Butterfly Ideas

Was there a time when people were friendlier on the internet? I actually think the internet is a little more civilized. HN is pretty good, and even on Reddit there's lots of pleasant interactions.

Prior to that, all I remember is flame wars in random forums. Maybe I was young and dumb and baitable.

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.

That doesn’t seem quite right: people still try to quash hypotheses. The difference seems to be that butterfly ideas are not quite at the “try to quash it!” stage just yet.

I'm not so sure. Where a hypothesis is vulnerable to evidence, a butterfly idea seems vulnerable to emotion:

> I’ve been on the butterfly crushing end of this myself- I’m thinking of a particular case last year where my friend brought up an idea that, if true, would require costly action on my part. I started arguing with the idea, they snapped at me to stop ruining their dreams. I chilled out, we had a long discussion about their goals, how they interpreted some evidence, and why they thought a particular action might further said goals, etc.

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".

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.

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.

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.

That's a pretty harsh take. I think it's worth fleshing out an idea a bit more to see how much value it has before you try to destroy it. If the cons outweigh the pros too heavily at the onset you might not bother trying to overcome them when there might actually have been something valuable there or something that could have been realized in a different way.