meedstrom

Karma: 127

meedstrom May 8, 2023, 1:12 PM
1 point
0
on: Self-Administered Gell-Mann Amnesia
Paraphrasing from How to Take Smart Notes by Sönke Ahrens: we easily get away with unfounded claims when we speak orally. We can distract from argumentative gaps with a “you know what I mean”, even if on introspection we would find that we don’t know what we mean. Writing permanent notes will make these gaps obvious.

meedstrom May 8, 2023, 1:02 PM
1 point
0
on: Where “the Sequences” Are Wrong
Thank you for writing this out. Don’t lose heart if the response isn’t what you’d hoped—some future post could even be curated into the featured section. Why I say that? The bits about ineffective self-talk:

He notices that he made a mistake by not trusting his gut instinct earlier enough, and then decides once again that he made another mistake. This is not, actually, the only reaction one could have. One could instead react in the following way: “Oops, I guess I didn’t make a mistake after all.” These two different reactions calibrate the mind in two different directions.

For me, it’s been important to change my self-talk towards compassion and acceptance, and this presents an interesting new dimension. If it helps us experience life (including our rationalist journey) as more fun, that’s so important. Ties in with what Nate was saying about stoking genuine enthusiasm, in his sequence Replacing Guilt.

meedstrom May 3, 2023, 2:19 PM
1 point
0
in reply to: Elizabeth’s comment on: In favor of steelmanning
Finding the cruxes?

meedstrom Jan 20, 2023, 12:08 PM
1 point
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in reply to: trevor’s comment on: Vegan Nutrition Testing Project: Interim Report
(To clarify, that’s 6% RDI, not 6% by volume, which would be worrying.)

I’m confused. Are you saying 1 cup of organic peas is “half a day’s intake of vegetables” for you?

meedstrom Jan 20, 2023, 11:56 AM
2 points
0
in reply to: npostavs’s comment on: Why you should learn sign language
It happens, but you can’t exchange complex ideas this way. You know when someone’s talking and you nod or say “Yeah” to show you get it without interrupting? There’s a number of other short phrases you could say if you wanted, like “I know” or “Impossible” or “Dunno”, and that’s mostly what we deafies in Sweden do IME. It’s rare that hearing people do this, breaks a norm I guess, but it’s in principle you could do it. With sign you can also say a bit more complicated things without breaking flow like “That’s a misunderstanding” or “You’re lying” or sometimes drop in a whole sentence like “Actually no she didn’t ”… but at that point the conversation is getting heated and starting to break down.

I guess if you wanted to construct a fulltime full-duplex mode of conversation it would be a bit easier with hands than voices. Or to let one speaker use hands and the other use voice, so as to use different parts of the brain.

meedstrom Jan 20, 2023, 11:29 AM
2 points
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in reply to: Alicorn’s comment on: Why you should learn sign language
As a deaf person, I’m always teaching people to sign, like when I move into a new house, and I do see a difference between learners. Some people don’t know what to do with their hands and end up “tangling their elbows together”, as you so vividly describe, while others have a talent as if they’d been waiting to sign all their lives. But this gap mostly closes after 3-5 months of living together. Even people who were pretty bad at the beginning end up being able to interpret a group conversation for me.

Not to diminish the difficulty—to do anything like interpret a group conversation, the whole group needs to put in some effort to slow down and speak only one at a time, and it’s still exhausting for an interpreter who’s only been learning for a few months. Not to mention the food on their plate goes cold.

I’m just saying. I don’t think a lack of progress necessarily something to scare you, but then again, I don’t know what it’s like to learn sign without someone to sign with. Pretty sure it’s usually a lot faster to become a productive conversator in any sign language than any spoken natural lang—the only thing you really need is the hand alphabet, and then the person you’re talking to can show you the signs for every new word you spell out.

meedstrom Oct 17, 2022, 5:01 PM
1 point
in reply to: Eli Tyre’s comment on: Public beliefs vs. Private beliefs

I might have legible argumentation, but I don’t expect it to be understandable without a bunch careful explanation and backtracking to prerequisites

That fits great with my definition of illegibility. This case sounds like you’ve clarified it enough to make it legible to yourself but not yet enough to cross inferential gaps, thus it remains illegible to other people.

meedstrom Sep 27, 2022, 11:37 AM
2 points
in reply to: DPiepgrass’s comment on: The Importance of Saying “Oops”
Not knocking your idea, but usually when you want to complain that “no one has upvoted me” it’s good to think again whether you really want to blame other people.

