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nyan_sandwich comments on How I Ended Up Non-Ambitious - Less Wrong
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Comments (237)
Less Wrong is entertainment, if it surprises you that it didn't change your life, your expectations were very irrational.
Like all entertainment, sometimes it has some positive (or negative) side effects, but they're not the real reason people are here.
Your cynicism is not helping. If you have some advice to improve the effectiveness of LW, please post.
Lesswrong is not for entertainment, it's not even that entertaining. 4chan blows lesswrong out of the water on that front. I for one am not here for entertainment, I suck at rationality and want to become stronger. Cynicism doesn't help.
If all you're here for entertainment, you suck at entertaining yourself.
Just before writing this comment I was reading a calculus book just for fun. I am currently working part-time as gardener and don't need calculus and don't expect that I will need it any time soon for anything other than understanding ideas that are even more fun. I get an incredible kick from understanding new concepts.
People are psychologically very different. I had some of the greatest fun in my life reading lesswrong.
ETA I also like to take photos, read science fiction and play games...and A LOT more :-)
Some people program computers for fun, and some people watch Jackass. It isn't clear to me that the people who don't watch Jackass suck at entertaining themselves ....
It's true that people have different ideas of fun. I find it hard to believe that a specific blog not at all devoted to being entertaining happens to be the best way to be entertained for anyone.
I have been a baker and I always cringe from the thought that some people do it for fun.
My dad has been a construction engineer for the German Railways. He told me about people who came to his workplace and took photos of the bridges and tracks he was inspecting. Those people literally knew every screw being used in the construction. They did that stuff for fun. There are whole clubs.
I even heard of people who collect stamps and travel to international meetings. Crazy huh?
Tourist railways. People volunteer to get up at 3am and do jobs that 150 years ago were incitements to socialist revolution.
'Work is anything you have to do', as the saying goes. However, I suspect if we looked, we would find that the working conditions 150 years ago would be vastly different from those volunteers' jobs. (Possible differences: 16-hour working days, emitted pollution, ergonomics like 'chairs'...)
I am not cynical here, I find lesswrong very entertaining to read for similar reasons to I regularly read research papers on things I'll never need in my life for fun.
I cannot possibly be alone - just ask anyone what happens when they want to quickly check a random article on Wikipedia or even worse TvTropes and end up spending an entire day on the site, learning minutae of things they have no use for whatsoever.
XiXiDu's and David_Gerard's responses suggest there's plenty of people who see lesswrong the same way.
I go back to chans every now and then, but it tends to get boring after a few days.
If you want helpful advice (wrt "sucking at rationality"):
One super-simple and very practical exercise I recommend is - every time you go shopping try to estimate cost of your shopping basket before you checkout. You'd be surprised how far off and how one-sided your estimates will be the first few times. Since everybody shops a lot it won't take you any extra time, and that's actually a pretty useful instance of more general skill of quick estimation.
Thanks.
YMMV. I take LessWrong strictly [1] out of my internet-as-television budget, and find it more consistently interesting than 4chan.
[1] though I'll often Google to link a remembered post in random Internet philosophical arguments.