This is the public group instrumental rationality diary for May 16-31.
It's a place to record and chat about it if you have done, or are actively doing, things like:
- Established a useful new habit
- Obtained new evidence that made you change your mind about some belief
- Decided to behave in a different way in some set of situations
- Optimized some part of a common routine or cached behavior
- Consciously changed your emotions or affect with respect to something
- Consciously pursued new valuable information about something that could make a big difference in your life
- Learned something new about your beliefs, behavior, or life that surprised you
- Tried doing any of the above and failed
Or anything else interesting which you want to share, so that other people can think about it, and perhaps be inspired to take action themselves. Try to include enough details so that everyone can use each other's experiences to learn about what tends to work out, and what doesn't tend to work out.
Thanks to cata for starting the Group Rationality Diary posts, and to commenters for participating!
Next diary: June 1-30
Immediate past diary: May 1-15
Started translating the Sequences into Slovak language (with Eliezer's permission). Two articles already published (yesterday, today), another eight are already waiting translated on my hard disk (I decided to limit publishing to at most 1 article per weekday, to avoid possible quick start followed by gradually slowing down later).
How much useful is that? Not sure -- this is a meta action, so it is naturally a multiplier, and I don't have a good estimate about what it multiplies: how many potential LW fans are there in my country. If many, this is one of the best ways to find them; someone can recommend them an article, or they can find it by putting some words in google. If there are few, this is a way to find out, and move on to some other plan. Perhaps this is also a way to create them.
What I learned:
Translating from English to Slovak is surprisingly easy for me. Understanding the context helps tremendously. I also have two translating programs open in browser (an English-Slovak dictionary, and Google Translate), so when I find an unfamiliar word, I first try to guess, and then look at the provided translation. If feels almost like using Anki. Seems like I found my comparative advantage. Depending on the results, this could be my most efficient "sanity waterline increasing" activity by far. I wish I had this idea half year ago; but better now than never.
Translating those articles and seeing the paragraphs written in my first language helped me understand the text better. (For example, in Simple Truth, which is a rather long text with some boring parts, I understood the motivation for having Autrey as a person separate from the speaker, as they represent different approaches. I somehow missed that on the first reading.) Generally, reading a text in a foreign language imposes a cognitive tax; with a lot of practice this tax gets smaller, but at least for me it's still far from zero. For the same reason I guess my readers will appreciate the translations even if they understand English.
It seems that you could capture benefits of both having the material online and searchable and retaining interested readers with regular updates by publishing everything at once, and then regularly posting your analytical readings of Eliezer's material. If you have the audience already, those could naturally grow into discussion posts.