I can guess at a reason why people may not have read that post you linked. I found it long-winded, like a page out of your diary where you’re still developing the idea, thinking aloud by writing—which is excellent to do, but it doesn’t seem like something you wrote from the start for other people to read, so it’s hard to follow. At least, I’m still puzzled about what you wanted to put forward in it.

meedstrom Mar 17, 2022, 11:18 AM
3 points
in reply to: mikbp’s comment on: Iterating fast: voice dictation as a form of babble

I’m a pretty slow reader and I really get frustrated and distracted with not-correctly written text, so I see the subsequent editing of the text as something really threatening and time-consuming for me.

I’ve become a fast reader in recent years, but like you, I also get disturbed by incorrectly written text.

To me it sounds like you will get used to these issues in time. You know it’s (1) your own words, (2) dictated by an imperfect program, and (3) mostly meant to be deleted. 1 would help me read faster, and 2 and 3 would help me tolerate the “writing flaws”.

Reading fast is fundamentally about skipping, and being okay with skipping. I think that should be easy if you remember saying the sentence that the words on screen refer to. If you remember the sentence, you’re reminded of the general concept you were getting at. Your job is after all only to figure out whether this whole sentence or section is worth keeping, and you only need to read the first few words to know that, probably.

You could also do a second dictation, to summarize what you’re reading. That one’ll be much shorter.

meedstrom Feb 28, 2022, 6:41 PM
2 points
in reply to: Alicorn’s comment on: Mental Crystallography
It was a perfect analogy for me. One carves up new concepts the same way one always does. A decoupler will carve up a concept differently from a contextualizer. Similar analogy: If someone’s knowledge can be seen as a massive mind-map, a feminist will structure a hierarchy in that mind-map quite differently from a Mormon, even if the leaf nodes are the same in the end. When you have a hierarchy in place, more knowledge added will tend to follow that hierarchy and thus subtly influence understanding.

But I’ve had experiences with people who interpret things very differently from me, receiving my words and hearing the opposite meaning of my intent. Ten years ago I did not have that experience, and maybe I would not have understood the analogy then. Maybe you could introduce it with a story next time, for the benefit of the young and the shut-ins.

meedstrom Feb 28, 2022, 6:31 PM
2 points
in reply to: wedrifid’s comment on: Mental Crystallography
Exactly twelve years later—did you ever come up with an example?

meedstrom Feb 26, 2022, 10:37 AM
2 points
in reply to: Andy_McKenzie’s comment on: My attitude towards death
To steelman it, maybe he’s thinking of how it’s commonly seen as a tragedy for a chicken to be alive for only one week, but killing it after some X years is not as much of a tragedy.

Initially, this implied to me that the curve of “value of remaining alive’ is higher in the beginning of a lifespan. But thinking about it, that’s not the same curve as the curve of “value of being alive”, which is lowest in the beginning.

(If that’s confusing, it helps to think of the one curve as the mirror image of the other, i.e. if value of being alive is high later, it means the value of remaining alive “in order to see the later parts of life” is higher early on.)

It’s also possible to view the value of being alive as a flat line, a positive constant, which could lead to his idea of human fungibility. But to use a different example, if you make me choose between five individuals living one year and one individual living five years, I prefer the latter… Same with two people dying at 25 vs. one dying at 50. Fewer people living longer is better. I can only see this working out if it’s not a flat line: value of life increases with each year already lived.

meedstrom Feb 18, 2022, 1:17 PM
3 points
in reply to: Shmi’s comment on: Epistemic Legibility
Rereading your comment, I think you’re saying that legibility will arise by itself well enough so long as someone is on Simulacrum level 1, caring only about the truth, and if their writing is not legible, they probably have an agenda and you’d better focus on finding out what that is, or just ignore what they said.

But
1. This feels unactionable—it’s just a rephrasing of old critical reading advice “find out the writer’s agenda and biases so you know where they’re coming from”. Which is so vague—even having that info, how do I debias just the right amount?? How do I avoid overcorrecting and falling prey to my own confirmation bias?
2. My experience writing legibly actually flagged areas in my belief system I didn’t realize was so weak—a huge boon for myself here—and in retrospect, if I’d published illegible writings about those topics I’d now want to take down those posts, as it’s both embarrassing to me as well as a disservice to readers. This is despite me being on Simulacrum 1 (or so I think I was).

meedstrom Feb 17, 2022, 2:02 AM
2 points
in reply to: Younes Kamel’s comment on: A compilation of misuses of statistics
As someone who wants to do systematic review (meta-analysis with a certain rigidly prescribed structure), I will love to hear about the mistakes to watch out for!

meedstrom Feb 17, 2022, 1:34 AM
1 point
in reply to: Younes Kamel’s comment on: A compilation of misuses of statistics
First off, I like the compilation you made and I’m tempted to memorize it despite all I’m saying.

