Thing of Things

> autistic A lot of people say this, but I think it's the wrong word in an important way. I'll give you P(autistic|rationalist) > P(autistic), but beware the base rate fallacy. My guess is you're focussing on a proxy variable. To show some important counter-examples: Temple Grandin, famously autistic and a lot of people's idea what autism means - not a rationalist in the sense you mean. Scott Alexander - fairly central example of the rationalist community, but not autistic (he's a psychiatrist so I trust him on that). EDIT: also P(trans|rationalist) > P(trans), but P(rationalist|trans) I'd say is fairly small. Base rate fallacy and something something Bayes. Identifying these two groups would definitely be a mistake. EDIT2: maybe this series (1 post so far) is worth bookmarking: https://thingofthings.substack.com/p/what-do-effective-altruists-belie…

Lol. No, it doesn't. And there are great reasons not to 'steelman.' https://thingofthings.wordpress.com/2016/08/09/against-steelmanning/

Mixed feelings on this. Tell culture allows people to express their feelings directly without prompting, but can also be used manipulatively when insisted on as a behavioral standard by someone who's overbearing relative to the people they're around. For further reading, here's the blog post that named the concept: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/rEBXN3x6kXgD4pLxs/tell-culture And further discussion within the same community: https://thingofthings.wordpress.com/2015/05/08/against-tell-culture/ There were a bunch of tumblr posts on this as well which are more work than it's worth to go recover.

It’s genuinely not legislation. Labor is expensive, which combined with the reality that anything beyond a 4:1 child-caretaker ratio is pretty bad for children pretty much guarantees that child care can never be cheap in a rich country with rich country labor costs. EDIT: I should've said "infants" and not "children" here, where the necessity of a 4:1 ratio really applies. As children get older this ratio can get higher. I recommend https://thingofthings.wordpress.com/2018/10/17/the-iron-mathematics-of… from someone who just assumed that child care costs were because of government intervention, and then did the math and found out this isn’t the case.

This happens more often than you might think: by doing basic steps to make your product usable, it suddenly becomes much more useful and in-demand than you anticipated. More examples are: - Force businesses/streets to add a curb lip for wheelchairs -> Stars above, suddenly it's easier to accept deliveries and bring in luggage! - Optimize site for slow connections, suddenly you have a torrent of previously-unserved customers. [1] Edit: Turns out it's called the Curb Cut Effect: https://thingofthings.wordpress.com/2014/11/15/the-curb-cut-effect-or-… [1] Summary at this HN discussion, follow through to the story for more details. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13601977

>First, there is no such thing as a [socially] successful person who has never ever creeped anyone out. Give yourself permission to be creepy. I am not saying that you should go around trying to creep people out; of course, if you know something is going to scare someone, you shouldn’t do it; it is best that one avoid becoming Harvey Weinstein. But miscommunications, awkwardness, and misunderstandings happen. Sometimes people make mistakes. You are not going to become Harvey Weinstein by accident. Most people have interacted with someone who has creeped them out at some point, and it does not exactly cause lifelong damage. And while there can be some negative consequences, particularly of creeping people out at work, if you ask [about] a random stranger['s day] at a bookstore or something and they’re creeped out, you know what will happen? Absolutely nothing. The [social] police will not come lock you up for creepiness in the third degree. Lightly adapted from [1], which is actually the best article online about how to find love and date. [1] https://thingofthings.wordpress.com/2018/05/25/models-a-summary/

̶c̶a̶n̶ ̶y̶o̶u̶ ̶p̶l̶e̶a̶s̶e̶ ̶p̶r̶o̶v̶i̶d̶e̶ ̶a̶ ̶t̶l̶;̶d̶r̶?̶ ̶w̶h̶a̶t̶'̶s̶ ̶t̶h̶e̶ ̶m̶a̶i̶n̶ ̶a̶r̶g̶u̶m̶e̶n̶t̶,̶ ̶w̶h̶a̶t̶ ̶d̶a̶t̶a̶ ̶i̶s̶ ̶i̶t̶ ̶b̶a̶s̶e̶d̶ ̶o̶n̶?̶ ... okay, I didn't want to be that lazy, so looked up the author. (Her name is interestingly not on the cover :o) Abigail Shrier, hm. okay, at least there's a wikipedia page about her. she seems to be a layman when it comes to psychology/psychiatry. and her 2018 book about "Transgender Craze" ... uh, okay. ... https://thingofthings.substack.com/p/bad-therapy-review-fifties-dad-me… """ Much of Shrier’s book is devoted to critiquing Internet Mental Health Culture, [...] I broadly agree with her critiques. [Her] preferred alternative to Internet Mental Health Culture is what you might call Fifties Dad Mindset. [...] Shrier explicitly says that the right response to “minor cutting” is to ignore it. """ Amazing book.

I know the origin of the word and its history. Its usage has increased tremendously in the past few years. I think we've reached the point where people should push back on invalid usage; I see somebody just posted the following to Hacker News: https://thingofthings.wordpress.com/2020/11/16/hermeneutical-injustice… It is not gaslighting when someone contradicts you, or intentionally causes you to doubt your beliefs, or leaves you uncertain of what you believe, or even makes you think that they think you are crazy. Gaslighting is about someone lying to you in a way that causes you to lose trust in your own capabilities as a rational person: your ability to reason, your competence to figure out the truth, your capacity to remember things in a broadly accurate fashion even if you are sometimes fuzzy on details, your knowledge of your own feelings and thoughts and desires. And if your mind is unreliable… well, you’ll have to rely on someone else.

