Published on November 19, 2024 8:09 PM GMT
Links to all my Shortforms:
personality( ground_truth ) --> stated_truthFeature-level thinking is natural, yet deeply wrongCognitive workspaces, not end-to-end algorithmsWhen is philosophy useful?Posts as nodes -- what's beautiful about LessWrongMemetics and iteration of ideasHow to do a meditation practice called "metta"Links to all my posts:
Why
I believe that philosophy without a traceable practical impact is impotent.
Either by directly remember them, or by being able to that they've shaped your current way of viewing things, even at an intuitive level.
The easier it is to find your writings, the more likely it is that you re-read them, and that they have an impact on you.
Also, I just enjoy the feeling of having a grand project I'm working on, rather than writing stuff off the top of my head.
Twitter sucks
It's also a rebellion against how Twitter works, where people just write shit with barely any consequences. The format itself is designed for writing things off the top of your head, without anything to reward good ideas or punish bad ones.
(Except for people following or unfollowing, but this is an extremely weak signal)
The solution to Twitter sucking, is not to follow different people, and DEFINITELY not to correct every wrong statement (oops), it's to just leave. Even smart people, people who are way smarter and more interesting and knowledgeable and funny than me, they simply don't care that much about their posts. If it's thought-provoking, you can't even do anything with that fact, because nothing about the website is designed for deeper conversations. Though I've had a couple of nice moments where I went deep into a topic with someone in the replies.
Shortform sucks less
The above dynamic is also a danger with Shortforms, to a lesser extent. But I really like writing Shortforms, I don't like the pressure of a post having to be polished before I can publish it, and I don't enjoy polishing them. Assuming I'm not changing my laziness, Shortforms are simply the best way for me to make progress on ideas, because getting things out is really important.
By making a holistic kind of post like this, they get referenced more often (by me), which means there is incentive to polish them over time. It also allows ideas to become interconnected, which was my main reason for writing on LessWrong to begin with. Simply making ideas visible, is a big deal.
Defeating addictive algorithms -- healthy energy funnel
An excerpt from something I wrote once:
Youtube doesn't want you to be happy, or motivated to get back to work, or to leave you satisfied after you get some joy from a video. It wants to keep you on the website for as long as possible.
The algorithm is not your friend, and the developers aren't either.
Most of life takes place in the digital world.
The actions you can take are designed by other people, the objects you encounter are chosen by algorithms designed by other people, and so is the shape that those objects take.
I want control over my digital life. I don't want it to be in the hands of the people who create apps and websites, nor in the Eldritch tendrils of the recommendation algorithms.
Simply having a healthy funnel for my random bursts of mental energy and random thought-avenues, is a huge deal for mental health, because the algorithms, predictably, don't make me happy.
This post has the chance of being the central hub of a long term project that is really good for me, and that I'm constantly excited to return to, that extracts energy from me more powerfully than other addictions do.
Root node -- feedback loops
One important thing that distinguishes a feedback loop from a mess, is that in a mess, the subcomponents don't influence future events: they are only outputs of the system, not inputs to it.
This post creates a way for my posts to update my way of thinking. By referencing them here, they're also more likely to get edited as a result of my progress at the "root node".
Why publish
Since this is fundamentally designed to be an evolving post, I doubt it'll ever be polished, so I'll just make it available right from the start, lol.
Predictions for this post
19-11-2024
It'll be tempting to just keep adding shit, which is why I need a rule or some kind of pressure that keeps it small. (Me actually re-reading this post over and over is one of the mechanisms that creates a feedback loop, which I don't do if it's too long.) I'll also need to "refactor" stuff into self-contained posts. If I don't do these things, this project will just die.
If successful, I'll have a lot of writing online, which some people (including myself sometimes) will wonder if it's a waste of time. And then I'll remind those people of the chapter about healthy energy funnels :) I'll have a better understanding of how to make philosophical progress, how writing affects my life and mental health, and write Shortforms on these topics.
Empirical
I become very happy when I finish writing a post, and when I spend time thinking about things I've written.
Discuss
