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I mean, there is already a consensus that people are adaptation executers, not utility maximizers. Evolution gives us random adaptations which contribute to fittness (1) on average (2) in an ancient jungle. Given this, why should we assume that “valuing things in future less” should precisely follow some cool mathematical equation, instead of some unspecified “less” which is a result of random influence of various heuristics, e.g. how easy or difficult it is to imagine the given day in the future. (So for example we may care less about what happens “200 days later” than what happens “next Christmas”, even if the next Christmas happens to be 200 days from now.)

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For me the most frustrating thing is people not understanding that beliefs should be used to create (probabilistic) predictions, or at least they should be expected to somehow correspond to the territory. For example, this weekend I talked with a smart girl, and I thought “maybe this is a LW material, I should talk a bit more and then invite her to a meetup”, when she mentioned people who can see human auras. I politely noted that some people could fake this ability, and she agreed that not all who claim to see auras really do. So I said: “imagine that there are two people: one of them really can see auras, another one is a fake; how could you (as a person who can’t see auras) experimentally decide which one is real”, and she said something like: it’s not possible. Sigh. So she has a university diploma in natural sciences, and yet the idea of experiment is completely foreign to her. I can’t even… And that was one of the smarter people I met. If most people can’t reason correctly about such simple matters, how could I discuss with them anything more complicated?

Seems to me that the only meaningful debate with most people is about their first-hand experiences. That is something sufficiently close to reality, and I can learn many interesting things. But when they start making any conclusions, it’s time to run away. On the other hand, many people like talking about their experiences, so this is a mutually acceptable solution for social talk.

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Man, this is exactly the problem I’m trying to overcome now. I’d like to dump my brain out onto paper, but I keep getting caught up in how it wouldn’t be perfectly researched journal quality, and this anxiety makes it hard to write.

How did you deal with this? What motivated you to keep pumping out a post a day? Particularly, how did you find a good way to divide up a massive idea into manageable pieces?

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(I thought of just saying that shorter thing, but it seemed like I would be accused of being inscrutable if I didn’t unpack/taboo it to some degree…)

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(As above, “personally I find status to often be a barrier to learning and would sort of prefer not to have attention called to myself”.)

The sword thing was mostly just for lulz. Admittedly, it’s not the greatest move from the attention dodging perspective… I think maybe that part was a net miscalculation? Compared to actual dueling, it would probably be more fun to get together sometime to practice fencing a bit and talk about what a progressive dueling protocol might look like, and whether it would be good for such a thing to exist.

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Of course you can still doubt the importance or relevance.

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