Ever since Eliezer, Yvain, and myself stopped posting regularly, LW's front page has mostly been populated by meta posts. (The Discussion section is still abuzz with interesting content, though, including original research.)
Luckily, many LWers are posting potentially front-page-worthy content to their own blogs.
Below are some recent-ish highlights outside Less Wrong, for your reading enjoyment. I've added an * to my personal favorites.
Overcoming Bias (Robin Hanson, Rob Wiblin, Katja Grace, Carl Shulman)
- Hanson, Beware Far Values
- Wiblin, Is US Gun Control an Important Issue?
- Wiblin, Morality As Though It Really Mattered
- Grace, Can a Tiny Bit of Noise Destroy Communication?
- Shulman, Nuclear winter and human extinction: Q&A with Luke Oman
- Wiblin, Does complexity bias biotechnology towards doing damage?
- Kurzweil's Law of Accelerating Returns *
- The Great Stagnation
- Epistemic Learned Helplessness *
- The Biodeterminist's Guide to Parenting
- Spreading happiness to the stars seems little harder than just spreading
- Rawls' original position, potential people, and Pascal's Mugging
- Philosophers vs economists on discounting
- Utilitarianism, contractualism, and self-sacrifice
- Are pain and pleasure equally energy-efficient? *
Less Wrong requires no politics / minimal humor / definitely unambiguously rationality-relevant / careful referencing / airtight reasoning (as opposed to a sketch of something which isn't exactly true but points to the truth.) This makes writing for Less Wrong a chore as opposed to an enjoyable pastime.
I agree. The overwhelming LW moderation focus seems to be on stifling bad content. There's very little in place to encourage good content. Even the thumbs-up works against good content. Before the thumbs-up, on OB, people would leave appreciative comments. It's much more rewarding to read appreciative comments than it is to look at your post's number (and probably compare it unfavorably to other recent posts' numbers...)
On social media sites like Digg or reddit, it's not a big deal to submit something that people don't end up liking 'cause it'll get v... (read more)