Aw, that makes me really happy to hear. I’m surprised that it made such a positive difference, and I update that I should do it more!
(The warmth part, not the agreement part. I can’t really control the agreement part, if we disagree then we’re just fucked. 🙃😛)
Re the social media things: yeah, I stand by that stuff, though I basically always expect reasonable people to disagree a lot about exactly how big a fuck-up is, since natural language is so imprecise and there are so many background variables we could disagree on.
I feel a bit weird about the fact that I use such a different tone in different venues, but I think I like this practice for how my brain works, and plan to keep doing it. I definitely talk differently with different friends, and in private vs. public, so I like the idea of making this fact about me relatively obvious in public too.
I don’t want to have such a perfect and consistent public mask/persona that people think my public self exactly matches my private self, since then they might come away deceived about how much to trust (for example) that my tone in a tweet exactly matches the emotions I was feeling when I wrote it.
I want to be honest in my private and public communications, but (even more than that) I want to be meta-honest, in the sense of trying to make it easy for people to model what kind of person I am and what kinds of things I tend to be more candid about, what it might mean if I steer clear of a topic, etc.
Trying too hard to look like I’m an open book who always says what’s on his mind, never self-censors in order to look more polite on the EA Forum, etc. would systematically cause people to have falser beliefs about the delta between “what Rob B said” and “what Rob B is really thinking and feeling right now”. And while I don’t think I owe everyone a full print-out of my stream of consciousness, I do sorta feel like I owe it to people to not deliberately make it sound like I’m more transparent than I am.
This is maybe more of a problem for me than for other people: I’m constantly going on about what a big fan of candor and blurting I am, so I think there’s more risk of people thinking I’m a 100% open book, compared to the risk a typical EA faces.
So, to be clear: I don’t advocate that EAs be 100% open books. And separately, I don’t perfectly live up to my own stated ideals.
Aw, that makes me really happy to hear. I’m surprised that it made such a positive difference, and I update that I should do it more!
(The warmth part, not the agreement part. I can’t really control the agreement part, if we disagree then we’re just fucked. 🙃😛)
Re the social media things: yeah, I stand by that stuff, though I basically always expect reasonable people to disagree a lot about exactly how big a fuck-up is, since natural language is so imprecise and there are so many background variables we could disagree on.
I feel a bit weird about the fact that I use such a different tone in different venues, but I think I like this practice for how my brain works, and plan to keep doing it. I definitely talk differently with different friends, and in private vs. public, so I like the idea of making this fact about me relatively obvious in public too.
I don’t want to have such a perfect and consistent public mask/persona that people think my public self exactly matches my private self, since then they might come away deceived about how much to trust (for example) that my tone in a tweet exactly matches the emotions I was feeling when I wrote it.
I want to be honest in my private and public communications, but (even more than that) I want to be meta-honest, in the sense of trying to make it easy for people to model what kind of person I am and what kinds of things I tend to be more candid about, what it might mean if I steer clear of a topic, etc.
Trying too hard to look like I’m an open book who always says what’s on his mind, never self-censors in order to look more polite on the EA Forum, etc. would systematically cause people to have falser beliefs about the delta between “what Rob B said” and “what Rob B is really thinking and feeling right now”. And while I don’t think I owe everyone a full print-out of my stream of consciousness, I do sorta feel like I owe it to people to not deliberately make it sound like I’m more transparent than I am.
This is maybe more of a problem for me than for other people: I’m constantly going on about what a big fan of candor and blurting I am, so I think there’s more risk of people thinking I’m a 100% open book, compared to the risk a typical EA faces.
So, to be clear: I don’t advocate that EAs be 100% open books. And separately, I don’t perfectly live up to my own stated ideals.