Intellectual insularity is because we don't en masse read other sources. So we can't discuss them. Sure, good books are mentioned in the post, but that didn't create a collective action. What could?
Proposal: At the beginning of the month, let's choose and announce a "book of the month". At the end of the month, we will discuss the book. (During the month, discussing the book should probably be forbidden, to avoid spoilers and discouraging people who haven't read it yet.)
Have we grown as a website? I don't know -- what metric do you use? I guess the number of members / comments / articles is growing, but that's not exactly what we want. So, what exactly do we want? First step could be to specify the goal. Maybe it could be the articles -- we could try to create more high-quality articles that would be very relevant to science and rationality, but also accessible for a random visitor. Seems like the "Main" part of the site is here for this goal, except that it also contains things like "Meetups" and "Rationality Quotes".
Proposal: Refactor LW into more categories. I am not sure how exactly, but the current "Main" and "Discussion&q...
Upvoted. I think that refactoring LW is a strong move, but it's also one which has been discussed for a while and hasn't happened. I think that's because there's never been a well-presented case for new sections, but the site admins are the ones to talk to about that.
Proposal: At the beginning of the month, let's choose and announce a "book of the month". At the end of the month, we will discuss the book.
I like this idea but it seems like it's on the wrong side of the 80/20 value/effort split. badger's summary of EPHJ is one twentieth of the length of the book it summarizes, but contains at least half of the value one gets from reading that book.
Kaufman's Personal MBA comes to mind as another thing to model off of. He's read hundreds of business books, and has distilled them down to create a mostly complete business education in 400 pages. The book reads like the blog- an explanation of a part in a few pages, and then on to the next part, with the parts fitting together to make a lean system.
Perhaps a summary contest? Identify some book as a valuable addition to LW, and announce a contest with a prize and deadline for posts that summarize the book or possibly posts th...
Summaries aren't too useful. On the other hand, commentaries and in-depth discussion might be useful. For example, I've occasionally thought of doing a chapter by chapter discussion of Good and Real, with additional material like a Haskell implementation of his Quantish universe (since I don't really understand it).
During the month, discussing the book should probably be forbidden, to avoid spoilers and discouraging people who haven't read it yet.)
Unless you're talking about fiction I'm not sure why spoilers matter. Better to encourage people to discuss parts they don't understand.
I think we could rewrite Eliezer's articles. I would disagree with the statement that they are "so good". The material is great of course, but the way he goes about conveying it is not for everyone. I can't really see a whole cohesive structure as I am going through and frequently, I am not so sure what point he is making. His use of parable just obfuscates the point for me; his constant referral to his story "The Simple Truth" in Map and Territory really bothered me because that story was difficult for me to get through and I just wanted to see his point in plain text. I still have trouble organizing LW material into an easy-to-think-about structure. What I am looking for is something more resembling a textbook. Very structured, somewhat dry writing (yes, I actually prefer that), maybe some diagrams. I'd do it, but I am not sure I have a strong enough understanding of the material to do so.
Speaking of OB, We have an expansive list of Eliezer's posts organized by topic but no such sequence exists for Robin Hanson. His posts on status seeking are incredibly important for human rationality.
I purpose that we produce a sequence devoted to RH's posts. If someone who read most of his posts can point me in the right direction I volunteer to do it. My summer's off from classes, I just have work and then my private projects and public project would be good for me to signal usefulness to LW, OB and the communities associated with them.
EDIT: RH gave me his blessing. I'm reading OB. Just crossed through to 2007. Writing major themes and interconnections as I go.
His posts on status seeking are incredibly important for human rationality.
I think he has an unfortunate tendency to treat status as a golden hammer, attempting to explain everything in terms of status, whether or not it's a good explanation.
I think he has an unfortunate tendency to treat status as a golden hammer, attempting to explain everything in terms of status, whether or not it's a good explanation.
His over-eager application to everything new he hears does not greatly diminish the usefulness of his foundational work on the general effects of status. Those are the ones Karmakaiser would want an index of.
It wouldn't surprise me at all if Robin himself agreed with this criticism.
