. I titled it “Noticing Boredom.”)
Suggestion: Attach or link these, rather than putting them inline in a comment. I like that they’re available, but I had to scroll down many screens to find the actual comments.
I observe that the idea of incorrectly believing I’m bad at something doesn’t disturb me much, while the idea of incorrectly believing I’m good at something is mortifying.
I smell some kind of social signaling here.
Written as “Human-Aligned Summer School”, I first read it as an educational experiment aimed at not making kids suffer. For some reason I find the misinterpretation hilarious.
This seems related to something I’ve been thinking about recently: That the concept of “belief” would benefit from an analysis along the lines of How an Algorithm Feels from the Inside. What we describe as our “beliefs” are sometimes a map of the world (in the beliefs-paying-rent sense), and sometimes a signal to our social group that we share their map of the world, and sometimes a declaration of values, and probably sometimes other (often contradictory) things as well. But we act as if there’s a single mental concept underlying them. The ambiguities are hard to shake out, I think because the signal version is only useful if it pretends to be the map version.
(I feel sour about human nature whenever I start thinking about this, because it leaves me feeling like almost all communication is either speaking in bad faith, or displaying a complete lack of intellectual integrity, or both)
I don’t use Facebook, but I should try something similar with my RSS feeds.
I find it interesting that facebook responds to commenting by showing you more of the same. IIRC, posts that aggravate people are also the most likely to inspire them to comment. That suggests Facebook is effectively rigged to piss you off.
Does that match people’s experience? It matches my priors, but they’re weak priors, since I won’t touch the service with a ten foot pole.
An RSS feed would be nice. Aside from that, I like it. Curation of content is a lengthy and undervalued service.
Voting to deactivate MD parsing inside the WYSIWYG editor, provided a MD-only editor still exists. A tool should do one thing well.
I’ll copy my comment from the other thread in here, though, since it’s relevant: Don’t hide the alternate editor in the user profile. Make it selectable when commenting, and remember the selection. Quite aside from making it immediately obvious that there’s more than one way to post, it means you can measure users’ preferences by seeing what they use to post with, with much less selection bias (owing to much less inconvenience for the non-default option).
I was disappointed by the new site, but still voted to migrate. The conversation is here, and content is king. Despite my bitching, your team deserves a great deal of credit just for breathing life back into the community.
That being said:
Performance was a big complaint, and kept me off lesserwrong until greaterwrong showed up, but you already know about that and for all I know it may have been fixed. My complaints are less with lesserwrong itself than with modern web design in general, and are mainly variants on “use of javascript as a first resort instead of a last resort,” “interfaces that want you to notice them,” and “overly complex underlying mechanics.” In short, lesserwrong may well be a fantastically engineered site, designed under a paradigm I am predisposed to despise. Discount my opinions accordingly.
(if I may nerdrage for a moment, the top navbar that folds down as soon as I scroll up, covering the text I scrolled up to see, is a common web misfeature that should die and its inventor should be forced to play a variant of the transparent newcomb’s problem where both boxes contain tigers.)
Note that the fact that greaterwrong can even exist (that is, that there’s an API with enough power and stability to make an alternate interface) is a huge win, and you and whoever else made the decision to allow third party clients deserve +gazillion karma for it. …but I still have to complain that said API is not documented.
Checking lesserwrong itself for the first time since GW became available, it looks as if it has improved. The comment box in particular is less odious, and the site as a whole no longer seems to grind my browser to a halt. These are good improvements. I’m sure there are other things not obvious at first glance.
If you do want to chat with a quasi-naysayer, I’m on the LW Slack as Error, on Freenode #lesswrong as ehs, and on xmpp as error@xmpp.feymarch.net. I’m best reached in the afternoons, eastern time.
Okay, cool. As long as it’s on your radar.
This is a concern for me too. A suggestion I made in feedback: Don’t break inbound links. Keep the old site, static, under archive.lesswrong.com or something, and redirect classic-format url paths to the archive.
