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patrissimo 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.
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.