I've done some public speaking coaching and could outline the four highest-value tips I know, if this would be helpful
I'd like to see posts about (for starters, a primer on) computational complexity. Scott Aaronson (see e.g. Why Philosophers Should Care About Computational Complexity) has suggested that computational complexity should be thought of as "quantitative epistemology": that is, it quantifies what it is possible for agents with finite computational power to know in reasonable amounts of time. This seems very relevant to the more abstract parts of the Sequences: for example, Bayesian inference is nice and all, but in practice it's often computationally intractable. If you want answers to your questions in reasonable amounts of time, what do you (or a superintelligent AI) actually do instead of Bayes? But the Sequences themselves don't really discuss these concerns.
I don't necessarily want a thorough discussion of particular results so much as an injection of the idea of computational complexity into the LW memeplex. It certainly seems more valuable than, say, quantum mechanics.
Exercise seems to be full of very-confidently-given advice not grounded in evidence. I am keen to have more energy for doing stuff and would love to know how to figure out what advice to follow.
The state of exercise science is absolutely deplorable. You're stuck with what coaches who train athletes say after having trained lots of people.
This is an example of what I mean by "very-confidently-given advice not grounded in evidence". [citation needed].
I once promised someone here I'd write a post called "(pure) mathematics for rationalists," and I tried, but it was way too big a subject and I couldn't figure out a good way to get started or exactly what I should be writing about. If someone would like to request a substantially narrower version of this post, I would be grateful. Some possible ideas, phrased in the form of questions:
I would like to see more posts like Paul Christiano's My workflow. There are many folks here who are extremely productive (e.g. lukeprog, gwern) and it would be helpful for many of us to have a detailed first-hand account of how such folks manage their time.
I'd be interested in lukeprog's (or CFAR's) thoughts on how to implement "tight feedback loops" into every day instrumental rationality (as opposed to running a business or project).
How can I alter my Big 5 personality traits? (In particular, conscientiousness and extroversion)
A few from 11 Less Wrong Articles I Probably Will Never Have Time to Write: Biases in Charity, Hedonomics, How to be a Happy Consumer.
A tutorial on whatever the current cutting-edge version of UDT is, written at the level of my decision theory FAQ.
I would like to request some detailed accounts of people dealing with mental health issues from a LW perspective. There's a lot on this website about hacking your brain's normal procedures, but not a lot about noticing actual bugs and taking steps to debug effectively and efficiently? Or maybe accounts of mistakes made in the debugging process? This might be too specific for each person to be useful, but it would still be interesting and maybe there are parallels to draw even if specific solutions don't translate from person to person. It seems like a lot of people in the comments have something to contribute from experience but there are few complete accounts.
EDIT: Here are some specific topics:
Well, why not?
Finishing my analysis of predicting Google shutdowns
[pollid:433]
Doing more work on my Touhou music data compilation (descriptive statistics & regressing against unemployment rates)
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Compiling cites on correlations of IQ with various desirable things as an example of a genuine halo effect in the real world
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A rant on how geeks' self-centered traits and lack of understanding of things like tacit knowledge lead to deprecation of user-generated content, not caring about archiving practices, and blaming the victims
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Trying to understand the confusing & contradictory literature on the relationship of IQ & Conscientiousness
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A chapter-by-chapter commentary on Drescher's Good and Real, optimistically including any commentary online or in academia, and over-optimistically including some Haskell to work with his Quantish universe (a project I've mulled for the past few years but never started, interested in whether there's major LW interest and I should push it way forward)
[pollid:438]
Are these life advice threads (like how to get a job in Australia, or how to be poly-amorous) appropriate for Less Wrong? Because if they are, there's a few procedural knowledge gaps I'd like to fill.
This has happened before, and worked out well for me: I wouldn't have written this post otherwise, and because that post was well-received I wrote my DA sequence.
I would like someone who had read, understood and internalized the QM sequence to write a TL;DR of it: the points essential for reading further sequences: reductionism, indistinguishability of "particles", Everett's worlds etc, with links to the subsequent posts which rely on these concepts. This would help those who are not natural at physics to forge ahead without getting stuck, or worse, skipping the sequence without learning anything from it. My hope is that, if such a distillation is successful, these essential points can be expanded on and motivated by other means, providing people with an alternative.