Sure, it would increase his status among rationalists. :D
EY also posts links to other useful posts of his for reference but I find reading the sequences in indexed order is easier than reading tags or chronological order. Every blogger has important ideas that they want to say and sometimes tags don't do everything you need them to. Like EY's posts, he installed a karma/voting system late in his blogging career and so his early posts in particular may be unduly ignored.
I imagine it'd be boring to index your own posts in your blog into an ebook like format since you already know your ideas. Since I haven't read all of OB it might even be fun for me to do it. I wouldn't be procrastinating to read OB anymore. It'd be working. Yay!
I'll let RH be the final arbitrator since it's his blog and just email him asking if he wants something like this done. I'm a bored undergrad in need of a project so why not?
Either I'm badly misunderstanding you, or your post is at odds with a great many facts about LessWrong and other internet communities. A few examples:
we very seldom seem to adopt useful vocabulary or arguments or information from outside of LessWrong
What??? LW is constantly citing and discussing science, philosophy, and other stuff that didn't originate on LW. Indeed, most of The Sequences consists in stuff that didn't originate on LW, as do almost all of my posts, as do lots of other LW content.
in topics that Eliezer did not explicitly cover in the sequences (and some that he did), LW has made zero progress in general
LW has made progress on many topics that Eliezer talked about on LW: decision theory, the science of human values, and more. Finding examples outside the topics Eliezer raised may be difficult because (1) Eliezer covered so many topics, and (2) Eliezer's Sequences define the major subject matter of the blog. (E.g. we haven't made progress on French politics because that's not a topic of the blog.)
...I was checking out a blogroll and saw LessWrong listed as Eliezer's blog about rationality. I realized that essentially it is. And worse this makes it a very crappy
Sure, LW could be better, but what are you comparing to? Every time I try to have a conversation outside LW/OB I am slapped in the face by how much worse other communities tend to be.
Yes, Less Wrong is better than all other places. But I hope you will agree that this is not an optimistic prognostication. I do not think we are doing particularly well, if you just look at us and look at how we are doing rather than comparing this place to other places.
I'd like to remind you of some of the words from my favorite essay, which is also one of your favorite essays:
But it is useless to be superior: Life is not graded on a curve. The best physicist in ancient Greece could not calculate the path of a falling apple. There is no guarantee that adequacy is possible given your hardest effort; therefore spare no thought for whether others are doing worse.
I do not think we are doing the best we possibly can, and I think that is very bad.
Yvain, myself, Anna Salamon, and many others have written hundreds of useful and well-liked posts since The Sequences. In what sense is it "Eliezer's blog"?
I agree, but these are salient exceptions, not the rule. It is "Eliezer's blog"...
Intellectual productivity from the last two weeks:
Non-insularity from the last two weeks:
Naturally many individuals will update. But as memories fade I think over time the influence of articles like the cited ones will mostly only remain in thick hard to communicate ways such as how they calibrate some rationalist's heuristics. My complaint isn't that we fail to note or bring up interesting ideas, my complaint is we fail to propagate them in the community in the same way we propagated original articles. We as a subculture don't update. I also mention we don't propagate the original articles as well as we should. Ideas originating off site on average get less debate and are seldom further built on. As several readers have pointed out this might be ameliorated by better indexing. I suspect a big reason for this may be that posts not in a sequence that are of high quality tend to be orphaned and more seldom read.
Concerning cited productivity. Reading the sequences and reading everything since the sequences is a disappointing exercise. I do especially enjoy your work and say Yvains and yes Eliezer's core is the result of several years perhaps even a decade of low intensity independent research and thought. It is enhanced by several early high quality community members fil...
I think the problem is that these posts aren't well-indexed, so they tend to get forgotten once they fall of the recent posts pages.
Well, as the great Iezer-el son of AIXI once wrote in the Scroll "Why Our Kind Can't Concentrate", LWers tend to be biased towards contrarianism, criticism, and anti-authoritarianism. So you're hardly alone.
