Current feeling on meta-science: I’m not sure anyone — authors, readers, etc — actually likes papers. What if we just got rid of them?
What could we replace them with?
conjecture: papers are weak and unopinionated
want to communicate an idea? do a vlog -- most communication is about inexplicit vibes
want to release a reproducible protocol? Record you in colab doing it, release for one click reproducibility
want to debate your side of an idea against another side? Do an adversarial collaboration with someone who disagrees with you slatestarcodex.com/2019/07/24/adv…
want real peer review? Record podcast with a bunch of peers for a couple hours. Less time, higher bandwidth than normal review
want a place to continually post updates to a research direction? Do a scientific thread distill.pub/2020/selforg/ or a twitter thread or even a twitter alt :D
want to help others join the field? Instead of writing a review, start a Slack where people can join and get up to speed
different ideas need different vessels. The paper introducing DNA was 2 pages, Origin of Species was 500+
It's hard because it means tradeoffs and choosing what to focus on, but when it's done right the vessel can be as important as the idea itself
science isn't magic it's just a bunch of people trying to figure out what's going on. IMO we're doing a terrible job with communication, and that may be the most important thing to get right
So let's try weird new things
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i’m often told people love half of what i write and hate the other half (to a surprising degree)
the second costs followers every time but it feels better to aim for honesty than status. I'm helped by the few who engage with the hated ones, and i don't think they know 1/
i’d encourage anyone in a similar position for others to do it more. First, they'll love you if you engage with the stuff others don’t, either riffing off in agreement or providing thoughtful criticism. But the reason to do it isn’t to be loved 2/
but because you’re helping cultivate the courage to write what is true to them, which is surprisingly hard. And by helping them write you're helping them think. Their best stuff hides in the intersection of hated and true, and you're helping them search this area for treasure
“The most counterintuitive secret about startups is it’s often easier to succeed with a hard startup than an easy one.” - Sam Altman
I think there’s a similar secret in psych. It’s sometimes easier to become happier than anyone you’ve ever met than it is to just cure low mood
one reason is that with the ambitious path you’ll need powerful tools and tons of self introspection to understand how you work and why you’re not 10/10 already
Whereas if you aim for marginal gains you may try symptomatic treatments that end up doing nothing at all
another is that in my experience most people only have one or two core things (part of identity, a trauma, etc) blocking them, often that they’re unaware of
Without reverse engineering and healing them it’s hard to have any progress, but if you do process can be shocking
Current worldview: most everyone deeply believes things that would cause them to lose status that they wished others believed too, but aren’t willing to actually make that trade
Please prove me wrong
I’ve lost ~100 followers on you deserve newborn love and I will continue to climb the empty office buildings and shout it from the rooftops
the only good thing in my formal education was accidental. The dangerous preteen rebellious identity I formed eg getting really into drugs, faking identity actually ended up being extremely healthy, drugs -> psych -> neuro, identity -> dodge child labor law -> start career early
A lot of my peers in my low social-class school got really into drugs too. Where I basically accidentally leveraged into interest in qualia, neuro, psych, hedonic baselines, they overdosed on fentanyl. Roll the dice again and it could have easily been me
also, I’ve never seen anyone else advocate for this, but imo changing child labor laws for outliers is incredibly important
The kids that desperately want to work somewhere real at 11yo are the creative risky weirdos who may accidentally kill themselves if they can’t
give to twitter and it gives back just trust the process
almost everyone I know who got really into twitter had their lives transformed in ways they couldn’t have anticipated. We need an MTV Cribs of twitter where people just talk about how it improved their lives
there's usually like an eight month delay though
twitter wont give you its treasure if it thinks you'll leave it in the morning, needs to know you're committed