This is a thread for me to post stuff that's smaller than a blog post. You can reply and discuss here but don't start your own topics here. You can do that in Open Discussion or at any relevant post.
This is a thread for me to post stuff that's smaller than a blog post. You can reply and discuss here but don't start your own topics here. You can do that in Open Discussion or at any relevant post.
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https://twitter.com/patio11/status/1377050104159379457
i can write things alone, daily, and not show anyone. so i can write with no feedback or discussion. so i can e.g. make a youtube channel and continue it regardless of whether anyone ever watches it, let alone replies.
i cannot, however, do major things for the sake of others and then keep doing them without feedback. e.g. scripting the videos would be really different than what i'd do if no other people existed, so that doesn't work for me without substantial rewards.
i wrote this on discord almost a year ago:
i suspect around (very roughly) age 2 is when people give up on the world making sense and lower their standards of knowledge. they start putting up with confusion and not knowing if they're right or not. that becomes normal. why? because their parents and other ppl boss them around. and the issue isn't mainly that they are told what to do (not free, not in control of their lives) but that the orders are confusing. parents demand little kids do stuff but then the kid doesn't understand what the parent said and wants. so the kid asks clarifying questions. hundreds of them. but parents don't like to answer those so the kid eventually gives up and tries to act on orders/requests/expectations that he doesn't understand.
Answering Doubting Thomas from Basecamp:
> How do guys deal with the fact that a lot of people one cares about are hopeless?
Having high confidence that you and someone *are not equals* (and you're superior) is generally bad for having a personal relationship with them.
Keeping in mind **relevance** helps. You can be superior *as a scientist* and still get along with your family. It's fine if people have specialties. And you can hang out and watch TV with your e.g. brother without him needing to learn the science stuff that you know. And meanwhile you don't know as much about his career, e.g. being an electrician or makeup artist.
Logic and rationality can be (approximately) separated from morality. If you don't think you're significantly morally superior, and they know you don't, it helps give them something. People don't like being worse or outclassed at everything.
If you're better than people at reasoning, you're still typically going to lose the majority of arguments with them about their specialities, e.g. their profession. Their greater experience with the topic can more than make up for your skill advantage.
If you got such a huge lead at reasoning that you were outclassing people at their own profession, despite having little experience at it, that's harder to deal with. Hopefully by that point, they'd respect you and be proud of you, which could make it OK. That'd be easier for them if you had public recognition like awards and millions of fans. Whereas if you think you're way way way smarter than them but the world in general disagrees, then it's harder for them to accept and be OK with your apparent arrogance.
If you want things from people that they can actually provide, successfully, then it can work. They can do something good or right when interacting with you, that you respect instead of refuting. If you want them to change and you don't like or appreciate them as they are, then it generally won't work out.
Howard Roark gets along with Mike (the constructor worker) among others.
Being good at stuff has lots of advantages re getting along with people. You can avoid lots of misunderstandings or petty fights.
And if you're more self-sufficient, independent and successful, you're in a better position not to ask much of people, not to pressure them, and even to be generous with them. If you're independently happy, and not reliant on controlling other people around you to try to make reality more to your liking, it's easier to have good relationships with people.
Lots of trouble with friends happens due to being needy, emotional, memey or insecure. But if your life is going great, then their imperfections shouldn't threaten or scare you. And if you're more confident, then you can avoid getting defensive when people judge you negatively, dislike something about you, disagree with you, etc.
If you develop some really intellectual interests that your friends and relatives don't have, and you're desperately lonely, that can lead to a lot of trouble because you want your friends and relatives to be something they're not and solve your loneliness problem. But if your intellectual interests are satisfied elsewhere, then it doesn't need to be a source of conflict with your friends and relatives.
It also helps to respect other people as independent entities with their own lives. And to internalize fallibilism and that disagreements are part of life and good ways to dealing with disagreement. In general, the fights between "rational" people and their families are more about the "rational" person being intolerant of disagreement than about the more conventional, normal people being intolerant. That's an avoidable error.
As with all progress, some things get easier but you'll also run into new, solvable problems.
some things i said in a discussion the other guy deleted
Negative emotions are one of the largest causes of content errors, including logical errors and bias.
I think you believe the other people need to get better at
1. logic
2. separating their words from their emotions
Whereas, I think they're having emotional issues which are connected to the content (just setting aside emotions is not a solution) and which are causing them to be worse at logic. And I think the same thing is happening with you. I don't think you have your emotions cleanly separated from what you think and say.
