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XiXiDu comments on NASA scientist finds evidence of alien life [link] - Less Wrong
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Comments (16)
I'd love to see some series of posts where someone applies LWism to such stories. LW is too much about refining rationality when the biggest problem is that people don't know how to apply it to real life problems. But since Yvain has basically bashed that idea I lost all hope that it will ever happen. He actually got 26 upvotes for it and I don't even know of a single post that shows how to apply what you can learn on LW to real life problems.
Looking back on that comment I agree it came across as too harsh.
I meant only that this site's comparative advantage is not in teaching object-level information about how to succeed socially, pick up girls/boys, program computers, or lose weight - even if the post with the information is called "Losing Weight The Rationalist Way".
I totally support more posts on the interaction between rationality and real-life problems, like if there is a specific cognitive bias that's preventing people from losing weight, or if the problem of weight loss illuminates some wider issue about how people think and act. Just not "Hey guys, I just read about how if you only eat carrots for a week you can lose thirty pounds! This sounds really rational and high utility! Bayes!"
(I feel the same way about discussion of politics. I realize different people's intuition about where to draw the line on weight-loss and politics posts are in different places, and I know I've gotten flak for crossing that line a few times, and I'm willing to live and let live on the issue up until it becomes really blatant.)
I would welcome an analysis of this claim, but I think it would be most suited to Less Wrong if the analysis focused on the process of analyzing scientific papers, rather than just being about the biology of cyanobacteria. I'd probably still read the cyanobacteria one, I just wouldn't see why it's on LW.
That's not what Yvain said. He called for:
Which is an objection to all of the posts about akrasia, social skills, and so forth, not to applying rationality to figure out whether particular scientific claims are likely to be true.
I agree the comment seems somewhat off-topic, but I'm glad it was posted here anyway only because I'm new and was considering posting things similar to what you say is discouraged. But I would like to ask, is the consensus that the topic itself is discouraged, or that if you are to post on that topic, the bar should be set much higher? If anyone has advice on what you guys want to see, or not see, here, it would be appreciated.
There have been a bunch of posts on self-help related topics (akrasia, social skills, etc.), and some of them have been very well received, so if that's the topic that you're referring to then it could fit in fine. Yvain was just giving his own views, not setting official LW policy (and he's clarified his views with another comment here).
If you want feedback on whether people would be interested in your post, you could give a two sentence summary of it, either here or in the open thread.
There's no real limit on what you can get away with if you can clear a high enough bar. For example, here's an article about discovering the sunken city of Atlantis.
As the author of one such post I have to protest this exaggeration, even while I agree that it would be nice to see more.