# 10 posts I like in the 2018 Review

I see basically every post that gets submitted to LessWrong, whereas many users come in and read things more occasionally, so I thought I'd list 10 posts I like in the 2018 Review that people might have missed.

I wasn't able to write quick reviews of each of them, so this is more like a list of nominations. I've left out a few posts that I expect will naturally be very popular.

1.  [**Naming the Nameless**](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/4ZwGqkMTyAvANYEDw/naming-the-nameless) by Sarah Constantin
    *   This points to a variety of specific mechanisms and gears by which culture and aesthetics affect our judgments and our choices, and combines them into an essay that walked me much further than I was before-hand in noticing these effects. I think it might be in my top 5 posts of 2018.
2.  [**Explicit and Implicit Communication**](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/PqbDgCtyRPYkYwHsm/explicit-and-implicit-communication) by lionhearted
    *   This has some powerful arguments about when *not* to say things out loud - when *not* to make background assumptions explicit - which I think is a really powerful datapoint for a rationalist to take on board. And the anti-Nazi 'Simple Sabotage Field Manual' is amazing.
3.  [**Challenges to Christiano's capability amplification proposal**](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/S7csET9CgBtpi7sCh/challenges-to-christiano-s-capability-amplification-proposal) **\+** [**Paul's research agenda FAQ**](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/Djs38EWYZG8o7JMWY/paul-s-research-agenda-faq)  by Eliezer Yudkowsky and zhukeepa (respectively)
    *   These together are maybe the first time I really understood what Paul's ideas were. Really helpful. I'm mostly talking about the Eliezer-Paul dialogue, both on Eliezer's post, and in the comments of Alex's post. I appreciate zhukeepa putting in the explanatory work post as a necessary step for that dialogue to continue.
4.  [**Varieties of Argumentative Experience**](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/NLBbCQeNLFvBJJkrt/varieties-of-argumentative-experience) by Scott Alexander
    *   So. Many. Examples. This is a strong step forward in conceptualising arguments and disagreements, written by someone who's read and been involved in an incredible amount of good (and bad) ones on the internet.
5.  [**Unrolling social metacognition: Three levels of meta are not enough.**](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/K4eDzqS2rbcBDsCLZ/unrolling-social-metacognition-three-levels-of-meta-are-not) by Academian
    *   This very clearly lays out the iterative process by which social emotions and attitudes are built up. Foundational for a lot of social modelling.
6.  [**Act of Charity**](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/rwjv8bZfSuE9ZAigH/act-of-charity) by Jessicata
    *   A thoughtful dialogue throwing into contrast a lot of key intuitions around deception, self-deception, and ethics.
7.  [**Public Positions and Private Guts**](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/Zbf2L4ZJf4ykZqmPA/public-positions-and-private-guts) by Vaniver
    *   This post says a lot about how formal communication ignores many messy parts of what it's actually like being a human, that helps show how what communication needs to be changes at scale.
8.  [**Optimization Amplifies**](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/zEvqFtT4AtTztfYC4/optimization-amplifies) by Scott Garrabrant
    *   One of the most important ideas IMO when thinking about AI and AI alignment. Best summarised by the line: "I am not just saying that adversarial optimization makes small probabilities of failure large. I am saying that in general any optimization at all messes with small probabilities and errors drastically."
9.  [**Intelligent Social Web**](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/AqbWna2S85pFTsHH4/the-intelligent-social-web) by Valentine
    *   Really well-written explanation of a basic way of understanding social dynamics, that helps me understand a lot of my experiences.
10.  [**Prediction Markets: When Do They Work**](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/a4jRN9nbD79PAhWTB/prediction-markets-when-do-they-work) by Zvi
    *   This post communicates a lot of Zvi's taste and experience about how to design basic markets - prediction markets, in particular. Shaped a lot of my thinking about this subject, and has been a good guide when I've been (a little bit) involved in trying to build forecasting infrastructure.

I'd be interested to see posts that other users really liked.