Duncan has just replied on Facebook to my request for descriptions of what each person on his list does. He says it's fine to copy his reply over here.

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Julia Galef: something like, a science reporter whose hobby side project is doing science reporting for middle schoolers, and it’s in fact good and engaging and not stupid and boring. Wholesomeness, clarity, a tendency to correctly predict which parts of the explanation will break down for the audience and a corresponding slow and careful focus on those sections. Not unrelatedly: a sort of statesmanlike, reliable diplomacy; genuinely civilized debate; not the sort of person who will ever ever ever contribute to a discussion going off the rails. Grounding, stabilizing, sane-itizing.

Anna Salamon: something like how modern AI art programs can take a verbal prompt and spit out endless variations of image, and can take an image and spit out endless variations of interpretation and description. An ability to do co-Focusing, to find matches for felt senses, to find MISmatches between a felt sense and the preexisting model, and zero in on the delta, and rapidly put words to the delta, ad infinitum. An ability to make the proposition “some things just can’t be put into words” feel much less likely to be true.

Rob Bensinger: something like Data from Star Trek: The Next Generation. An ability to continuously produce relevant related information, an ability to maintain equanimity, an often-refreshing decoupling (in the decoupling vs. contextualizing sense). Someone who is unusually able to productively set aside human baggage and discuss things in depth, with mild manner, despite them perhaps being heavy or dangerous or deeply confusing.

Scott Garrabrant: something like an ability to externalize subtle and deep introspection, and to track the impacts of various pressures on his own cognition, and to hazard sound guesses as to the impacts of various pressures on the cognition of others. Fittingly: much closer to being a lens that can see itself than most people, and as a benefit, sometimes being able to serve as a mirror for other lenses to kind-of-sort-of see themselves.

Vaniver: something like an ability to synthesize realpolitik and the real world with the ivory tower; unusually capable of both recognizing *which* swathes of unfortunately-messy reality are relevant, and of keeping the conversation tethered to those swathes. “Would survive in the Game of Thrones universe without necessarily having to resort to evil” is kind of opaque, as a gesture toward why-Vaniver-is-a-good-communicator, but it fits the felt sense. Another way to say this is perhaps “comes to the table with the same sort of savvy that a veteran factory-floor engineer brings to a design discussion.”

Eliezer Yudkowsky: something like an ability to start from first principles and actually run the simulation forward, reliably and without skips and hallucinations and glossings-over, seeing what would happen rather than discovering that what you previously expected to happen of-course happens. Probably relatedly, the ability to *not* have his thinking visibly swayed by the hootings of the other monkeys; to neither cringe in fear nor seek applause.

Logan Strohl: something like the ability to cast “detect fuckery” and then also *say aloud* the results of the spell without getting torn to pieces by the other monkeys. A high sensitivity to things-being-askew coupled with an ability to express a) what the being-skewed feels like, in terms that allow others to recognize it, and b) hypotheses about what is causing the skewed-ness that are right or very close to right a shocking percentage of the time. Sort of like the love-child of the Anna-description and the Scott-description. Someone who speaks language as a second language, with both the drawbacks and the benefits that this provides (and it’s the benefits I’m pointing at, as valuable).

Oliver Habryka: something like courage and something like candor (I don’t mean to belittle; maybe it just IS those things but I can’t see inside his head so all I can speak to is what they resemble from the outside). Unwilling to let a falsehood pass, unafraid to voice a disagreement. The sort of person who, if he’s just “in the room,” I can trust that *I* have not accidentally said something false, because he will beep more reliably than almost anyone I know. Someone who actually flies the flag of truth, higher than any other flags (this is true of many of the people on this list but it’s conspicuously *representative* of Oliver’s particular virtue even moreso than the rest).

Kelsey Piper: something like the ability to bridge gaps, the ability to translate, the ability to host powwows, the ability to make-legible to one another *very* different views and cultures. Perhaps the best translator on the list. Able to extract the shape of the whole thought-tree from the mind of Person A, and to skillfully plant, water, grow, and trim the resulting thought-tree in the mind of Person B such that they are, in all the important ways, the *same* thought-tree, despite the two mental environments being very very different.

Nate Soares: something like the ability to track, and explicate, all of the uncertainties, and the uncertainties around those uncertainties, and the uncertainties around those as well; to make crisp and workable-with all of the possible flaws in a stack of conjecture. Not unrelatedly, the ability to track (and make trackable, for others, at least sometimes) all of the branches of dependency and possibility in a complex chain of thoughts; to note that A depends on B and C, and B depends on D, E, and F while C depends on D (also), G, H, and I, and that depending on the conclusion re: A something will *change* about J which informs both H and E.

Eric Rogstad: something like relentless good faith, the ability to be “on the side” of all parties in a meaningful and true sense, even if those parties are themselves opposed. Curious, and somehow *safe* in his curiosity; not someone whose curiosity comes with risk; not someone whose curiosity you will regret indulging (which is unfortunately not always the case!). In similar fashion: genuinely good-willed and good-natured; where someone like Julia or Kelsey might be low-conflict because Actually Diplomatic and someone like Scott or Logan might be low-conflict because Actually Has No Horse In This Race, Eric seems (to me) to embody and project something more like actual universal compassion, with correspondingly positive effects on discourse.

