Welcome! Glad to see you posting. It sounds like you are describing the difference between instrumental and epistemic rationality. Epistemic stuff is super important as the foundation for instrumental improvements. I feel that a lot of lesswrong has historically been epistemic. Which is very important. Of course now that that exists I agree that we would do well to encourage more instrumental ideas to be shared.
Would you be interested in sharing your instrumental ideas? Some good examples you mentioned above include asking the question: "so what have I actually learnt?" and taking notes as you read things.
What else do you do? Can you write a top level post about it?
Hmm, sure my approach is definitely instrumental rationality-oriented, but I value epistemology a lot and you won't find me complaining about it. As far as I can predict the experience of someone who has a pressing need to learn epistemic rationality efficiently and tries LW, they are going to be very frustrated (beyond the standard sequences). Eliezer worked not only as idea-adder, but also as idea-distiller and sequence-stringer. So maybe it's just that the rest of LW engages in idea-adding only?
About my instrumental ideas, sure I'm interested in sharing...
Note 1: I'm not very serious about the second part of the title, I just thought it sounds more catchy. I'm a long time lurker writing here for the first time, and it's not my intention to alienate anyone. Also, hi, nice to meet you. Please leave a comment to achieve a result of making me happy about you having left a comment. But let's get to the point.
I think you might be familiar with TED Talks. Recall the last time you watched one, and how you felt while doing it.
[BZRT BZRT sound of imagination working]
In my case, I often got the feeling like if I was learning something valuable while watching most TED Talks. The speakers are (mostly) obviously passionate and intelligent people, speaking about important matters they care about a lot. (Granted, I probably haven't watched more than a dozen TED Talks in all my life, so my sample is quite small, but I think it isn't very unrepresentative.)
But at some point, I started asking myself afterwards:
Which translates in my internal dialect to:
(Note 2: don't treat this "one sentence summary" thing too strictly - of course it's only a reflex/shorthand that is useful in many situations, but not all. I like it because it's simple enough that it's installable as a subconscious trigger-action.)
And I could not state afterwards anything actually useful that I have learned from those "fascinating" videos (with at most one or two small exceptions).
This is exactly what I mean by "Education as Entertainment".
It's getting the enjoyable *feeling* of learning without any real progress.
[DUM DUM DUM sound of increasing dramatism]
And now, what if you use this concept to look at rationality materials?
For me, reading the core Eliezer's braindump (basically the content of "From AI to Zombies"), as well as braindumps (in the form of blogs) of several other people from the LW community, had definite learning value.
I take notes when I read those, and I have an accountability system in place that enables me to make sure I follow up on all the advice I give to myself, test the new ideas, and improve/drop/replace/implement as needed.
However, when I read (a significant part of) the content produced by the "modern" community-powered-LessWrong, I classify its actual learning value at around the same level as TED Talks.
Or YouTube videos with cats, only those don't give me the *impression* that I'm learning something.
THE END
Please let me know what you think.
Final Note: Please take my remarks with a grain of salt. What I write is meant to inspire thoughts in you, not to represent my best factual knowledge about the LW community.