HughRistik comments on Self-Improvement or Shiny Distraction: Why Less Wrong is anti-Instrumental Rationality - Less Wrong

105 Post author: patrissimo 14 September 2010 04:17PM

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Comment author: Yvain 14 September 2010 08:39:04PM *  37 points [-]

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:

  1. 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.

  2. Poll on whether people want a bulletin board or subreddits. This poll is below this comment.

  3. 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.)

  4. 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.

Comment author: HughRistik 14 September 2010 09:05:36PM 10 points [-]

AND WHICH CAN HANDLE ANY THREADS IN A SANE WAY

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.

Comment author: NancyLebovitz 15 September 2010 02:03:00AM 11 points [-]

It would be nice to have a recent comments link for specific threads.

Comment author: Risto_Saarelma 15 September 2010 09:41:36AM 2 points [-]

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.

Comment author: NancyLebovitz 15 September 2010 10:33:30AM 0 points [-]

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.

Comment author: CronoDAS 15 September 2010 02:47:56AM 0 points [-]

Yes it would.