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This conversation is getting a bit hard to follow. I think more organization would help. Would you be interested in making a tree for it? Like I did with gigahurt. See:
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLKx6lO5RmaetSHkYrUkcWTI6QEifkSyHj
and
http://curi.us/2311-making-idea-trees
Making trees is actually one of the things I was going to suggest you could do to improve conversations with people. So it'd have a dual purpose. It'd be useful to this conversation and the technique could also be used to help with the problem this conversation is about.
If you organized a discussion with someone with a tree, it'd help them follow what was being said and understand you better. People often fail at project management and organization issues, which can lead to what appear to be logical errors, not listening or low effort. Making a tree can help them with that weakness re managing complexity and can help guide them. It can also help make things friendlier by showing (rather than telling) them that you're putting in a good faith effort to understand what they're saying. And it can make it more of a team effort to add nodes to the tree and create a thing together, rather than having an ephemeral war of words. Trees can also help with the problem of people jumping around between topics, which is sometimes more about bad organizational skills than bad faith.
Sometimes people will decline to have a conversation involving a tree even though you're willing to do all the diagramming work. In that case, it may be useful information that that isn't a conversation you should have, or you should only have it with really limited expectations.
Giving people Boosts (like upvotes/likes/favorites) on Basecamp concerns me. I don't want to be a teacher giving out gold stars. It's a lot less of an issue for other people who don't have a leadership/authority role. Power imbalances in your favor make giving out praise more dangerous.
It leads to problems like if I give out an upvote to 3 things, and then not the next one, people feel like they did it wrong this time or it's bad or something. But maybe it's fine. If I have to give out an upvote every time it's fine ... ugh I don't want to be in that situation. And the more you do that, the worse it gets. If you give out the 4th upvote in a row, now the pattern of upvoting all the decent ones is stronger.
People like encouragement but it's really important that they don't rely on it.
Any kind of inconsistency in encouragement can get noticed. That's for an individual (I upvote 3 things then not the 4th) and also between individuals (I upvote Joe's first thing but not Sue's first thing).
Maybe I need to avoid giving feedback unless I explain what it is and means in words, and it's OK if there's a larger barrier to entry there.
read some reddit comments on racism
https://www.reddit.com/r/Competitiveoverwatch/comments/mme754/liao_korean_esports_players_staff_speak_out_on/
#20360 oh that's ambiguous huh. i meant "i read..." not a command that you should read it.
I'm thinking maybe I don't want to do the obligation of a subscription forum where I'm expected to provide stuff regularly. But I think I do want a paywall to improve quality. So I'm thinking maybe a one time price to buy an account. Like $100 for an account or $500 for access to a semi-private forum and chatroom (only people who pay can see it, and people are requested not to share stuff to the open internet – it's not true privacy since anyone can buy access). If the private forum price sounds high just don't buy it.
I was also thinking about selling discussions. Could be something like: 2 week max, $1000 (or way more for same thing privately). This has incentives that might work well for me. People tend to drop or evade discussions. With a flat fee, if they do that I get paid well for my time. If they talk a lot, then I don't get paid as much for my time, but I get a discussion where someone actually talked much... The time limit is necessary to cap my effort, put a limit on my obligation, and to avoid people evading and then trying to continue next month.
Thoughts, reactions?
#20367
> I'm thinking maybe a one time price to buy an account. Like $100 for an account or $500 for access to a semi-private forum and chatroom (only people who pay can see it, and people are requested not to share stuff to the open internet – it's not true privacy since anyone can buy access).
Sounds basically fine. You'd probably need to have super specific rules about what stuff will get an account revoked, since people will be paying for the account not the content they got while the account was active.
> I was also thinking about selling discussions. Could be something like: 2 week max, $1000 (or way more for same thing privately). This has incentives that might work well for me.
I remember an offer of something kinda like that earlier, with few takers. IIRC the previous offer was by the response/post instead of a flat rate for all the discussion within a time period, so the incentives were different. But I think the target market was similar.
I think you'd have to advertise it often and specifically to get takers. Like, advertise it when people post on a topic you're not interested in enough to discuss unless paid. If you think they'd benefit from the discussion if they paid you, you could say so in response to their post, so maybe they'd agree and buy. I doubt many or any people (including me) will notice on their own when they'd benefit from buying a discussion.
Two problems: This (advertising) is, itself, work you may not want to do. And, if you do it, I'd guess most people will interpret it socially and anti-capitalistically (something like: you're either hopelessly arrogant or needy and greedy).
