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Yvain comments on Self-Improvement or Shiny Distraction: Why Less Wrong is anti-Instrumental Rationality - Less Wrong
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To get more meta, not only has Less Wrong not produced "results", but all the posts saying Less Wrong needs to produce more "results" (example: Instrumental Rationality Is A Chimera) haven't produced any results. Even though most people liked the idea in that recent PUA thread, I don't see any concrete moves in that direction either.
Most of these threads have been phrased along the lines of "Someone really ought to do something about this", and then everyone agrees that yeah, they should, and then nothing ever comes out of it. That's a natural phenomenon in an anarchy where no one is the Official Doer of Difficult Things That Need To Be Done. Our community has one leader, Eliezer, and he has much better things to do with his time. Absent a formal organization, no one is going to be able to move a few hundred people to do things differently.
But small interventions can have major changes on behavior (see the sentence beginning with "I was reminded of this recently..." here). For example, I think if there were socialskills.lesswrong.com and health.lesswrong.com subcommunities linked to the top of the page, they would auto-populate with a community and interesting posts. I would love to see a discussion forum on nootropics where people can post their experiences and questions in an organized and easy to find way, for example. This idea has been brought up since forever and no one has ever done anything about it. The alternate idea, that we make a bulletin board in which these things can be done easily and naturally (AND WHICH CAN HANDLE OPEN THREADS IN A SANE WAY) has also been brought up since forever and no one has done anything about it (one person made a bulletin board back in the Overcoming Bias days, but no one used it. Go figure.)
So I propose the following:
Community norm against saying "It would be nice if someone in our community did X" if you have no particular plans to do X and no reason to think anyone else will.
Poll on whether people want a bulletin board or subreddits. This poll is below this comment.
If people want a bulletin board, and they promise to actually use it once it is made, and Eliezer and Tricycle don't want to make it themselves, and no one else more competent with computers will make it, I will make and host it (maybe. I'm not sure how much traffic it would get and I don't want to commit to something that would bankrupt me. But in principle, yes.)
I don't know how to program subreddits, but if that solution wins the poll, I will pay someone who does know a small amount of money to do it, and other people probably will too (because we will do the fundraising in a rationalist way!) adding up to a medium amount of money.
Seriously? That's a pretty quick judgement! I wrote most of a follow-up post, but I'm going to reevaluate it a bit in light of Patri's article.
I strongly support proposal 1, and I'd welcome some monitoring to make sure I don't violate this new norm.
If the subreddits idea wins, I will also chip in for the technical cost. Social.lesswrong.com seems like a decent way to do the thing-that-isn't-PUA.
You're right, I was rounding you to the nearest cliche of the last few people who said this sort of thing, and I was wrong.
I like the sound of social.lesswrong.com.
Upvote this if, out of the solution set [keep things they way they are, have subreddits, have bulletin board], you would prefer to have subreddits.
I will donate 10 USD if Yvain does this.
I would prefer subreddits, and would match a consensus donation at up to $10 on pledgebank.
This won the poll, so I'm going to talk to some people and see how it would get done and what it would take. I'll report back when I get answers, maybe in an Open Thread or somewhere.
Forgive me if I'm just being oblivious, but did anything end up happening on this?
I messaged Eliezer several times about this and he never got back to me. I talked to Tricycle, they said they were working on something, and what ended up happening was the split between Discussion and Main. This was not quite what I wanted, but given my inability to successfully contact Eliezer at the time I gave up.
Seems not. Three years is plenty of time.
Personally, I would say there has been very clear progress between 2010 and now, though I suppose if you don't think much of CFAR you might suppose otherwise.
Progress, yes, but I'm not seeing anything quite on the level of the call to action presented here. The argument isn't that LessWrong isn't useful, but that it is operating without the recursive return on its investments that would benefit it so much more than the current (slowly advancing) practices.
I certainly don't think we're "there yet," but it seems somewhat uncharitable to say that nothing ended up happening. I also don't think the final stage of rationality practice/training will look like a martial arts dojo in almost any respect.
I'm sorry, but creating subreddits is too trivial a task that would bootstrap this specific advancement to overlook. The only way to offset this oversight is if the administrators were trying to perform some kind of "test" to see if the community can work around the problem, but that's really stretching it. I fault the entire system regardless. I suppose I don't disagree that it is somewhat uncharitable, but the advancements that have been made aren't ...
Looking over your submission history, I can see what's happening here. You are advancing and improving, and writing posts about it, with those posts being received well, but the reception is far from effective. There are any number of psychological tendencies in place to cause you to inaccurately project your own advancements onto your peers. The truth is Eliezer_Yudkowsky has already embedded a ton of these lessons in the sequences over and over again. You're stating them more formally and circling the deeper ubiquitous causes of specific individual opinions here and there, but you've yet to make the post that resonates with the community and starts breaking some of the heavier cognitive barriers in place whose side-effects you've been formalizing.
It's all well and good, you're doing well, and your effort is paying off, and the community is advancing. Some of us are just getting really impatient with how slowly LessWrong refines itself in the immediate presence of so much rationality optimizing knowledge.
