Today, one of the chief pieces of advice I give to aspiring young rationalists is "Do not attempt long chains of reasoning or complicated plans."
Advice more or less completely ignored by everyone, including EY himself.
An alternative interpretation is that we should break up long chains of reasoning into individually analyzed lemmas and break up complicated plans into subgoals.
Hell, even LW has counter-memes against entering politics.
Avoiding discussing politics directly is not the same as not personally entering politics.
Traditional Rationalists can agree to disagree.
The LW advance in this area seems to consist entirely of agreeing to disagree after quoting Aumann's theorem and continuing the argument well past the point of diminishing returns
It's good advice, but only if both parties are truly following it; an admittedly implausible prospect.
If math is what will save us from making interesting new mistakes, we clearly aren't doing enough of it.
What about requiring all new users to solve some different numbers of Euler problems to comment, vote, post top level, have cool neon color names, etc.? Alternatively or conjunctively, breaking up the site into "fuzzy self help" and "1337 Bayes mathhacker" sections might help.
Because I have nowhere better to post this:
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Today (9/8/11) #lesswrong IRC user puritan (User:Incorrect)
earned ten paper-machine points
by successfully executing a CSRF attack against LW.
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nqTJmUqEreF3YjVvYTrthAhsw9zUhAuxx0yCTmzyaaZucGUxJ+Rd4EAM5qVyT2Gx
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A
Today's post, My Wild and Reckless Youth was originally published on 30 August 2007. A summary (taken from the LW wiki):
Discuss the post here (rather than in the comments to the original post).
This post is part of the Rerunning the Sequences series, where we'll be going through Eliezer Yudkowsky's old posts in order so that people who are interested can (re-)read and discuss them. The previous post was Say Not "Complexity", and you can use the sequence_reruns tag or rss feed to follow the rest of the series.
Sequence reruns are a community-driven effort. You can participate by re-reading the sequence post, discussing it here, posting the next day's sequence reruns post, or summarizing forthcoming articles on the wiki. Go here for more details, or to have meta discussions about the Rerunning the Sequences series.