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Comments (30)
I would really like this to actually exist.
That is, I would like to see a subcommunity of LW devoted to researching mathematical and scientific problems independently of the current formal academic structure. Indeed, this already exists for decision theory; I would like to see it extended to other mathematical topics as well. I would even like to do this project.
I am convinced that there is a lot more fruit hanging a lot lower than people realize, in pretty much every field. Yes, even in string theory/quantum gravity/mathematical physics. The negative epistemic effects of existing social structures (aka Eld Science), as well as simple cognitive biases, really are that bad.
It may be helpful in this connection to remember Quirrell's Law:
Moreover, I have to admit that I'm just curious as hell about some of these topics, and about the level of progress that could be achieved via systematic, LW-inspired/trained effort.
So who's interested in building a rationalist subcommunity for mathematical and scientific research? Zack Davis? Any of the decision theory people? Does anyone else feel as I do?
That would be really nice. There have been some attempts, but all previous attempts (that I'm aware of) have more or less failed.
I'm far less optimistic about this.
I would be interested, and I feel this way.
I was thinking about this during the Falcon 9/Dragon launch, and the lowest-hanging fruit in PDEs probably involves systematizing the wealth of inequalities and quantitative results regarding solutions of PDEs. It probably wouldn't be very flashy, though -- there are a lot of extremely technical results that are only well-understood by a handful of people.
There was an attempt headed by Tao (of course) and others, called DispersiveWiki, but it fell to a spam attack a couple months ago. I'm not sure if it's been rebooted.
It seems to be working at the moment..
I think the wiki format would be very useful for work of this kind; and I agree that systematizing PDE results seems a promising approach.
Could someone find us some problems to work on that require relatively little advanced mathematics vocabulary to understand?
What were the previous attempts you are thinking of?