Announcing rationalist blog aggregator

22 Post author: nerfhammer 29 September 2011 07:34PM

After input from many of you guys and the NYC group, I am announcing planetrationalist.com

There's a lot of different directions this sort of idea could go in, but I figured that this could be a good-enough first effort.

Enjoy, and let me know what you think.

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Comments (26)

Comments (26)

Comment author: curiousepic 30 September 2011 03:35:46PM 2 points [-]

Any hope of toggleable sources?

Comment author: nerfhammer 30 September 2011 04:11:39PM 0 points [-]

Meaning you want to turn some sources off?

Comment author: curiousepic 30 September 2011 05:53:05PM 0 points [-]

Yes.

Comment author: Document 01 October 2011 04:22:56AM 1 point [-]

Element Hiding Helper may or may not help.

Comment author: nerfhammer 30 September 2011 06:13:41PM 1 point [-]

Options for now:

  • create a greasemonkey script to hide posts from the sources you don't want. Every source has a unique CSS class so it should be trivial.
  • create a yahoo pipe to filter the sources you don't want through the rss feed and read it through a feed reader
  • clone the set of sources using the OPML feed in your feed reader of choice and add/remove whatever you want from the source list. However, this will not be kept in sync in the likely event that the official set of sources should change.

Out of curiosity, what don't you want to see and why?

Comment author: curiousepic 30 September 2011 07:56:49PM 1 point [-]

I like the aggregation, but there are a lot of posts for each day. I just thought it would be nice to reduce the amount to something manageable to cover in a few minutes a day, and to be able to choose which sources. Of course this is available with RSS and whatnot, it's probably not something you need to focus on soon.

Comment author: handoflixue 29 September 2011 07:56:52PM 2 points [-]

The connection has timed out.

The server at planetrationalist.com is taking too long to respond.

Comment author: MichaelHoward 29 September 2011 09:22:21PM *  1 point [-]

It seems fine for me now.

If not for you, maybe check down for everyone or just me.

Comment author: handoflixue 29 September 2011 10:21:49PM 1 point [-]

It seems to have resolved itself, but thanks - I should have thought to check that and included the result either way :)

Comment author: MichaelHoward 30 September 2011 12:24:42AM 1 point [-]

Funnily enough it was down when I first read your comment, as were downforeveryone.com, isup.me, & all similar suggestions Google had.

Comment author: nerfhammer 29 September 2011 10:40:59PM 0 points [-]

May not have been just you, I suspect my ISP was having problems earlier.

Comment author: Elo 04 July 2016 04:01:42AM -2 points [-]

The feed is shit and needs some pruning. Will this happen, or should a new feed be made?

Comment author: djcb 02 October 2011 06:08:32PM 0 points [-]

I like it! Thanks for providing this.

Only minor quibble is the fact that some of the blogs only put a short snippet in their RSS-feed. As I like reading things in a feed-reader (actually, feed2imap + my e-mail client), having to open a browser to read things is small nuisance.

So, as a small feature request, maybe offer a way to filter the feeds to only get the ones that have the full text in their feed?

Comment author: nerfhammer 03 October 2011 03:26:40PM *  1 point [-]

I've thought of ways of working around this. There are ways of actually defeating the truncation. One issue is that there isn't necessarily an obvious programmatic way of telling which feeds are truncated and which aren't.

For now, try out this feed proxy: http://andrewtrusty.appspot.com/readability/ , e.g. http://andrewtrusty.appspot.com/readability/feed?url=http%3A//feeds.feedburner.com/planetrationalist

Comment author: djcb 08 October 2011 08:14:32AM 0 points [-]

Thanks - will try that!

Comment author: Lapsed_Lurker 02 October 2011 05:31:41PM 0 points [-]

I've checked out planetrationalist.com several times in the past few days, finding interesting stuff to read. So, you get my upvote.

Comment author: michaelcurzi 30 September 2011 07:22:06PM 0 points [-]

Sweet. I endorse you doing things. You need share buttons - I want to be able to send these articles out or tweet them with a click.

Comment author: nerfhammer 30 September 2011 08:20:55PM 0 points [-]

Hmm, I was wondering how much people used those things. Do you want just twitter + email? Facebook?

Comment author: michaelcurzi 03 October 2011 03:18:55AM 0 points [-]

All of the above, I'd just install some basic set of sharing buttons. Email, twitter, facebook, maybe Google+.

Comment author: nerfhammer 03 October 2011 03:33:41PM 0 points [-]

I've re-instated twitter so far. The issues are: general visual clutter, I found a way to mitigate this issue by using a trick to force lower the visual contrast of the buttons, and that these social buttons often really slow down the loading of the page, especially if you want the dynamic share/like/retweet counters for every item. I might leave the counter on twitter but omit it for the others and see what the page load is like.

I'm not sure what email-sharing service to use... facebook has one in its "share" button, there are probably others.

Comment author: FiftyTwo 30 September 2011 05:03:37PM 0 points [-]

Very interesting, I suspect I will spend a lot of time reading this.

How are you defining rationalist for these purposes? How are you selecting the blogs?

Comment author: nerfhammer 30 September 2011 06:37:43PM *  0 points [-]

To be completely honest, I wasn't going on a strict definition of the term rationalist; frankly I consider the term kind of flawed anyway. But I don't have a better replacement in mind. For me it means being interested in being rational, being interested in how the mind works, being interested in cognitive biases, Bayes' rule, probability, statistics, logical fallacies, and scientific self-improvement.

  • I selected the sources starting with lesswrong and overcoming bias, then taking suggestions from people, doing some rudimentary graph analysis, manually adding blogs of authors in related fields, watching what sources I selected linked to themselves.
  • I tried to include sources that were readable but not gimmicky (e.g. top 7 secret tips to supercharge your goals!!!). Sometimes sources vary outside this interval, and I don't have any filtration sophisticated enough to handle this.
  • I selected against sources that posted too frequently, anything political, anything that seemed angry or upbraiding or read like a manifesto. I included some sources which include these but against which I was able to filter out the political etc. posts easily. The rudimentary methods I used to filter topics doesn't work perfectly, though.
  • I tried to include a few sources from less closely related subjects that were high quality and don't seem to post that frequently. For instance, I included only a couple skeptic blogs, but there are tons and tons of them out there and I feel that it's a different niche that's already addressed pretty well elsewhere. Some fields I avoided almost entirely like entrepreneurship or economics.
  • I tried to not let any one subject dominate the set of sources. I feel like I included too many psychology blogs, for example.
Comment author: Dreaded_Anomaly 29 September 2011 10:53:28PM 0 points [-]

I am impressed. (I would be marginally more impressed if the site gained a favicon.)

Comment author: nerfhammer 30 September 2011 02:20:39PM 0 points [-]

Yeah I couldn't think of one.

Favicon contest?

Comment author: shokwave 30 September 2011 12:12:26AM 0 points [-]

I suggest the Google Chrome default favicon with a big coloured R in the middle.

Comment author: nerfhammer 30 September 2011 02:19:07PM *  0 points [-]

Hmm I've seen that before somewhere....

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