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katydee
Karma: 4,700
The most important thing in life is to be free to do things. There are only two ways to insure that freedom—you can be rich or you can you reduce your needs to zero.
Colonel John Boyd
I’d like to see more humor on LessWrong, but I don’t consider this post particularly funny.
This post seems uncomfortably arrogant to me.
Can you please reformat this post so that it uses the default LW font?
This post seems like a great example of (a variant of) the planning fallacy in action.
I suspect that the common error is not the one you identify, but rather its reverse; it strikes me that there are significantly more people who care too much about money than there are people who care too little about it.
While posts like this are very useful for those who care too little about money (because, let’s be real—money is pretty useful!), I consider them somewhat dangerous for those who care too much about it.
In other words, I like this and think it’s great for the intended audience, but I think it may be harmful to an unintended audience who will nevertheless read it anyway.
I think this post is wrong and dangerous, but I like it a lot and I think you’re bold to post it. Hopefully it will help more than it harms.
Great content, but this post is significantly too long. Honestly, each of your main points seems worthy of a post of its own!
If you can discover in human life anything better than justice, truth, temperance, and courage… if, I say, you can see anything better than this, then turn to it with all your heart and profit from this supreme good which you have discovered.
But if nothing better is revealed… if you find all else to be trivial and cheap when compared to this, then grant no place to anything else which, if once you turn to it and turn aside from your path, you would no longer be able without distraction to pay the highest honor to the good that is proper to you and truly your own.
-Marcus Aurelius, Meditations (Book III)
Despite being at +13, this post has been somewhat controversial, with a positive vote ratio of only 73%-- I’d be interested in hearing what caused some people to downvote it.
My current feeling is that this comment should have been part of the original post—I thought it was implicit, but evidently this was not the case. Therefore, I’m especially interested in hearing comments from downvoters who downvoted the post for reasons other than the above.
At least in our English class, we were taught that the only acceptable response to being asked “How do you do” is to repeat “How do you do” back.
This is actually true, at least in terms of what’s ‘proper’ to say!
However, very few people know about it anymore, at least in the United States—that’s what I was alluding to when I said that “most people of my generation don’t really know how to react to this.” In fact, I’ve legitimately never heard anyone other than myself make the “correct” response there.
My point is, it’s kind of tricky to declare an action “worse than worthless” without having very detailed information about all of the actors involved.
A fair point. Note, though, that my opponent said that his aesthetic preference was “useless but not actually harmful.” This post is intended to show how such preferences can, in fact, be harmful rather than merely useless.
It is certainly possible that someone would care more about aesthetics than about winning and be willing to accept that tradeoff—but in this case, the fact that it even was a tradeoff went unrecognized.
One interesting thing I’ve noticed is that if you greet someone with an unorthodox but still “within norms” greeting, it can break them out of this pattern.
For instance, I often greet people with “How do you do?”. Most people of my generation don’t really know how to react to this, and it makes them stop, think, and give a more “real” answer than if I asked “What’s up?” or “How’s it going?”.
If you try to do this, though, be careful that you don’t go too far—I’ve seen people try to do a similar thing with stuff like “Good morrow” and it tends to look affected.
Yes and yes.
Heavily downvoted comments, yes. This proposal is more oriented towards everyday voting situations.
Here we have an example of an explanatory comment from Larks that failed to communicate anything to you.
Did you even read my reply? It literally starts with “this comment was actually extremely helpful.”
(Oh, also the reason your comment is surface-level unhelpful is because “I thought it was a bad idea” isn’t a real explanation of your decision process, not because explaining votes is inherently bad—but of course you knew that already.)
Ironically, this comment was actually extremely helpful. I certainly don’t downvote things that I think are bad ideas, only things that I think violate standards of discourse or are inappropriate for the venue in which they are posted.
If downvote is just being used as the “I disagree” or “I don’t like this” button, I think LessWrong has far bigger problems to deal with!
One reason to classify beliefs as contrarian is that it helps you discuss them more effectively. My presentation of an idea that I expect will seem contrarian is going to look very different from my presentation of an idea that I expect will seem mainstream, and it’s useful to know what will and won’t be surprising or jarring to people.
This seems most relevant to stage 3-- if you hold what you believe to be a correct contrarian view (as opposed to a correct mainstream view), this has important ramifications as to how to proceed in conversation. Thus, knowing which of your views are contrarian has instrumental value.