There is a lot of valuable material on the classic site. It might not be useful for current discussion, but let’s not lose it, or let it get buried on archive.org.
(come to think of it, if maintaining an archive is itself unworkable, a redirect to archive.org might be an acceptable next-best alternative)
I would. WYSIWYG is a terrible editing paradigm, but some people like it, so I won’t argue against providing it. Trying to mix WYSIWYG with markup-based editing, though, is far worse.
I further suggest that the plain option not be hidden out of the way. Make it selectable when commenting, and remember the selection. I wasn’t even aware it existed until just now.
(edit: To be fair, I’m probably going to keep using greaterwrong regardless. Discount my opinion to whatever extent applies)
I don’t think that edit was present when I composed, but thanks.
For users that aren’t satisfied with those and don’t mind speaking CSS, Stylish and similar browser extensions are an option. I picked up css customization mainly to add max-width to body text that does not have it, but it’s good for pretty much any case where you think a site designer’s choices were unwise.
many more people want you to surrender to them than it is good for you to surrender to, and the world is full of people who will demand your apology (and make it seem socially mandatory) for things you do not or should not regret.
This was my first thought, too. I’m all in favor of the argument against weasel apologies, but sometimes the reason you’re giving a weasel apology is that, by your own lights, you didn’t do anything wrong.
Weasel apologies are never appropriate, but sometimes a sincere one also isn’t appropriate. Sometimes the appropriate response is “No, I did the right thing here. Sorry, but no social surrender will be forthcoming.” You’ll have to accept the probable social consequences, of course, but that’s part of the price of integrity.
Why not just make the LW2 site better, rather than make another site and have two sites that do the same thing?
A choice of clients is good for users. If an interface sucks, but multiple clients are available, you can switch to one with an interface that does not suck. If no clients have interfaces that do not suck, in principle you have the option of writing your own, which seems to be what happened here.
The best people at administering a service are not necessarily the best at programming a UI, and vice-versa. Allowing alternate clients lets you make use of comparative advantage.
Competition between clients is good for users for the same reasons it is good for customers in the market. New features are created for advantage; good ones are copied and spread. Niche preferences (especially those of power users) stand a chance of getting accounted for.
In short, multiple robust clients makes all clients better. If I may mount my hobby horse for a moment, the lack of client (and service) choice is part of why “modern” web clients still have not caught up to 90s-era newsreaders. This can only be a good thing for LW.
Why do more people need to know this particular email-password combination?
This one is a complaint I think I agree with, although the issue only affects web clients. From the LW2 thread it sounds like the author is working on it.
I’ve been using this for a while (actually using the rss feed from it), but I don’t know where I got the link and I had no idea it was a secret project. May you receive a 50% karma bonus/turn.
How is this engineered under the hood? Something like nginx->greaterwrongapp->LW2 API-> LW2 database? You note elsewhere in the thread that GW uses the same underlying database as LW2. I find it unlikely that the LW2 DB is exposed to the open net (at least it shouldn’t be O_O), so something else is going on.
That you could do this at all suggests there’s an API stable enough for third parties to use....which suggests a native client might be possible...which is of interest to me, but the last time I asked if there was a documented API I didn’t get an answer.
(I see your link to GraphQL, but am unsure how it fits into the picture)
Datum: I have a Pixel 3 (known for a relatively small battery) and the only time battery becomes an issue is when I forget to put it on the charger overnight.
But I don’t watch video (too small a screen), play games (ditto), send email (fuck phone keyboards), or do much of anything but SMS, rare phone calls, and internet lookups when I’m away from a keyboard. I think a lot of worrywarting over phone battery capacity stems from trying to use them for things that are better done on a real computer.
That said, I got an external battery after reading this post. I have one use case: at conventions, when I use it constantly to read the schedule. Buying something for a single use case seemed out of line at first, but eventually I thought of it this way: if I’m willing to spend $30 for slightly more convenient parking, I should be willing to spend $30 to stop worrying about phone charge forever.