#20367 I don't like lifetime subscriptions in general. The service provider could go away or decide to stop providing the service or get bought out by someone else who decides not to honor the lifetime subscription. I'd rather pay month by month or annually.
#20369 in general, i think if i have to suggest that a conversation about a topic would be good, then the person doesn't have enough initiative/motor to make it good. i don't wanna drag them along and make it good for them (if i wanted to do something more like that, i'd prefer a more impersonal, group format like an article or lecture which is more suited to dealing with people who aren't doing much).
or put a different way: it's hard for me to suggest a conversation would be good b/c it depends on what the person will put into it. TONS of conversations would be good if the person put a lot into it. the bottleneck is more about their motor than the topic.
> You'd probably need to have super specific rules about what stuff will get an account revoked
no i don't. it's very simple. my decisions are final. the end. don't like it, don't sign up.
i will not refund ppl who get banned early b/c part of the point of the price is to keep trolls out. refunding ppl who misbehave would defeat part of the purpose of a paywall.
i might give a refund in some cases at my own discretion, but ppl should not count on it.
https://twitter.com/lijukic/status/1383024844959318016
> Really fascinating set of maps: all the skyscrapers located in Asia, North America, and Europe, down to the regional level where applicable.
> 80% of all skyscrapers in the world are located in Asia. Shenzhen alone has well over double the amount of skyscrapers as Europe.
I would have guessed more than 26 skyscrapers in SF and didn't know it had under 10% the amount in NYC. Maybe the issue is they require ~50 stories for a building to count, and there are a lot of buildings I view as skyscrapers that don't get included on the map.
Shenzen and Hong Kong are both over 500!
Elon Musk is BS. Thunderf00t has lots of good vids debunking his crap, e.g. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vgUIzyn0hZY
Nice book summary re nuclear power:
https://rootsofprogress.org/devanney-on-the-nuclear-flop
Horowitz Freedom Center has a project exposing the most racist universities:
https://toptenracistuniversities.org
Interesting book summary about stagnation of American progress. has some good bullet point summary of progress in major areas of life and rough timeframe:
https://rootsofprogress.org/summary-the-rise-and-fall-of-american-growth
basically progress was great from 1870-1940, good to 1970, and bad since then except in a few things like computers.
author of book thinks slow progress is fine and wants bigger govt. author or summary disagrees and thinks we should get faster progress going again.
https://rootsofprogress.org/progress-studies-a-moral-imperative
> Jared Diamond’s claim that agriculture was “the worst mistake in the history of the human race”
wait wtf? i had no idea Diamond was *that* bad. i think DD didn't know either, hence no mention in BoI.
i had to google for a source. it's a 1987 article by Diamond:
http://www.zo.utexas.edu/courses/Thoc/Readings/Diamond_WorstMistake.pdf
skimmed. looks like Crawford wasn't exaggerating or misquoting.
#20413 Jared Diamond also gets criticized by the historians at https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians
Guns Germs Steel is criticized in their FAQ:
https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/wiki/historians_views#wiki_historians.27_views_of_jared_diamond.27s_.22guns.2C_germs.2C_and_steel.22
Here's a search for him on the subreddit:
https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/search?q=jared+diamond&restrict_sr=on&sort=relevance&t=all
I liked reading excerpts from Carnegie's autobiography:
https://rootsofprogress.org/andrew-carnegie-autobiography
lol
Tons of people decide their political positions by not knowing anything:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bwE9070oucE
Chris Do has some notable skills re talking with clients:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2nVPJDelYNc
https://twitter.com/stucchio/status/1392572039165358084
the link in the tweet goes to:
https://statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2021/05/10/the-javert-paradox-rears-its-ugly-head/
the blog post has the text stucchio apparently quoted without using quote marks, and links to an earlier article:
https://slate.com/technology/2018/03/its-hard-to-criticize-science-without-looking-like-an-obsessive.html
> Can You Criticize Science (or Do Science) Without Looking Like an Obsessive? Maybe Not.
> We need to normalize the pursuit of accuracy as a good-intentioned piece of the scientific puzzle.
Haven't read yet but looks worth a read. Looks Paths Forward related.
Tim Pool: Fear of Runaway Inflation As Local News Reports Food Shortages, Gas Shortage In Some States Near 50%
Worrying.
People sometimes think I'm anti-social and mean. And they connect those. They think anti-social is extra mean or something.
But socialization teaches people to be mean. It's kinda conflicting to assume I'm mean in socially normal ways that I don't actually say while also picking up on an anti-social vibe.