There seem to be many math/physics/CS/mathy PhDs and grad students on LW. I am one. I would very much like to hear your experiences and what activities increased/decreased your productivity and success. In fact, this seems like a good idea for another 'Advice Repository'.
Being in a position to soon either look into joining, or to start a rationalist group house, I and other potential housemates would very much appreciate a post on how to go about doing either (beyond Shannon's somewhat minimal post), and/or a post where individuals who have already done so could talk about their experiences, their benefits and pitfalls, etc.
I'd like to see a post about eye strain and eye care. Specifically in regards to time spent in front of a screen, room brightness, breaks, matte versus glossy, glasses, related software, the effect on eye-strain of having multiple monitors, etc.
If anyone is interested, I was considering writing about using game theory in real life combined with luminosity. In particular, I was thinking of writing in an in-depth way about an example (what to do after infidelity in in monogamous relationships) for one-boxing in real life, because it felt like a better intuition pump for me than any other example I've heard before.
Newcomb's problem in real life has already been covered before in these posts: http://lesswrong.com/lw/4yn/realworld_newcomblike_problems/ http://lesswrong.com/lw/1zw/newcombs_problem_happened_to_me/
A practical guide to inferring our own desires or generally discovering/deciding what you want. Rationality is supposedly systematised winning, but it is difficult to win when you don't know what your objectives are.
If the idea of unemployment primarily caused by technological change is a valid, then it poses a serious risk to social and economic stability. I would like to see a post about possible solutions to technological unemployment. This topic doesn't seem to get as much mainstream attention although 60 minutes did recently do a segment on it. There is prior discussion on LW, but none that offer potential solutions.
Also, I'd like to know how this community is split on this topic.
Unemployment primarily caused by technological change is a major problem: [pol...
Hello LWers, I would deeply appreciate it if someone could write a post on Turing inductive machines as an alternative to Solomonoff induction as a means of inductive inference. Thank you very much!
I've said this before, but:
I would like a LW take on feminism, including topics like what feminists are actually doing, whether you should be one, and why.
I've seen attempts to expose LW to feminism before, but it normally seems to consist of taking existing feminist content and reposting it here - I'm thinking of a more "local" version.
I realise this is not quite the point of this thread, but it is relevant:
I would like not to have any more posts on PUA or feminism. They are political, unproductive timesinks. The mutual disarmament we had after the flamewar of Summer 2009, where neither side posted, was excellent.
I have a few objections against the way PUA and feminism are present at LW, but I think that could be fixed by presenting them in a different way.
My problem with PUA is that its discussion does not happen at a separate article, but rather as huge threads within articles about something else. So I am annoyed with the discussion being off-topic, long, repeating the same points over dozen different articles, never reaching any conclusion, threatening to happen again and again forever. Also, even the basic terms are never defined, so people just talk past each other, each one having a completely different understanding what "PUA" means.
This could be solved by having one article, written by someone who understands the topic, but is not mindkilled by it. Someone who could shortly describe the history and evolution of the movement, its most important schools, and what is considered the state of the art today: specific techniques and beliefs, with some evidence that this is what many PUA's really believe today. So the critics can focus on the core, instead on what some guy said 20 years ago and almost nobody agrees with him today. Having different beliefs properly attributed to d...
This thread is another experiment roughly in the vein of the Boring Advice Repository and the Solved Problems Repository.
There are some topics I'd like to see more LW posts on, but I feel underqualified to post about them relative to my estimate of the most qualified LWer on the topic. I would guess that I am not the only one. I would further guess that there are some LWers who are really knowledgeable about various topics and might like to write about one of them but are unsure which one to choose.
If my guesses are right, these people should be made aware of each other. In this thread, please comment with a request for a LW post (Discussion or Main) on a particular topic. Please upvote such a comment if you would also like to see such a post, and comment on such a comment if you plan on writing such a post. If you leave a writing-plan comment, please edit it once you actually write the post and link to the post so as to avoid duplication of effort in the future.
Let's see what happens!
Edit: it just occurred to me that it might also be reasonable to comment indicating what topics you'd be interested in writing about and then asking people to tell you which ones they'd like you to write about the most. So try that too!