The Best of LessWrong

Tsvi has many underrated posts. This one was rated correctly. I didn't previously have a crisp conceptual handle for the category that Tsvi calls Playful Thinking. Initially it seemed a slightly unnatural category. Now it's such a natural category that perhaps it should be called "Thinking", and other kinds should be the ones with a modifier (e.g. maybe Directed Thinking?).  Tsvi gives many theoretical justifications for engaging in Playful Thinking. I want to talk about one because it was only briefly mentioned in the post:  For me, engaging in intellectual play is an antidote to political mindkilledness. It's not perfect. It doesn't work for very long. But it does help. When I switch from intellectual play to a politically charged topic, there's a brief period where I'm just.. better at thinking about it. Perhaps it increases open-mindedness. But that's not it. It's more like increased ability to run down object-level thoughts without higher-level interference. A very valuable state of mind. But this isn't why I play. I play because it's fun. And because it's natural? It's in our nature. It's easy to throw this away under pressure, and I've sometimes done so. This post is a good reminder of why I shouldn't.

I wish this had been called "Duncan's Guidelines for Discourse" or something like that. I like most of the guidelines given, but they're not consensus. And while I support Duncan's right to block people from his posts (and agree with him far on discourse norms far more than with the people he blocked), it means that people who disagree with him on the rules can't make their case in the comments. That feels like an unbalanced playing field to me. 

I think this, or something like this, should be in a place of prominence on LessWrong. The Best Of collection might not be the place, but it's the place I can vote on, so I'd like to vote for it here. I used "or something like this" above intentionally. The format of this post — an introduction of why these guidelines exist, short one or two sentence explanations of the guideline, and then expanded explanations with "ways you might feel when you're about to break the X Guideline" — is excellent. It turns each guideline into a mini-lesson, which can be broken out and referenced independently. The introduction gives context for them all to hang together. The format is A+, fighting for S tier. Why "something like this" instead of "this, exactly this" then? Each individual guideline is good, but they don't feel like they're the only set. I can imagine swapping basically any of them other than 0 and 1 out for something different and having something I liked just as much. I still look at 5 ("Aim for convergence on truth, and behave as if your interlocutors are also aiming for convergence on truth") and internally wince. I imagine lots of people read it, mostly agreed with it, but wanted to replace or quibble with one or two of the guidelines, and from reading the comments there wasn't a consensus on which line was out of place.  That seems like a good sign.  It's interesting to me to contrast it with Elements Of Rationalist Discourse. Elements doesn't resonate as much with me, and while some of that is Elements is not laid out as cleanly I also don't agree with the list the same way. And yet, Elements was also upvoted highly. The people yearn for guidelines, and there wasn't a clear favourite. Someday I might try my own hand at the genre, and I still consider myself to owe an expansion on my issues with 5. I'm voting for this to be in the Best Of LessWrong collection. If there was a process to vote to make this or at least the introduction and Guidelines, In Brief in

The thing I want most from LessWrong and the Rationality Community writ large is the martial art of rationality. That was the Sequences post that hooked me, that is the thing I personally want to find if it exists. Therefore, posts that are actually trying to build a real art of rationality (or warn of failed approaches) are the kind of thing I'm going to pay attention to, and if they look like they actually might work I'm going to strongly vote for including them in the Best Of LessWrong collection. Feedbackloop-first Rationality sure looks like an actual attempt at solving the problem. It lays out a strategy, the plan seems like it plausibly might work, and there's followup workshops that suggest some people are actually willing to spend money on this; that's not a clear indicator that it works (people spend money on all kinds of things) but it is significantly more than armchair theorizing.  If Raemon keeps working on this and is successful, I expect we'll see some testable results. If, say, the graduates or regular practitioners turn out to be able to confidently one-shot Thinking Physics style problems while demographically matched people stumble around, that'll be a Hot Dang Look At That Chart result at least in the toy problems. If they go on to solve novel, real world problems, then that's a clear suggestion this works. There's two branches of followup I'd like to see. One, Raemon's already been doing; running more workshops teaching this, teasing out useful subskills to teach, and writing up how how to run exercises and what the subskills are. The second is evaluations. If Raemon's keeping track of students and people who considered going but didn't, I'd love to see a report on how both sets are doing in a year or two. I'm also tempted to ask on future community censuses whether people have done Feedbackloop-first Rationality workshops (["Yes under Raemon", "Yes by other people based on this", "no"] and then throw a timed Thinking Physics-style problem a

As a rough heuristic: "Everything is fuzzy; every bell curve has tails that matter." It's important to be precise, and it's important to be nuanced, and it's important to keep the other elements in view even though the universe is overwhelmingly made of just hydrogen and helium. But sometimes, it's also important to simply point straight at the true thing.  "Men are larger than women" is a true thing, even though many, many individual women are larger than many, many individual men, and even though the categories "men" and "women" and "larger" are themselves ill-defined and have lots and lots of weirdness around the edges. I wrote a post that went into lots and lots of careful detail, touching on many possible objections pre-emptively, softening and hedging and accuratizing as many of its claims as I could.  I think that post was excellent, and important. But it did not do the one thing that this post did, which was to stand up straight, raise its voice, and Just. Say. The. Thing. It was a delight to watch the two posts race for upvotes, and it was a delight, in the end, to see the bolder one win.