Says basically working in in-person groups sucks but working in async, remote, online groups is good.
Quoting mathjax doesn’t work right automatically so I think it’s OK to use plain text of equations in quotes in simple cases where that only results in different formatting not a substantive difference.
Imagine if a quote like this example above, which appears to be generated by the forum software, was inaccurate. Imagine someone selected the text, clicked quote, then went and changed the words. That would be really bad, right? And it’d look intentional and easily avoidable. If someone said “I only made small edits that didn’t change the meaning”, that would be a terrible excuse which admits they did it on purpose. You shouldn’t edit the accurate, software-generated quote at all. Or if you have an important reason to edit it, indicate the edits with e.g. square brackets.
I think I view misquotes in general like this (unless they’re old or I otherwise expect them to have been copied from paper). By default, I expect quotes to be just as accurate as when you select text and press “quote” and software handles the rest, or alternatively when you use copy/paste. I think anything worse than that is unreasonable in general for stuff people post on the internet today. My intuitions about quoting were developed after copy/paste existed and were primarily developed by quoting electronic text (e.g. on email lists) not paper books, and when I do quote books today I usually use electronic copies (which are widely available for most books that anyone cares enough about to quote).
My stance on quoting may be aided by modern technology but the concept that quotes shouldn’t change any words is widespread and well known despite not being widely followed. The standard convention of not changing words in quotes is why the square bracket convention for indicating changes to quotes exists.
Trump’s election campaign looks really bad this time.
He’s anti-woke instead of anti-swamp. He appears to have become a mainstream Republican who gets along with most Republican politicians reasonably well. He also became more friendly to big corporations (that commit fraud).
He’s emphasizing “traditional” gender role stuff, anti-trans and anti-abortion.
He says basically if we elect him he’ll fix everything but if he knows how to do that why didn’t he do it during his first term?
Because of my past posts, I wanted to say that I don’t support Trump in 2024. I broadly dislike both major U.S. political parties and don’t plan to vote. I find most information sources on both sides awful.
Also, the longer Israel’s war goes, the more skeptical of it I am. Israel’s past wars being short was actually important to David Deutsch’s arguments about Israel that he persuaded me of. If Israel has/had no good plan to achieve important goals quickly, dropping a lot of bombs ineffectively for months seems probably worse than doing nothing. I am not reading news articles about this, I don’t know details, nor have I researched Israel’s old wars to see if what Deutsch told me about them was true. This topic isn’t a priority for me but I wanted to mention it because of Deutsch’s position and my past position. I’m more neutral and unsure than before.
If it was possible to get organized, rational debate, with knowledgeable people, about politics (or a ton of other topics) I’d probably be interested. But I don’t know how to get that.
Ghost (the software for the CF articles) added a tips and donations feature (one-time payments via Stripe). Here’s the link if you’d like to send me money (no account required).
Low context communication is important for philosophical topics, science or debates.
If people disagree, making assumptions about context can prevent discussion about the actual point of disagreement and cause confusion. People with substantial disagreements tend to disagree about some stuff that they would assume as context when walking with friends.
For scientific experiments to be repeatable or analyzable, they have to be documented in pretty clear, accurate, literal and complete way. That helps other labs, with people who are different than you, check your work. Having results checked by people in other countries, cultures or time periods increases the chance of finding an error you made. If your work was only double checked by people with a lot of similarity to you, who share a lot of unstated context with you, that’d be less effective: those people would be more likely to repeat rather than recognize the same assumptions and errors you made.
One of the many things Taking Children Seriously was wrong about is this:
There were often discussions of real or hypothetical problems that parents face and suggested non-coercive solutions.
The TCS solutions often involved high resource use in some way.
The unstated premise was that these problems were exceptions or outliers. Under that premise, putting high effort into a solution makes sense and works. Basically, TCS was teaching some crisis management ideas without labelling them that way.
However, if the problems are happening frequently, then using high-cost solutions repeatedly won’t work. You’ll run out of resources so you won’t be able to keep doing that, plus running out will cause other problems.
An example of a TCS solution would be offering your kids a trip to Disney Land to get them to stop fighting. This proves that there is a non-coercive way to handle that situation; the conflict isn’t literally impossible to resolve without coercion. And if you have a major problem once a year, you can use that style of solution. But if you have daily or weekly problems like most parents, then you’ll need to resolve almost all of them with solutions appropriate to daily life, not spend tons of resources on each problem like it’s a rare, exceptional crisis.
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I don’t support Trump in 2024.
I commented on YouTube regarding misquoting at Misquote of Feynman | Analyzing The Beginning of Infinity, part 10
Here’s the Hacker News comment. Based on now searching the shorter quote given there, there are many results and it may be real. It looks like maybe the YouTube commenter added extra words so his version isn’t accurate.
I think there’s something interesting involved with:
- Being impressed by a prestigious book or author which you believe is smart and better than you are.
- Holding the smart book or author to the same low standards you have for yourself.
It looks like the person is defending misquoting in a book because he’s a misquoter and would do the same thing and doesn’t see a big problem (despite implicitly acknowledging the book is wrong). But if he’s a fan of the book, and thinks it’s high quality and written by someone super smart, why doesn’t he expect it to be better and more accurate than his own thinking?
It would seem natural to me, in at least some ways, for most fans of the book to feel betrayed if they found out it had misquotes and actually wasn’t the super-smart, better-than-they-could-do, highly-polished material they thought it was. I thought part of what people want in these kinds of books is for an expert who they can trust to explain advanced science and philosophy in layman’s terms. I suspect lots of people wouldn’t see it this way but I’m not clear on why.
Put another way: I thought they expected the book author to be pedantic and get details right, unlike themselves. But the YouTube commenter seems to have an attitude more like “picking on details is unfair” because he wouldn’t like someone doing that to him in debate with him. But I thought he would think scientist authors at major publishers could stand up to detailed scrutiny, not that it was unfair to use logic, detail-orientedness and intelligence to pick on them (they should have those traits and be able to hold their own). And books like this also have and at least one editor involved and sometimes a fact checker, so there’s at least one extra person involved, besides the author, whose paid job it is to be detailed-oriented and keep errors out of the book.
Also, if this was the only quoting-related error in the whole book, that’d actually be pretty good compared to most books. But it isn’t. There are lots more similar errors.