It makes for good Less Wrong introductory material to point people to, since there are lots of people who won't read long article online but will listen to a podcast on the way to work: LINK.
Apologies for the self-promotion, but it could hardly be more relevant to Less Wrong...
Mostly stuff that's familiar if you've read enough of Eliezer's articles, but this bit was interesting:
LUKE: Well Eliezer one last question. I know you have been talking about writing a book for quite a while and a lot of people will be curious to know how that’s coming along.
ELIEZER: So, I am about to finished with the first draft. The book seems to have split into two books. One is called How to Actually Change Your Mind and it is about all the biases that stop us from changing our minds. And all these little mental skills that we invent in ourselves to prevent ourselves from changing our minds and the counter skills that you need in order to defeat this self-defeating tendency and manage to actually change your mind.
It may not sound like an important problem, but if you consider that people who win Nobel prizes typically do so for managing to change their minds only once, and many of them go on to be negatively famous for being unable to change their minds again, you can see that the vision of people being able to change their minds on a routine basis like once a week or something, is actually the terrifying Utopian vision that I am sure this book will not actually bring to pass. But, it may none the less manage to decrease some of the sand in the gears of thought.
I don't think you need to apologize for the self-promotion. I was happy to hear it, and glad to be told about it.
I think that asking the community to downvote timtyler is a good deal less disruptive than an outright ban would be. It makes it clear that I am not speaking only for myself, which may or may not have an effect on certain types of trolls and trolling. And doing nothing is not a viable option..
I know wellkept gardens die by pacifism. Notice I did not say you shouldn't moderate. They also die by micromanagement and pitting users against each other. I've been running forums (some wellkept, others not so much) for over 10 years now so believe me I've had similar conversations from the opposite side more than I care to remember. My intention is not to cause you grief. However, soliciting up/downvotes would be called gaming/voting-rings if done by anybody else. And by prompting downvotes, it's not clear that 'you are not speaking only for yourself'.... (read more)