Off-Topic Discussion Thread: April 2009

MBlume

Dale McGowan writes:

And it needs to go well beyond one greeter. EVERY MEMBER of EVERY GROUP should make it a point to chat up new folks—and each other, for that matter. And not just about the latest debunky book. Ask where he’s from, what she does for a living, whether he follows the Mets or the Yankees. You know, mammal talk.

In this spirit, I propose the creation of a fully off-topic discussion thread.

Here is our monthly place to discuss topics entirely unrelated to Less Wrong that (of course) have not appeared in recent posts.

ETA: There are two behaviors I would love to see associated with this thread. First of all, discussions often drift off-topic in the middle of a thread. In these cases "let's take this to the off-topic thread" would be an excellent response. Secondly, given who's doing the discussing, I could easily see, say, a discussion about recent developments in some webcomic blossoming into a LW-worthy insight, in which case someone could spawn a new thread.

Dale McGowan writes:

And it needs to go well beyond one greeter. EVERY MEMBER of EVERY GROUP should make it a point to chat up new folks—and each other, for that matter. And not just about the latest debunky book. Ask where he’s from, what she does for a living, whether he follows the Mets or the Yankees. You know, mammal talk.

In this spirit, I propose the creation of a fully off-topic discussion thread.

Here is our monthly place to discuss topics entirely unrelated to Less Wrong that (of course) have not appeared in recent posts.

What other blogs do folk here recommend? I'll recommend two: Greta Christina's blog which talks about sexual politics, atheism, skepticism, and politics in general, and FiveThirtyEight which covers the inside baseball of Washington DC according to a baseball statistician.

http://davidbrin.blogspot.com/ <---- Blog of David Brin, science fiction writer. Talks a lot about politics. http://atheistethicist.blogspot.com/ <---- also recommended

5badger17y

I'll resist my urge to dump every blog in my feed reader, and just give the five that LW readers might not be aware of: * The Endeavour: Math, programming, statistics, and productivity. * The Universe of Discourse: Math, programming, science. Humorous and very high quality, although infrequently updated. The author really needs to be subsidized to post more often. * Acephalous: Travails of a young English professor. * Statistical Modeling, Causal Inference, and Social Science: Andrew Gelman's blog. * Seth Roberts: Self-experimentation, health, and musings about the state of modern science.

2SoullessAutomaton17y

If you enjoy FiveThirtyEight, Andrew Tanenbaum's electoral-vote.com is in a somewhat similar vein (and for the CS nerds here, yes, that's the Dr. Tanenbaum you're thinking of). It's currently somewhat inactive though, as he only actively updates it during major election cycles.

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Off-Topic Discussion Thread: April 2009

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Off-Topic Discussion Thread: April 2009

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