[HN Gopher] Butterfly Ideas
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Butterfly Ideas
Author : surprisetalk
Score : 27 points
Date : 2023-12-28 17:18 UTC (2 days ago)
(HTM) web link (www.lesswrong.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.lesswrong.com)
| 082349872349872 wrote:
| We used to use "thinking out loud" as the tag for these...
| PaulDavisThe1st wrote:
| Sometimes when I am thinking out loud, I am sounding out ideas
| I feel are pretty strong (I might be right, I might be wrong).
|
| Sometimes when I am thinking out loud, I am sounding out ideas
| I feel are pretty weak. These are "butterfly ideas".
| LargeTomato wrote:
| This website is written in a very self aggrandizing way. At this
| point I feel like I am biased against the articles before reading
| them because every article seems to explicitly state, or attempt
| to implicitly state, how smart the author is. Meanwhile, I read
| some blog posts that are posted onto HN that are not like that.
| jauntywundrkind wrote:
| Using an ad hominem isn't even a fair way to crush a butterfly.
|
| I think it's a sign of maturity as a reader to be able to work
| around the bad to get to where one can see some of the good.
| This article is about letting that better nature in.
|
| HN is one site where we really could permit some space &
| possibility better.
| thot_experiment wrote:
| The LW crowd is all like that, I think it's neat that they've
| been able to create this echo chamber for themselves because it
| leads to some really wonky ideas and norms. I think the
| rationalists have mostly failed at their stated goals ("raise
| the sanity waterline"?) at least on an object level. However, I
| do think there's a good amount of value in the second order
| effects of a big group of nerds who are rich enough off tech
| money to eschew a great deal of societal norms and create
| something so fucking odd when viewed through a normie lens.
|
| I think society's annealing could use more heat, and they
| provide.
| koliber wrote:
| Think about this!!!!
| Sniffnoy wrote:
| Possibly worth noting that this is a crosspost of
| https://acesounderglass.com/2022/02/04/butterfly-ideas/
| lisper wrote:
| "Butterfly idea" is a cute aphorism but there is already a term
| of art for this which ought to be in more widespread use
| especially among nerds: hypothesis, as in, "This is just a
| hypothesis, but ..."
| koliber wrote:
| Different hypotheses differ in strength. While a butterfly idea
| is a sort of hypothesis, it specifically denotes a particularly
| weak one with the most minimal amount of support. I like the
| term because it allows you to express the magnitude together
| with the fact that it is a hypothesis with minimal effort. Of
| course the people you work with need to be familiar with this
| vernacular, but that's doable.
| zh3 wrote:
| This point I thought was telling (the internet is not what it
| once was):-
|
| >"...what I write in public ends up being on the very defensible
| end of the things I think"
| shunyaekam wrote:
| Therapy helps in overcoming pretentiousness, no doubt. This is an
| emotional problem, feelings of worthlessness, attaching one's
| sense of identity to how smart one is etc.
|
| It's a big problem, especially among people with no life (family,
| self-care habits), eg nerds with no purpose.
|
| Making up a term just so you can continue jerking each other off
| intellectually wont help you with anything.
| PaulDavisThe1st wrote:
| From TFA:
|
| > Sometimes talking with my friends is like intellectual
| combat, which is great. I am glad I have such strong cognitive
| warriors on my side. But not all ideas are ready for
| intellectual combat. If I don't get my friend on board with
| this, some of them will crush an idea before it gets a chance
| to develop, which feels awful and can kill off promising
| avenues of investigation.
|
| That doesn't describe anything like what you've described in
| your comment.
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(page generated 2023-12-30 23:01 UTC)