...smarter than me...
I think this is a largely overestimated concept, especially on LW. I doubt most people here are "smarter" than average Joe. A lot of it is due to education, a difference of interest, and a little more ease when it comes to symbol manipulation. Surely there are many more factors, like the ability to concentrate, not getting bored too quickly, being told as a child that one can learn anything if one tries hard enough etc., but little has to do with insurmountable hardware limitations.
Eliezer Yudkowsky recently wrote:
You know how there are people who, even though you could train them to carry out the steps of a Universal Turing Machine, you can't manage to teach them linear algebra...
I haven't heard of any evidence that would suggest that there are human beings who can't understand linear algebra. I myself have not yet arrived at linear algebra, because I didn't bother to learn any math when I was a teenager, but I doubt that it is something only superhuman beings can understand. I would go as far as to bet that you could teach it to someone with down syndrome.
Take for example the number 3^^^^3. Can I hold a model of 3^^^^3 objects in my memory? No. Can I visualize 3^^^^3? No. Does that mean that I am unable to fathom some of its important properties, e.g. its scope? No.
Someone who has no legs can't run faster than you. Similar differences are true about different brains, but we don't know enough about brains, or what it means to understand linear algebra, to indiscriminately claim that someone is "smarter"...
I'm not convinced anybody could teach me to understand linear algebra. Or maybe what I mean by that is that I'm not convinced of my own ability to understand linear algebra, which may be a different thing.
I have trouble with maths. More specifically, I have trouble with numbers. What I experience when faced with lots of numbers is akin to how people with dyslexia often describe trying to parse lots of written text - they swim and shift beneath my eyes, and dissolve into a mass of meaningless gobbledegook that I can't pick any sense from. And then after a w...
Or, what do you want to see more or less of from Less Wrong?
I'm thinking about community norms, content and topics discussed, karma voting patterns, et cetera. There are already posts and comment sections filled with long lists of proposed technical software changes/additions, let's not make this post another one.
My impression is that people sometimes make discussion posts about things that bother them, and sometimes a bunch of people will agree and sometimes a bunch of people will disagree, but most people don't care that much (or they have a life or something) and thus don't want to dedicate a post just to complaining. This post is meant to make it socially and cognitively easy to offer critique.
I humbly request that you list downsides of existing policies even when you think the upsides outweigh them, for all the obvious reasons. I also humbly request that you list a critique/gripe even if you don't want to bother explaining why you have that critique/gripe, and even in cases where you think your gripe is, ahem, "irrational". In general, I think it'd be really cool if we erred on the side of listing things which might be problems even if there's no obvious solution or no real cause for complaint except for personal distaste for the color green (for example).
I arrogantly request that we try to avoid impulsive downvoting and non-niceness for the duration of this post (and others like it). If someone wants to complain that Less Wrong is a little cultish without explaining why then downvoting them to oblivion, while admittedly kind of funny, is probably a bad idea. :)