I honestly expected my comments back here three years in the past to go unnoticed for some time. That people still pay attention to these events is surprising. That you took the time to reply was surprising, and while I recognized your name as the author of one of the recent LessWrong-advancing posts, I didn't properly think of the full implications until now. As long as you're paying attention across time, I might as well point out to you that nobody else is. I was going to focus on getting this article bumped tomorrow, but if you are already here now, I might as well simply suggest you start thinking about an article about visiting the past posts of LessWrong.
I'd suggest that you go along with this anyway-- while I have an article in the works that deals with some of these matters, it won't be forthcoming for some time.
Karma Score: -8
My own attempt at an article would be something vastly different, encompassing issues in such a way that article revival (anti-forgetfulness) would be a more apparent issue in need of being addressed. That's just one aspect in a deeper pool of cognitive shortcomings that I aim to empty significantly. But first I need to acquire a more detailed picture of exactly what set of biases exist in that pool, so as to trip only the ones that produce a productive pattern of thought when activated. More or less, I need to (l)earn the karma.
Article/thought re-ignition is simply an immediate and (presumably) "easily" communicable step that would produce powerful results; this community is sitting on a gold mine of cognition just waiting to be used.
Fixed.
My only feasible solution to follow rapidly developing discussions is still to read the recent comments, rather than the thread (due to all the thread and which bleeds onto continued pages)... basically a full table scan of LessWrong. The flat view of comments is better for avoiding missing something, even with comments on other posts thrown in.
It would be nice to have a recent comments link for specific threads.
Upvoted for agreement. Even better, add subscription flags to threads, and provide a recent comments view that shows only the subscribed threads.
Poking around at the source tree, this seems to be the current CMS template for the global recent comments page. As far as I can tell, the query for listing the comments is here.
A quick hack solution would be to add a second comment query where comments from posts one isn't interested in are filtered out of the all comments query before the list is returned.
I've been suggesting developing trn capabilities for a while, but that would be a big job. Adding the most valuable aspects as needed probably makes more sense.
Yes it would.
Upvote this if, out of the solution set [keep things they way they are, have subreddits, have bulletin board], you like the way things are now.
I think it's a natural phenomenon on a blog - a format which is so anti-growth, so focused on shininess, that even energy towards productive change, when directed through the blog, goes nowhere. One big reason is the community norm of this all being free stuff done in spare time (except for Eliezer). Helping people grow, and designing curricula for and monitoring their growth, is hard work. It requires professional time and getting paid.
I do X all the time in my life and in my organization. The question is whether someone will take the time to create X for others. I am happy to participate in figuring out how to do X by supplying some of my very limited time. I will pay for X (workshops, coaching, or instruction), if X is taught more effectively from this community than from the many other places offering to help me grow and become better at achieving my goals. That demand will create it's own supply.
Re: subreddits & bulletin boards - Great, more shiny ways to waste people's time. Real change happens from what you do off the internet, is that so hard an idea to understand?
One of the last posts on this sort of thing mentioned the phrase "'Good enough' is the enemy of 'at all'".
Yes, the best way to do this would have in-person groups with paid instructors. I interpreted you as saying we should go create these groups. If your point was that these groups already exist and we should get off Less Wrong and go to them, then I misunderstood, but I am still doubtful. The vast majority of people don't have access to them (live in smaller cities without such groups, don't have time for such groups, et cetera), those who do probably don't know it, and among those who do have access and know it but still haven't joined, saying "You ought to be going to these!" is unlikely to change many minds.
But I understood you to mean that Less Wrong should work to create such groups. If that's true, then they're unlikely to happen. Only a tiny handful of cities have enough Less Wrongers to form a group, and as far as I know only the Bay Area and NYC (possibly also Southern CA?) actually have one that meets consistently and with defined agendas. That immediately excludes all LWers who live outside Bay Area and NYC. For example, I live 150 miles from the nearest other LWer.
So if we want to use the community for this, we need some way of number one organizing existing and potential big-city-groups better, and number two creating online groups for people not in big cities. If someone is good enough to be worth money, we need a way to organize and fundraise for them.
Finally, a realspace organization with a paid instructor represents a big commitment for the members and a huge commitment for the instructor. It may be that just mentioning the possibility will convince a few people to set up the necessary organization. But I think it's much more likely that people will do this after the organization has already existed in online form for a while and proven it has potential; ie using an online form to bootstrap a realspace form.
It was a reference to Something's Wrong, I think.
Same here. We've found 3-4 Texas LWers. Since I have a lot of vacation time I need to use up by the end of this year, I would very much love to spend a few weeks with a more concentrated rationalist community. Anyone have any ideas for how this could work out? I'm thinking of something sort of like a SIAI house visit, but I was turned down as a visiting fellow.
Edit: A NYC LWer offered me a chance to stay a few weeks with the NYC rationalist crew, so count that as progress in this direction.
Upvote this if, out of the solution set [keep things they way they are, have subreddits, have bulletin board], you prefer to have a bulletin board, and you would use it and check it often if it existed