Eliezer,

I'm still curious about one thing: how did you develop the art in the first place? I mean I get that you are an auto-didact, but did you have any mentors? How did you choose the next thing/book to study/read, how did you grow?

Eliezer,

Has LessWrong so-far served the ends you intended in 2009?

Are you going to scale back comments, too, or just top-level posts?

I hate to see you go but it's true, there is another thing that greatly needs and deserves your full attention. So thank you, and safe journey. I hope what you planted here grows strong, and you look back on this time as being well worth the gamble.

Thank you. It's been a truly wonderful time. Not thanks to you alone, even if you were the driving factor. It will be difficult for anyone to fill your shoes, but then again, LW has shown many others having great promise, well enough that it can become a community much greater than it already is, and thus meaning success for you in this endeavour.

While I'm sad to see you give up your central role, for yours are the posts that I've in general found to be the most eye-opening and enjoyable, it is a also a relief to see you returning focus to the core job of SIAI, as it indicates greater confidence about your chances of success in that. Still it would be interesting to hear why you considered this detour from concentrating on FAI so important to do at the point you did it.

I find my reaction to this post interesting. It is less "Well, now what?" and more "Yeah... and?"

I attribute this to both to being new and also to the fact that my (fledgling) loyalty is to Less Wrong and not Eliezer or Overcoming Bias. My value assessment for the latter two firmly revolves around things they have already done. When I read this post it confirms that the value I can receive from Eliezer is in the past. Less Wrong is valuable because of something in its future. So, while digging through all of Eliezer's radio messages, I remember that my primary task is to keep moving forward and learning about the maze I am in. Standing around pondering what Eliezer's maze must have looked like and appreciating how Eliezer was so smart as to describe this way is only so useful.

This, natually, is both good and bad. The good is that I am some small evidence that Eliezer did find a way to replace himself. The bad is that I may start picking up ideas and running around with them while getting them all wrong. I may be a bad spark of enthusiasm that sees just enough of a promise at the end of a maze to start madly dashing around in circles. The real test is if Less Wrong can succeed as a whole where any one individual may be wrong and hold enough courage to squelch the bad sparks.

In the meantime, I am off to explore my maze with newly opened eyes. If my radio messages do not jive with the Way, feel free to tune me out, vote me down, and I will wander off alone. But for goodness sake, don't touch the bad spark.

So I say to you now, on behalf of all our causes: Do, whatever you may find worth doing.

(Note) I have been doing minor editing on this comment. Just FYI.

Another "thank you". It's been...remarkable.

I hope you can continue to use your symbolic position to keep us cohesive for a while even when you're not posting at quite the same rate. And I look forward to seeing more of your often very interesting ad hoc observational posts now that you don't feel compelled to stick to a sequence.

Let me join in the love-fest. Your articles have been the largest single influence on my world-view. Not surprising, since after two years of reading Overcoming Bias, I've probably read more words written by you than any individual non-fiction writer. Hope you can get some good vacation and come back strong. Until then, it looks like we need to cheerlead Yvain into posting daily.

Best of luck Eliezer, the past two years of reading religiously have changed the way I think about pretty much anything. As with Galactica, the finale gives me an excellent rationale for heading back to the start. I also take a strange pleasure from reading my nonsense comments from early on.

Looking forward to seeing your name in lights and saying 'that guy told me I was wrong hundreds of times!'

[Ben Jones on OB]

Standing_Ovation

Godspeed. Can't wait for the book!

May your confidence intervals forever be as narrow as your circle of influence is wide.

I've been a lurker of OB/LW for a little while. I will truly miss your postings, which I thank you greatly for. (Perhaps with a donation to the SI from my next paycheck.) I've found them to be very well-written and well-explained, and although you're currently at an intellectual level higher than my own, you don't write cryptically.

I have read some of your old stuff and have noticed an improvement, so I've decided to try my own experiment of writing something of size and complexity each day. Perhaps one of these times I'll put it on LW, and not worry about looking like a complete idiot when it's juxtaposed next to something of yours. =P

Eliezer has done an excellent job of conveying to us his knowledge and experience, and for that we are grateful. But this is only the very beginning, the very first step towards creating an Art. One rationalist has shared his skills - this gives us a single data point. Now what?

We need to learn how each rationalist came to their current beliefs, to identify common elements and patterns. It is through this process that we can begin to outline a curriculum, so that we can begin trying and improving it. Rationalists seem to be predominantly young males, but eventually we will have children ourselves - how do we teach rationality to them? What could they accomplish if they have been raised with rationality their entire lives?

There is much work to be done. Eliezer is a respected colleague who provided a seminal contribution, and he will be remembered well, but it is time to forge ahead into the future.

Eliezer, you are a great inspiration, thank you and I wish you success in everything you do!

As a year-long reader and a never-commenter, thanks for writing. Your blog posts have enriched my life just as my world-views are coming into twisting, bending, ever-changing focus.

And I shared OB with my roommate today. With any luck, he too will find these paths.

I doubt you need the encouragement, but keep up the great work.

I'll jump in with the "thank you"s too. :) Reading your posts generally seemed to not just teach me something, but "tickled my brain" the right way to actually help me absorb whatever the subject matter was.

But yeah, back to work on... the other stuff! :)

Thanks, Eliezer. I've been reading since the days of sysopmind and sl4. Imagine my stunned delight when I checked yudkowsky.net one day, and discovered that you were blogging ... daily! Fortunately for me, I think I still have a substantial backlog of your OB posts to read. You remain my favorite author, and I always look forward to your future works.

Another "thank you". It's been...remarkable.

I hope you can continue to use your symbolic position to keep us cohesive for a while even when you're not posting at quite the same rate. And I look forward to seeing more of your often very interesting ad hoc observational posts now that you don't feel compelled to stick to a sequence.

I hope you don't actually withdraw from the community. I imagine most of us would be very sad to see that happen -- not because the community depends on you for its survival, but simply because we enjoy your contributions. (Maybe I shouldn't admit to this, but I have found your posts to be a great source of pleasure reading, whether or not I was explicitly learning anything new.)

Most folks here presumably have "day jobs" of one sort or another that aren't specifically involved with rationality per se; yet they still find time to hang out here. I hope it can be likewise with you.

Good luck.

I am not going to turn my attention away entirely and all at once.

Good thing, I was planning a coup to turn everyone here into theists.

(Maybe you read what I wrote. It didn't sound sincere coming from me..even though it was. So I took it out.)

I'll continue my job of being 'the outsider' that helps define what the group is not..