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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   4031 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for February 10, 2023

Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.

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Wanted to start off by saying I really enjoyed your submission. I think the model of intuition you laid out is largely one I agree with.

Yeah, I found it to be a difficult topic, which is ok.

I was mostly motivated to submit something because I really like the competition model.

I find https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X_Prize_Foundation pretty fascinating.

I really like the idea of scaling it down, both to try and shape a nascent internet community (does this internet community still count as nascent???) you're part of, and even just to generate insights into something that's just bothering you.

I really like it conceptually, so I felt like I should submit something, if nothing else, to support it as a model of something I think we should get more of.

I'm not sure I had any particularly fantastic insight into the topic, certainly none I would have thought to share if FiveHourMarathon had posted 'hey, how do you think intuition works?' in a Small-Scale question thread or something. (Reading over the posts, I think this is somewhat reflected in that my submission seems to do the worst job of staying on the topic).

I think that's sort of what makes the competition model cool though. If nothing else, its a way to break people out of their shells. If there's a particular topic you want to mine the board expertise about, this seems like a good model.

I like it enough that I think I might found a 2nd competition on a different question.

If people have any thoughts about shaping the competition in a way that works well, I'd be interested in that. This topic was pretty broad, would a narrower topic work better?

"I think people judging our essays might be very quick to criticize and say: why didn't the writer mention X? how didn't the writer connect Y with Z? (it's obvious)"

Again, I enjoyed yours quite a bit.

Not sure writing generates these sorts of responses unless its good enough to be engaged with. I would take any such response as a perverse form of flattery.

"then of course the time limit doesn't help (although without it I probably would have delayed the work even more than I did)."

I'll just speak for myself as someone who submitted the final, without the deadline, I wouldn't have gotten around to generating a submission.

"the end result might not necessarily be a reflection of your thoughts on the subject, which are probably evolving as we speak (the very next day I had yet another insight that I feel should be worthy of writing about)."

fwiw, I had the same experience, if anything, I think that's one of the real values of getting it out of my head and into the real world, thoughts that are sort of 80% formed, you can keep 80% formed for a long time in your head, exposing them to light forces them to evolve.

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