Thanks for writing this post! This is something that I've noticed and have been trying to actively fight. (DA sequence, Thinking and Deciding review.)
A pithy way to express this is along the lines of a sense that more is possible: we have a sense that more is out there. For example, I was researching an entirely unrelated post which began with a reference to the Litany of Gendlin, and from that learned who Eugene Gendlin was, found and read his book on therapy, which seems like it might be as useful for dealing with akrasia as it is for other problems. There was this whole well of value there- and far as I can tell the most LW drew out of that well was a paragraph that made for a nice poem.
Right now, LW is very philosophical, and seems like it's for AGI researchers by AGI researchers. I think that's a very good foundation to build off of, but it doesn't feel complete to me. I would very much like to see more types of people involved in rationality- decision analysts, psychologists, atheist activists, scientists in general, etc.- as active participants in the conversations here. It would be awesome for us if Jonathan Baron started posting here, for example, but he's not going to unl...
For example, I was researching an entirely unrelated post which began with a reference to the Litany of Gendlin, and from that learned who Eugene Gendlin was, found and read his book on therapy, which seems like it might be as useful for dealing with akrasia as it is for other problems.
It is. As it turns out, the thing I thought I invented called RMI is basically the same as Gendlin's Focusing; I'd just never heard of it and came up with a version of my own. Nowadays, I recommend that book to my new students if they have trouble learning the method from my materials. (Like Gendlin, I've noticed that some people seem to just already know how to do it, or pick it up almost immediately; the rest need varying amounts of practice and training to do it successfully.)
In and of itself, I do not consider "focusing" (boy is that the wrong name for the process) to be a panacea or even much of a cure for anything, let alone everything. It'd be like saying that a screwdriver is a cure for your television set not working. All it really does is let you open up the access panel and have a look in... or in Gendlin's case, provide an opportunity for the therapist to have a look ...
1) Insularity: I actually don't think LW is all that insular. Users often link to science articles, ask for opinions on other writers, discuss films and books, etc. Exactly what set of sites or communities is LW being compared to here when you call it insular?
2) Growth (in terms of users): This is quantifiable. http://www.google.com/trends/?q=less+wrong Looks like a big jump at the beginning of 2011, perhaps when HPMoR took off, and fairly constant since. Anyway, I'm not sure that becoming big in terms of raw users is all that much of a goal, although high-quality users certainly is (at least to me).
3) Growth (in terms of articles): I agree this is a problem. There are weird incentives with karma for main vs discussion for getting promoted and such, which probably turns off people from writing a "series" of posts.
4) Organization of content in useful chunks: Also agree that this is a problem. Though we often talk about Anki, the actual Anki flashcards available are quite poor (as I found when I tried to download ones for cognitive bias). Same with the organization of the so-called sequences.
I think #1 and #2 are not that important. I think #3 and #4 are ultimately site ...
I agree with pretty much all of this. This is slightly off-topic, but:
I don't just think we should be discussing new arguments that fall within our cluster of topics--IMO, we should be branching out even more. For a while now, a handful of LWers have been arguing in comments like this one that we need a much wider range of scholarship, and that subjects outside of LW's typical math/science cluster--yes, even those icky-looking liberal artsy ones--are worth studying. This seems like a pretty reasonable suggestion. After all, the site is overwhelmingly male, white, atheist, young, consequentialist (or wannabe-consequentialist), transhumanist and heavily math/science focused. Heck, that's a near-perfect description of me. As a result, there's a natural tendency for us to be ignorant of certain subjects, and consequently to discount them. E.g., for me, subjects like anthropology are unknown unknowns: I don't know what the field is even about or how relevant it is to LW-style rationality topics.
Trouble is, we run the risk of falling into the typical autodidact failure mode of being recklessly overconfident about these topics after reading introductory material or opinion pieces on eac...
For a concrete example of something I think we're missing, I watched just enough game theory videos to realise it's full of useful ideas that would be valuable to the kind of things LW discuss, but a relatively small proportion of LW people seem to use those ideas.
I'm an example of what I'm criticising here - I know there's lots of important information in that field I don't know.
