Will I become significantly more mellow by the end of the year?
31
31
141
resolved Jan 1
Resolved
YES
I've long been a fan of biting criticism, speaking plainly, and calling out bullshit. Will I adopt a significantly different approach by the end of the year? Question resolves according to my own judgment. Close date updated to 2022-12-31 11:59 pm
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predicted YES

"biting criticism, speaking plainly, and calling out bullshit" is based. it's directly useful in the sense that the most biting possible criticism is a direct statement of something true that severely alters the usefulness of someone's actions or ideas. Which is valuable, it lets that person, or others, reallocate their time! accurate and deep criticism is missing in most areas. even on the EA forum, and EA is better than most about this, every few days I see a post that just seems wrong, and would benefit from deep or even shallow criticism, but doesn't have any. (shortform and uncertain but significant-sounding criticism is a lot less approved of than shortform "wow, im really excited for this"). EA (forum posts! i'm not an EA, i just read the forum) generally seems to have a bit too much 'so excited for this!' or 'lots of good stuff here' relative to, say, direct statements of disagreement.

OTOH i dont know you or about this general thing beyond reading a few dozen ea forum posts. nor do i know your reason for getting a bit more of a handle on your disagreeableness. but past disagreeable posts were fun reads.

but you asked!

predicted YES

Some insider trading at the last moment, which nonetheless sees this resolve as YES. I think that in some important sense I have "less to prove", and have a bit more of a handle on my disagreeableness.

bought Ṁ50 of YES
Recently had a great conversation about this
bought Ṁ20 of NO
People tend not to change their personalities a bunch, and I don't think you are making a project to do so (in part, because I think it's not obvious to you [*] that this would be an improvement). [*] In English, "It's not obvious to you that X" implies that X is true, but I don't mean to imply that.
bought Ṁ1 of YES
Reopened question.
bought Ṁ1 of NO
I would guess that being more mellow is good for one's social status, at least in academia-adjacent circles and at least in the US, although I'm only like 85% confident in this. I'm also not sure whether being more mellow is good for changing minds. But I would not want people to engage in ~philosophical/political (broadly conceived) discussions with me with the explicit goal of changing my mind, or to optimize their discussion style for changing my mind. I would prefer it if they didn't care at all about what my opinion is, and instead cared about figuring out the truth, or something like that. Something something treating other people as autonomous rational agents something something Kant something something, except I don't think one needs to be a deontologist to subscribe to this. I would guess that almost all people would prefer to be treated in the latter way, but I won't make a further argument for this here. (That said, there are cases where changing someone's mind is sufficiently good instrumentally to outweigh concerns about how they want to be treated. E.g. if showing Hitler a propaganda poster would have prevented the Holocaust, I would certainly have supported showing him the propaganda poster. I might begrudgingly agree that when e.g. writing a NYT article on effective altruism, propaganda considerations could be sufficiently strong to warrant being mellow. But I'd think that this is not the case when e.g. writing an EA forum post.) Anyway, even if one buys the argument that they should not be trying to change people's minds, I admit that there is still a positive case that remains to be made for speaking plainly conditional on optimizing whatever the thing is that one actually ought to be optimizing, but I won't elaborate on this right now either. I agree that there is variation in how people like to be treated etc., and that it's best to take this into account when optimizing whatever one is optimizing in discussions. Also, I don't want to argue for cruel insults or ridicule (nor does this seem to be what Nuño is currently pursuing, at least based on a cursory look at his twitter).
bought Ṁ5 of YES
i agree with isaac, and also i want to add that the best is to understand first other people's minds and work with them, don't believe that all of us work in the same way. some of them will need more criticism and satires than others, you only need to learn when you are going to act in one way or another.
bought Ṁ5 of YES
As someone with a similar disposition, I've found that biting criticism and "calling people out" tends to be counterproductive. If your goal is just to raise your social status then sure, go ahead, but if your goal is to change minds I think you'll find that a different tactic is far more effective. You can still tell people that you disagree with them, but refrain from ridicule and insults, since that's just going to make them less receptive.
bought Ṁ25 of YES
socialization is like a game. you only need to know how/where to play.
bought Ṁ10 of YES
*learning how this works*
bought Ṁ20 of NO
mellow is boring; I think almost all interesting people prefer to be spoken to candidly
bought Ṁ20 of YES
Read How to Win Friends and Influence People. Basically, do you need to be rude to speak plainly?
bought Ṁ28 of NO
Trying to increase liquidity manually so that bets don't move the price as much