This ‘pluralism’ solution does not feel meaty—your last sentence “Hence the value of pluralism” sounds to me like an applause light. I mean yeah, ultimately you and I build a lot of what we know on trust in the whole collective of scientists. But it’s not directly relevant/useful to say so; there should be a halfway good solution for yourself as a solo rationalist, and calibrating yourself against others’ beliefs is an extra measure you may apply later. Because I still prefer all those others to have used good solo toolkits for themselves: it makes them more reliable for me too.

Tentatively, for a real solution, I propose that it’s better to focus on what right statistics looks like so that wrong statistics will automatically generate a feeling of puzzlement, and this way you still anyways get the ability to compare the quality of two studies.

Or you could learn each type of misuse as part of thoroughly learning the concept where they apply, with focus on better understanding that concept, not on learning about the misuse.

meedstrom Feb 15, 2022, 4:11 PM
2 points
in reply to: Trevor Hill-Hand’s comment on: Analog rewritable tablet
Now I’m glad I recently ordered the older version. (my motivation was that it can run Parabola GNU/Linux + Emacs)

meedstrom 15 Feb 2022 16:09 UTC
1 point
in reply to: Ruby’s comment on: Less Wrong/Article Summaries
You may enjoy Rationality: From AI to Zombies Summaries.

meedstrom 15 Feb 2022 10:56 UTC
10 points
on: Epistemic Legibility
Today, dynomight made an interesting nuance in Observations about writing and commenting on the internet. It seems that just optimizing epistemic legibility may cause people to fail to listen altogether:

Technically, the complaints were wrong. How could I “fix” the problem of not citing any papers when I had already cited dozens? That’s what I thought for months, during which people continued to read the post and have the same damned reaction. Eventually, I had to confront that even if they were “wrong”, something about my post was causing them to be wrong. Viewed that way, the problem was obvious: The idea that a humidifier could be bad for you is weird and disturbing, and weird and disturbing things are usually wrong so people are skeptical and tend to find ways to dismiss them.

Should they do that?

[Insert long boring polemic on Bayesian rationality]

It’s debatable—but it’s a fact that they do it. So I rewrote the post to be “gentle”. Previously my approach was to sort of tackle the reader and scream “HUMIDIFIERS → PARTICLES! [citation] [citation] [citation] [citation]” and “PARTICLES → DEATH! [citation] [citation] [citation]”. I changed it to start by conceding that ultrasonic humidifiers don’t always make particles and it’s not certain those particular particles cause harm, et cetera, but PEER-REVIEWED RESEARCH PAPERS says these things are possible, so it’s worth thinking about.

After making those changes, no one had the same reaction anymore.

Part of me feels like this is wrong, that it’s disingenuous to tune writing to make people have the reaction you want them to have. After all, I could be wrong, in which case it’s better if my wrongness is more obvious.

At least when I make my reasoning transparent and easy to falsify, I feel like I discard other qualities of writing, because I feel that should be enough. But to get an audience, it’s still important to try to sell it. Not by reverting to opaque reasoning, of course, but perhaps by demonstrating empathy with the reader, understanding of the inferential gap and… I don’t know what else.

Maybe it’s related to the concept in rhetoric of creating a “good audience”: encouraging them to be “attentus, docilis et benevolus”:
- attentus (or “attentive”—because you cannot persuade if your audience is not paying attention)
- docilis (or “teachable”—because you cannot persuade unless your audience can learn from you)
- benevolus (or “benevolent”—because you cannot persuade unless you make a good impression on your audience).

meedstrom 15 Feb 2022 9:53 UTC
2 points
on: Analog rewritable tablet
What’s your opinion of wet-erase boards? No accidental erasure as with dry-erase boards.

meedstrom 15 Feb 2022 9:42 UTC
2 points
on: A compilation of misuses of statistics
I’m concerned that getting well-versed in statistics mistakes has the same issues as doing so for biases and fallacies (Knowing about Biases Can Hurt People). When you’re analyzing others’ studies, you’ll find that basically every study has at least one flaw of some kind. So this opens the door for unconsciously applying harsher criticism against studies you disagree with.