Spencer Greenberg: something like clean, something like straightforward, something like matter-of-fact. Stays firmly within the boundaries of his competence, keeps the ground under him, is cautious and reserved in his claims, stretching them only as far as observation will permit. Avoids trash fires and demon threads, possibly with a corresponding sacrifice in *which* topics he’s able to publicly discuss (mild contrast to my depiction of Rob above), but with the result that the Spencer-garden is well-kept and flourishing and tranquil and engaging. A Japanese tea garden of discourse.

Dan Keys: something like a Logan-esque detect fuckery, except instead of being focused on the human experience it’s focused on the interaction between information and summary. Reliably notes “I don’t think that Y conclusion is actually supported by X data.” In fact cares about the record, in fact cares about the evidence. An actual logician, an actual scientist. Trustworthy, by virtue of having filters that strike down 99 claims out of 100 and only allow the actually-deserving ones through.

i'm sorry not to be engaging with the content of the post here; hopefully others have that covered. but i just wanna say, man this is so well written! at the sentence and paragraph level especially, i find it inspiring. it makes me wanna write more like i'm drunk and dgaf, though i doubt that exact thing would actually suffice to allow me to hit a similar stylistic target.

(the rest of this comment is gonna be largely for me and my own development, but maybe you'll like reading it anyway.)

i think you do a bunch of stuff that current me is too chicken to try. skimming quickly through, here are a few phrases that stand out as "I'm too chicken for that":

"There’s no data for Antarctica because all the people there are penguins."

"To make olive oil, you grind some olives and press them."

"Lots of trials where vegetable oils look great were also excluded."

the middle quote strikes me as a paradigmatic example of what happens when you take all the most standard writing advice i know of and apply it without tripping over your own damn feet. "To make olive oil, you grind some olives and press them." even though i love reading it, when i imagine writing it, i feel so scared of everything i'm leaving out, as though the complexities of the world will haunt me for as long as that sentence is available to other people's eyes. "what about removing the pits? what about combining the paste with water? what about how maybe there are other methods of making olive oil that i don't know about? when i made buckwheat flour, i didn't even have to do the 'press' part, but it still took me hours; am i really gonna compress something like that into six words?"

why can't i write "all the people there are penguins"? because there are in fact a few humans in antarctica, and also even if we exclude the humans there are at minimum whatever people the penguins eat, so on multiple counts it's literally false. but clearly i prefer the world where you write "because all the people are penguins", and i'm pretty darn sure i would also like to be able to write "all the people are penguins".

why can't i write "trials where vegetable oils look great"? for almost the same reason as the penguins thing: i have some kind of stick up my butt about excessive precision and literality. "there's no such thing as something that looks great, without some kind of perspective or reference from from which or for which it looks great."

seems like i have an interesting internal disagreement that hews close to the foundations of my beliefs about good writing. thanks for helping me pinpoint it. also, having examined these particular examples, i'm seriously wondering whether being drunk really would be a tremendous improvement for me along this axis.

Ah, so would I! I think I never actually got to see more info on the outcome. I don't know whether or not anything was actually compiled. Once it was in Leverage's hands, I guess I lost track of it somehow, but I don't remember why.

thanks!

A note on illustrations:

Somebody brought up that their friend assumed my illustrations are AI generated. So I want to clarify: With the exception of the two dancers in "Spaciousness In Partner Dance" (AI generated) and the spider web in "On Realness" (commissioned from Theresa Strohl, my mother), I've painted all the illustrations by hand myself. Duncan Sabien has edited them slightly to make them work with LW's site background.

(Designated Buddhism thread)

I ordinarily do not allow discussions of Buddhism on my posts because I hate moderating them. I haven't worked out what exactly it is about Buddhism, but it seems to cause things to go wonky in a way that's sort of similar to politics.

Also, my way of thinking and writing and doing things in general seems to bring out a lot of people who want to talk about Buddhism, and I want my work discussed mostly on its own terms, without it being immediately embroiled in whatever thing it is that tends to happen when people start talking about Buddhism.

One of my moderation rules forbids discussion of Buddhism by default.

Since there was a big old section on meditation in this post, and the type of meditation I described is pretty specifically shikantaza from Soto Zen, I'm designating this here thread as the place where people can talk about Buddhism-related stuff if they want to, just this once, as a treat. 

I don't promise to participate. My other moderation rules still apply.

I have thought fondly of this post several times since I read it.

This post helped me relate to my own work better. I feel less confused about what's going on with the differences between my own working pace and the pace of many around me. I am obviously more like a 10,000 day monk than a 10 day monk, and I should think and plan accordingly. 

Partly because I read this post, I spend frewer resources frantically trying to show off a Marketable Product(TM) as quickly as possible ("How can I make a Unit out of this for the Workshop next month?"), and I spend more resources aiming for the progress I actually think would be valuable ("In the world where I have robustly solved X one year from now, what happened in the intervening twelve months?").

Outside of academia (or perhaps even inside of it, at this point), our society does not really have a place for monks of the larger magnitudes, so it's uncomfortable to try to be one. But if I'm going to try to be one, which I absolutely am, it's awfully helpful to be able to recognize that as what I'm doing. It impacts how I structure my research and writing projects. It impacts how I ask for funding. It impacts how I communicate about priorities and boundaries ("I'm not scheduling meetings this quarter.") 

I plot my largest project on a multi-decade timescale, and although there are reasons I'm concerned about this, "lots of other people don't seem to commit to such things" is no longer among them.