What are you working on? February 2013

David_Gerard

This is the bimonthly 'What are you working On?' thread. Previous threads are here. So here's the question:

What are you working on?

Here are some guidelines:

Focus on projects that you have recently made progress on, not projects that you're thinking about doing but haven't started.
Why this project and not others? Mention reasons why you're doing the project and/or why others should contribute to your project (if applicable).
Talk about your goals for the project.
Any kind of project is fair game: personal improvement, research project, art project, whatever.
Link to your work if it's linkable.

This is the bimonthly 'What are you working On?' thread. Previous threads are here. So here's the question:

What are you working on?

Here are some guidelines:

Focus on projects that you have recently made progress on, not projects that you're thinking about doing but haven't started.
Why this project and not others? Mention reasons why you're doing the project and/or why others should contribute to your project (if applicable).
Talk about your goals for the project.
Any kind of project is fair game: personal improvement, research project, art project, whatever.
Link to your work if it's linkable.

Well, if no-one else is going to dive in ...

I have been feeling bored and tetchy for a while now. So for one project I took on the job of volunteer sysadmin at the well-known wretched hive of scum and villainy RationalWiki. It's been quite fun robustifying a small LAMP server overwhelmed by its Alexa 12,000 rating. MediaWiki is a lardy beast, but a coupla Squids in front and it's pretty good; ticking along nicely. Of course, now we have to stop the Squids from falling over too ...

This obviously didn't soak up enough energy. So the other thing I've been doing is the official unofficial RationalWiki blog - a skeptical blog. It's not official yet, but aspires to be; so it's stuff about RW itself mixed with more general skeptical interest. So far it's getting about 150 hits/day, which is not terrible starting from zero. I've also got the keys to @rationalwiki, for further social media delight.

So far, doing the blog feels like NaNoWriMo, or thirty things in thirty days. Thankfully I've actually talked other editors into writing a bit.

LW aims to raise the sanity waterline. But to extend the metaphor, sanity's waterways include quite a few alligator-laden swamps, and toxic waste spills in need of cleanup. I'd like RW to be good at that.

Hey, is there any chance that you could add an automatic site thing like "This page has been heavily (%number changes) edited by a low (%number) number of people for the last %number months. It may not represent an unbiased spread of opinion." Looking at you, LW site on RW ..

15Eliezer Yudkowsky13y

Out of curiosity, is there any sane way to have a debate with RW's top people about whether it's actually productive for them to go around systematically heaping scorn on anything that seems-to-them like an easy target (e.g. homeopathy and cryonics), while also scoffing at the nerds who try to talk about it using math? Or is there no probable productive outcome of even trying to have that conversation?