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.

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?

I actually liked all the snark on Rational Wiki's LessWrong page... RationalWiki pretty much defines itself as a wiki for making fun of things, after all...

21David_Gerard13y

Basically not, because, like Wikipedia, it is literally true that no-one actually runs it and there are no top people. There is no-one who can tell trolls or (worse) the reasoning-incompetent to just fuck off, much as it would be nice sometimes, and some long-standing RW users stand firm against it on principle. (There's a board, and some of them are having to be beaten about the head with Section 230 - they were elected as charity trustees, not as forum wizards.) It's a mob of annoying skeptics, and the qualification to be a skeptic is only slightly narrower than the qualification to be an atheist. So the bottom half of RW has lots of shit from lots of arseholes. I would like the blog to project a much better image by being a lot better, in the hope of inspiring people to better stuff. e.g. I think the homeopathy in India post is actually important.

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