What Goes Without Saying — LessWrong
There are people I can talk to, where all of the following statements are obvious. They go without saying. We can just “be reasonable” together, with the context taken for granted.
Concepts like Goodhart’s Law, cargo-culting, greenwashing, hype cycles, Sturgeon’s Law, even bullshit jobs[1] are all pointing at the basic understanding that it’s easier to seem good than to be good, that the world is full of things that merely appear good but aren’t really, and that it’s important to vigilantly sift out the real from the fake.
If anything, I often get frustrated with chronic pessimists who cry “fake” or “sellout” or “bullshit job” about everything popular or glossily presented, or everything whose value isn’t obvious to them.
But then sometimes I meet people who talk as though they aren’t tracking “how do we make sure we’re tackling the main problem?” or “well, most things in this space are {unreplicable, failures, trivial, biased, error-prone, etc} so how are we ensuring we select for the few actually-good ones?”