Your post is all generalizations, with almost no specific examples. I think I disagree with most of the generalizations, but it would take an equally long post for me to explore why for each generalization.
In any case, you don't make any recommendations for how Less Wrong users should change their behavior. I might agree with those if you had made them. Here are some possible policy prescriptions based on your complaints:
I do disagree with your assessment that LW has made very little progress. As Luke pointed out below, we frequently have new work being done, and references to work being done by other people. I suspect the source of this feeling is that nearly all of the progress lies within a very small field. This blog is a mix of human rationality (specifically, improving the way we think), and Artificial Intelligence.
If you are like me (and I have a slight suspicion that you do fit into this category), you don't actually pay that much attention to the discussions of Ar...
Can you think of anything specific from outside of LW that we should have updated on, but haven't?
Thanks for this post. I agree with a lot of it, and that with which I disagree, I still think is important to discuss. I have several tangential thoughts. I'm not sure how coherently organized this comment will be, but I'll try.
Intellectual Productivity: I agree this is a problem. I think there are a number of factors about LW that, in some ways, discourage intellectual productivity. I've said it before, but if I want to read something technical, I'll read the sequences, since I haven't finished them. As a result, I read very little of main. Raemon mention...
I concur. I read the sequences, then I read every post from the end of the sequences until that time (May 2011). I was amazed just how little seemed to have been taken in even from the posts on LW since the end of the sequences.
I have faint hopes the Center for Modern Rationality can seed a new set of community norms.
As per our discussion on irc, I agree!
I am a defender of "read the sequences". People should!
One step I've found often interesting that builds on EY's posts is to... read some of the stuff he mentions! For example, Influence is a great book.
In particular, we need more maths around here. I am totally displaying the problem I'm complaining about, but for example there is a great shortage of game theory. And I'd like to see people work through Khan Academy or similar.
First - upvoted, completely agree.
I think "insular" is a bad phrasing, though. It implies "doesn't listen to outside sources." The issue is more-so that the sequences are VERY prominent, and NOTHING else approaches that prominence. The wiki could ostensibly aspire to that goal, but in it's current state comes no where close.
It's not that the community is closed off to new or external ideas, it's that the community has this very prominent stone tablet of the Sequences - a very prominent and largely STATIC piece of content. The solution s...
One reason people aren't so big on linking the sequences is that Eliezer has, for some time now, been writing a book consolidating the sequences into a much more readable text. I think people are waiting until that comes out to bug everyone to read Eliezer's work.
Update: The books are on hold because we need Eliezer for other projects. If we're lucky, a professional writer will be able to take Eliezer's (substantial) work and finish it (with minimal input from Eliezer). We have a retainer with one writer who has written at least one bestseller so far, and will take a crack at Eliezer's books once he finishes his current project, probably late this fall.
Update: The books are on hold because we need Eliezer for other projects.
Gah! That is no doubt a good decision all things considered but still frustrating to hear as a prospective reader!
I wish there were some transparency in what he is involved in and to what degree. Not a wholly unreasonable thing to ask from a non-profit. Hopefully major donors have a better visibility into the SI/EY day-to-day operation.
Posting my idea from irc here too. We should look for ways to make the claims of this post more concrete and testable. I propose crawling the site to create a LW citation index. We can then make measurements - which new posts are picked up by the LW community? Does everyone always refer back to EY, or do we talk about the new stuff? etc
And mysteriously the author of this article leaves the site, after he finds himself advised by a "top poster" to do so since his contributions are "harmful". Gee what convenient timing.
Maybe he failed a private struggle session? Though obviously new reasons are probably in the works, who knows they may even be posted here! Joy.
we very seldom seem to adopt useful vocabulary or arguments or information from outside of LessWrong.
This motivates me to not postpone further the small discussion post I was thinking to write about a useful bit of vocabulary (from outside of Less Wrong) for suggested adoption. Expect it later tonight. Don't expect anything too special mind you.
Edit to add: Actually it seems I'll have to postpone this a day or two, apologies.
The community seems to not update on ideas and concepts that didn't originate here.
