as far as I can tell
No content on this page itself — see linked references below.
12 linked references
July 10th, 2026
- my threads on twitter as far as I can tell and other co-epistemic frame tags, including a massive list
February 26th, 2024
- one of the things that gets people tagged as crazy is when they say absurd stuff without acknowledging that it'll come off as weird or surprising
- there's a kind of disconnect from the collective sense of things
- story of a person who came into a group and comments that he and his son were exhausted because someone searched their apartment last night
- friend > who was searching?
- [foreign country's secret police]
- friend > what did you do?
- we pretended to be asleep
- group was silent
February 8th, 2023
tracking Duncan Sabien's paradigm › You Don't Exist, Duncan › this post is full of examples of intersubjective tension …
- & frame stuff, like missing as far as I can tell and other co-epistemic frame tags
- this is discussed in Sapir-Whorf for Rationalists by Duncan Sabien
- here
- > > "I claim that passe muraille is just a variant of tic-tac."
"Obviously, passe muraille is just a variant of tic-tac."
"It seems to me that passe muraille is just a variant of tic-tac."
"I might be missing something, but as far as I can tell, the most sensible way to think of passe muraille is as a variant of tic-tac."
"Passe muraille is just a variant of tic-tac." - > There are a lot of reasons why people argue that the distinctions between these sentences shouldn't matter—
(Two of the more common ones being "I don't want to put in the effort to track it" and "It's useful for me to be able to equivocate between them, e.g. using verbal markers of confidence for emphasis rather than to express strength-of-justified-belief.")
—but if you're in a subculture whose explicit goal is clear thinking, clear communication, and collaborative truth-seeking, it seems pretty likely to me that you'll get further if you can sustain common-knowledge agreement that these sentences are, in fact, different.
- and here
- > I often object to certain conversational moves, and occasionally that objection takes the form of me attempting to rewrite what my conversational partner said—trying to express what I think they genuinely believe, and meant to convey, without violating Duncan-norms in the way their original version did.
- > (Because usually there is indeed something in there that's expressible in Duncan-culture; it is an intentional feature of Duncan-culture that many more things may be prosocially expressed than in most enclaves of American culture.)
- > After doing this, though, I often get back a counterobjection of the form "why should I have to put in that much interpretive labor?" or "if I have to put in that much work, I'm just never going to say anything3(lesswrong.com/posts/PCrTQDbciG4oLgmQ5/sapir-whorf-for-rationalists#fny…)" or "yeah, no, I'm not gonna arbitrarily swap out words to meet some opaque and inscrutable standard."
- > And there seem to me to be several things going on in that sort of response, most of which aren't appropriate to dive into here. But there is one aspect of it that sticks out, which is that it seems to me that such people assume/believe that I'm doing something like applying a politeness filter after the fact, or tacking on empty catch phrases to appease the audience, or similar.
- > Which is just not what's happening, ever—at least, not in my head. The differences between:
- Harley is a liar
- Harley is lying
- It seems like Harley is lying
- It seems to me like Harley is lying
- I'm having a hard time understanding how Harley could be being honest, here
- > ... are quite real, and quite salient in Duncan-culture. Those are not sentences which would ever be mistaken for one another and the differences between them are not cosmetic; they are crucial.
June 13th, 2022
- "seems so" as an alternative to "I agree" or "that's true"
- it's like "I agree" in that it retains a subjective sense
- it's like "that's true" in that it doesn't emphasize the self
- (from convos with Daniel S)
June 1st, 2022
- I believe as something that probably wants to be replace with as far as I can tell
- I believe reifies and emphasizes the believer and the belief itself, rather than
- present-at-hand rather than ready-to-hand
- (from a convo w Daniel S)
- > I believe that choosing the first strategy risks getting bogged down in details while not addressing how different kinds of changes interact with each other.
June 27th, 2021
- "as far as I can tell" is a powerful way to own something that's self-evident in your frame without claiming it should be self-evident to others
- I'm also thinking about the phrase as far as I can tell
- what if instead of "core principles" we had a list of the AFAICTs of NNTD?