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Link: My something-like-Friendliness-research blog

11 [deleted] 16 December 2010 01:12AM

If you want to know what that something-like-Friendliness is, you can read the blog! You can find it here: http://willnewsome.wordpress.com/ (About page here: http://willnewsome.wordpress.com/about/ )

Anyone who's bothered to notice the trend of my posts and comments to Less Wrong has probably noticed that I aim to be as metacontrarian and contentious as possible. Other times I run small social experiments. Sometimes this is interesting, sometimes it's probably just frustrating, but I do hope it's at least thought-provoking. With my blog I'm trying to showcase interesting ideas more than bring up counterintuitive alternatives, so perhaps those who don't generally like my posts/comments will still find my blog tolerable. It's also about something that I take more seriously than other rationality-related topics, that is, building an AI that does what we want it to do.

The names of of the posts I've put up already: "What are humans?", "Are evolved drives satiable?", "Why extrapolate?", and "Gene/meme/teme sanity equilibria".

I hope to get a new post out every few days, but honestly I have no idea if I'll succeed in that. At the very least I have a few weeks' worth of cached ideas to post, and I'll continue studying related things in the meantime. 

I'd really like anyone else who has a blog about anything mildly related to rationality to post a link in their own discussion post. Currently I only know to follow Vladimir Nesov and Luke Grecki (whose blogs are linked to from mine), and my RSS feed has room for many more.

Comments (5)

Comment author: Vladimir_Nesov 16 December 2010 11:29:51AM 11 points [-]

Anyone who's bothered to notice the trend of my posts and comments to Less Wrong has probably noticed that I aim to be as metacontrarian and contentious as possible.

Better aim to be less wrong!

Comment author: Larks 16 December 2010 01:38:54PM 2 points [-]

I'd really like anyone else who has a blog about anything mildly related to rationality to post a link in their own discussion post.

I attempted to bring some rationality to the mind-killer here; writing about understanding the scope of theorems rather than blindly chanting 'comparative advantage', that socialists aren't inherently evil, etc.

Comment author: Vladimir_Nesov 16 December 2010 07:23:12PM 1 point [-]

I liked those articles: keen application of standard LW methods. Consider linking to them from a top-level (discussion) post, as this post does.

Comment author: gwern 17 December 2010 12:42:16AM 0 points [-]

I've read through what you have so far; some of them are decent, but why are they on a separate blog?

Comment author: Will_Newsome 17 December 2010 01:41:26AM 2 points [-]

They're not about rationality, they're more organized this way, I have a smaller and more selected audience, and don't have to worry as much about wasting peoples' time or sanity, thus making it easier for me to braindump. A big part of why I'm writing is so that people I work with at SIAI can examine some of my intuitions, since I'm not good at explaining them on the fly. It also makes me appear more productive than just reading a bunch of books and storing them in my brain, waiting for big insights.

Spewing out lots of content also seems personally useful since I'm not that good a writer, and I strongly dislike being not-great at things.