This seems obviously wrong to me, so I probably don't understand what you mean. Once you remove the ideas of Hofstadter, Jaynes, Drescher, Kahneman, Pearl, Dawkins, Asimov, Nozick, etc... from Less Wrong, there isn't a whole lot left. Am I wrong?
When thinking of insularity, the first example of content from LW that came to my mind was a post where someone supported what might be called "LW-native" politics, and the most highly upvoted comment was a defense of the "LW-outsider" politics. This seems incredible non-insular.
When thinking of productivity, my first thought was of previous intense lamentation of problems being social that I saw all over the site when I joined, and comparing it to the very positive social interactions that people seem to have had and be having at meet...
Guys I'd like your opinion on something.
Do you think LessWrong is too intellectually insular? What I mean by this is that we very seldom seem to adopt useful vocabulary or arguments or information from outside of LessWrong. For example all I can think of is some of Robin Hanson's and Paul Graham's stuff. But I don't think Robin Hanson really counts as Overcoming Bias used to be LessWrong.
Edit: Apparently this has been a source of much confusion and mistargeted replies. While I wouldn't mind even more references to quality outside writing, this wasn't my concern. I'm surprised this was problematic to understand for two reasons. First I gave examples of two thinker that aren't often linked to by recent articles on LW yet have clearly greatly influenced us. Secondly this is a trivially false interpretation, as my own submission history shows (it is littered with well received outside links). I think this arises because when I wrote "we seem to not update on ideas and concepts that didn't originate here" people read it as "we don't link to ideas and concepts" or maybe "we don't talk about ideas and concepts" from outside. I clarified this several times in the comments, most extensively here. Yet it doesn't seem to have made much of an impact. Maybe it will be easier to understand if I put it this way, interesting material from the outside never seems to get added to something like the sequences or the wiki. The sole exception to this is hunting even more academic references for the conclusions and concepts we already know and embrace. Thus while individuals will update on them and perhaps even reference them in the future the community as a whole will not. They don't become part of the expected background knowledge when discussing certain topics. Over time their impact thus fades in a way the old core material doesn't.The community seems to not update on ideas and concepts that didn't originate here. The only major examples fellow LWers brought up in conversation where works that Eliezer cited as great or influential. :/
Another thing, I could be wrong about this naturally, but it seems to clear that LessWrong has not grown. I'm not talking numerically. I can't put my finger to major progress done in the past 2 years. I have heard several other users express similar sentiments. To quote one user:
I've recently come to think this is probably true to the first approximation. I was checking out a blogroll and saw LessWrong listed as Eliezer's blog about rationality. I realized that essentially it is. And worse this makes it a very crappy blog since the author doesn't make new updates any more. Originally the man had high hopes for the site. He wanted to build something that could keep going on its own, growing without him. It turned out to be a community mostly dedicated to studying the scrolls he left behind. We don't even seem to do a good job of getting others to read the scrolls.
Overall there seems to be little enthusiasm for actually systematically reading the old material. I'm going to share my take on what is I think a symptom of this. I was debating which title to pick for my first ever original content Main article (it was originally titled "On Conspiracy Theories") and made what at first felt like a joke but then took on a horrible ring of:
We like linking articles, and while people may read a link the first time, they don't tend to read it the second or third time they run across it. The phrase is eventually picked up and used out the appropriate of context. Something that was supposed to be shorthand for a nuanced argument starts to mean exactly what "it says". Well not exactly, people still recall it is a vague applause light. Which is actually worse.
I cited precisely "Politics is the Mindkiller" as an example of this. In the original article Eliezer basically argues that gratuitous politics, political thinking that isn't outweighed by its value to the art of rationality, is to be avoided. This soon came to meant it is forbidden to discuss politics in Main and Discussion articles, though it does live in the comment sections.
Now the question if LessWrong remains productive intellectually, is separate from the question of it being insular. But I feel both need to be discussed. If our community wasn't growing and it wasn't insular either, it could at least remain relevant.
This site has a wonderful ethos for discussion and thought. Why do we seem to be wasting it?