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cypher197 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.
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.