One class of markets that I suspect is a target-rich environment: disability-adaptation tech. 1. There is a decent chance that existing entrants are tied down by a focus on meeting the regulations rather than on delighting users. 2. You might be able to significantly scale-up and thus improve the unit economics. While the market of people who can pass the means-testing to qualify for whatever government-subsidized benefit exists might be small, the nature of bureaucracy means there is often a MUCH wider pool of people who are "quasi-disabled", either permanently or temporarily. Note that there are a few disabilities which are so overwhelmingly common that the market is already saturated. The classic example is eyeglasses. 3. The specific disabled population is a ready-made population of early adopters IF you identify that you can keep your focus on delighting users and just use the regulations to remind yourself of risks and edge-cases. (This really will depend quite heavily on the quality of the regulations -- notice the difference between Japanese zoning and SF-bay housing-approvals) Lots of legacy disability tech: * Has a pretty frustrating maintenance cycle, so you can win on a strong customer service brand IF you can innovate on operations. * Can be pretty frustrating to use, so you can win big on design. A focus on delighting users rather than ticking boxes is naturally going to produce a naturally better product. Here is the key tactic though: lean on the…

Dude, if you'd just asked me a more specific question, you could surely have baited me into commenting on this or that culture war issue. Since you asked a general question, though, I'll simply answer with the generality that I wish we could all make more of an effort to show empathy for each other's problems, and (as I said on the podcast) carefully articulate where we agree and disagree with each other rather than just flinging 140-character excrement. OK, I'll also give you a few links. Here's my Quora answer about what it felt like to be widely attacked on social media, for trying to host a conversation about gender and teenage nerdery that got past platitudes to the roots of people's feelings: https://www.quora.com/What-was-it-like-for-you-to-be-widely-attacked-o… Second, here's my friend Sarah Constantin's blog post about the changing nature of social media, the one I mentioned in the podcast: https://srconstantin.wordpress.com/2016/11/27/hiding-in-plain-sight/ Third, here's a recent post called "On Culture War Bubbles," from the blog "Thing of Things": https://thingofthings.wordpress.com/2018/06/27/on-culture-war-bubbles/ This is much easier said than done, but as Ozy writes in that post, may we all be granted the mental strength to ignore culture war bullshit, until and unless we decide with the rational parts of our brains that it's important or worth responding to.

There's a good critical overview of the various papers here[0]. [0] https://thingofthings.wordpress.com/2018/10/10/on-sokal-squared/

I read Models after a good review of it[1]. It was only sort of useful for my 36 year old self but it would have been immensely useful to me at 16. [1]https://thingofthings.wordpress.com/2018/05/25/models-a-summary/

I am strongly reminded of https://thingofthings.substack.com/p/rationalists-and-the-cultic-milie… which concluded that the kind of person who believes complex irrational arguments is also the kind of person who falls for conspiracy theories, weird cults, and various kinds of whacky beliefs. That said, I would advocate a more systematic version of the article's conclusion that we should accept that we can't think. Instead borrow an idea from Superforecasting. One way to get better at predictions is to start by constructing an outside view, and an inside view. Suppose we want to predict the odds of a thing happening. First we make a tally of roughly comparable situations. In how many did the comparable thing happen? The inside view is a detailed analysis of how the thing could happen this time. You can analyze this to a Bayesian analysis. The problem with the inside view is that, confronted with a way something could have happened, we overestimate all of the probabilities. We wind up too certain that it did. Conversely if we don't think of a way that it could happen, we wind up being too certain that it could not. So the inside view has too much variance. We fix that by adjusting the inside view towards the outside view. How much you should do this takes some practice to figure out. But actually doing this makes your predictions more accurate. Instead of calling this epistemic learned helplessness, I would call the need to adjust to the outside view as estimated…

I'm not diminishing anything. I'm just pointing out that people tend to imagine all minds behave like their own, hence why you believed that cis people would experience gender dysphoria in VR avatars of the opposite sex. I've accumulated enough experience to indicate that isn't true. Another piece of the puzzle: Pretty much every trans person I've talked to who has used VR has enjoyed choosing an avatar of the opposite sex. Afterwards when they're back in the real world, they tend to miss it. This maps to my model of reality that says that the vast majority of people cannot experience gender dysphoria. They prefer their current sex mostly out of habit. Other people such as Scott Alexander[1] and Ozy[2] have said the same thing, though they arrived at that conclusion by posing thought experiments to their friends, not using VR. 1. https://slatestarcodex.com/2013/02/18/typical-mind-and-gender-identity… 2. https://thingofthings.wordpress.com/2015/01/28/cis-by-default/

My social skills are just fine thanks. I’m still not under the illusion allistic people like autistic people, or accept them except under the condition that they hide who and what they are. I don’t think autistic people are creepy perverts. I think that normal people pretty much automatically think they’re creepy because there’s something off about the way they interact socially. The degree of offness varies but if you never had it you were never autistic. If you’re under the impression people are accepting go to an autism or asperger’s support group. You will be quickly disabused of your high opinion of humanity. https://thingofthings.wordpress.com/2019/04/24/on-stimming-and-autisti… > Being able to pass as nonautistic is an important skill. We live in a world full of people who hate autistic people. Other people find the natural way our bodies move to be upsetting or repulsive to look at. It is not realistic to expect nonautistic people to change, so those of us who can acquire the skill of passing will often be better able to achieve our goals if we can pass.