This is the monthly thread for posting media of various types that you've found that you enjoy. Post what you're reading, listening to, watching, and your opinion of it. Post recommendations to blogs. Post whatever media you feel like discussing! To see previous recommendations, check out the older threads.

Rules:

• Please avoid downvoting recommendations just because you don't personally like the recommended material; remember that liking is a two-place word. If you can point out a specific flaw in a person's recommendation, consider posting a comment to that effect.
• If you want to post something that (you know) has been recommended before, but have another recommendation to add, please link to the original, so that the reader has both recommendations.
• Please use the comment trees for genres. There is a meta thread for comments about future threads.
• If you think there should be a thread for a particular genre of media, please post it to the Other Media thread for now, and add a poll to the Meta thread asking if it should be a thread every month.

‘Stock phrases’, in the sense I am using it here, refers to established phrases (in the more common, more specific sense), noises, gestures, etc.; they form a canon of well-known signifiers for messages one might want to convey, like the verbalisation ‘I am happy’, or the gesture of nodding in agreement. They can be very useful, because they save communicators the time, effort, and distraction of forming descriptions from existing phrases. Sometimes a stock phrase has been honed so finely that to try to recreate its precise meaning from scratch would not be possible in any practical period of time. As with language in general, novel or less common combinations of stock phrases are more liable to be misinterpreted. (For example, winks, nods, and other individual gestures are generally less ambiguous than chains of gestures.)

To put it another way: Compression is useful because some amount of upfront time and effort (learning meanings of stock phrases) can save a lot of time and effort later (having to construct new stock phrases repeatedly from scratch).

Two considerations that arise from this are over-reliance on the existing canon of stock phrases, and the skill of originating successful new stock phrases. 

With the former, stock phrases are used even in situations where it would be better to construct a phrase not already in the canon. It is very tempting to round off a complex sentiment into the nearest available stock phrase, because it is so much more convenient—they are available. For example, saying ‘I’m an atheist’ can be a lot more convenient than saying, ‘I put an effectively-zero, but non-zero, probability on the existence of God’. And in some contexts, the former might genuinely be just a useful approximation. But in some other contexts, it can lead to spending an hour arguing with someone before they realise that you don’t rule out God entirely like they were arguing against, and you realise that they have been disagreeing with you ruling out God entirely, rather than you not believing in God with high probability. (Of course, this might not mean the argument is over since there will probably be remaining disagreement. But it might shorten the argument by a frustrating hour.)

Over-reliance on stock phrases can also not only fail to communicate to others, but actually alter the shape one’s own aliefs or beliefs actually take. For example, identifying oneself with a label as a convenience, when one does not actually endorse all the implications of that label, can cause one to begin to advocate for those other implications, even if one did not originally. “I’m an X now, guess I have to believe Y/advocate for Z.” Sometimes this is to avoid censure by other people who identify with that label, whose approval one desires, and this might be a stable decision under reflection. But sometimes it’s as simple and undesirable as the social anxiety of, “If I stop using this label because it doesn’t describe me well, then people might point and laugh at me for seeming to change my mind.”

Originating successful stock phrases is important because of how dependent we are on them—as we should be. Neither extreme—doing everything from scratch on the spot, nor only using the most common stock phrases in the canon—is best; the optimum lies in between these extremes. Therefore we must depend on stock phrases to some extent, and moreover we need to depend on them often enough that we should get good at creating new ones to suit our circumstances, and ensuring that they spread to the relevant people with whom we shall need to use them.

Some things that help:

(1) Training the skill of noticing similarities between attempts to communicate, so that opportunities to generalise a new stock phrase are not missed. A common cue for this would be a feeling of dissatisfaction or frustration that one had not communicated exactly what one had meant and had been misunderstood, and the feeling of ‘I feel like there is a general meaning or class of experience here that I have in mind, but the other party does not realise this, but until I point them to it, we are kind of talking past each other.’

(2) Getting good at coming to catchy, memorable phrases or names. This need not be a solo effort; seeking others’ assistance or going to people who are particularly good at this are also options. Should we have a Phrase Lab here where we can post requests for assistance propagating useful phrases? Vote here!

(3) Surrounding oneself with or having access to people who are good at absorbing, using, and propagating useful phrases. Or at least avoiding people who are actively bad at these things; some people are scornful of new phrases (possibly a status thing; originating widely-used phrases gains status, so endorsing or using a phrase can feel like someone gains status relative to onself), and some people are snobbish prescriptivists (again partly a status thing) and will shoot down novel suggestions on principle. I suspect that an underestimated factor in the Bay Area success story is the unusually high openness to phrases and jargon, which allow deeper exploration of ideas and systems than the more general population’s stock phrases allow.

(4) Related to the above, but worth stating standalone: Surrounding oneself with or having access to people who are good at telling you when your phrases are good, and also when they’re crap. It is good to be motivated when you do good and notice useful categories or clusters, and also good to be warned when you are crystallizing a disuseful patterns. Similarly, people who are willing to say, ‘I think this phrase has made everything look like nail. We should reconsider our usage of it,’ once a phrase has taken off are to be valued.

(Related to my comment on (3): Although there are other factors in the gap, people perhaps underestimate how much of the gap between, say, Eliezer and Yvain and the average LessWronger-who-is-not-a-LessWrong-celebrity comes from their ability to crystallize, describe, and promote useful phrases. For those of us who are not so good at doing all three in one go and need more assistance, LessWrong could probably be more welcoming in seeking assistance or feedback on not-yet-complete phrases or crystallizations. This might not seem like a big advantage, but bear in mind that intelligence correlates very, very well with manipulating patterns, which is what phrases help with, and that while the leverage of using a phrase once is not very high, two or three decades of iterative use of phrases and the resulting positive feedback loop might explain more of the gap than one might initially think.)

I've been travelling around the US for the past month since arriving from Australia, and have had the chance to see how a number of different Less Wrong communities operate. As a departing organiser for the Melbourne Less Wrong community, it has been interesting to make comparisons between the different Less Wrong groups all over the US, and I suspect sharing the lessons learned by different communities will benefit the global movement.

For aspiring organisers, or leaders looking at making further improvements to their community, there already exists an excellent meetup organisers handbook, list of meetups, and NYC case study. I'd also recommend one super useful ability: rapid experimentation. This is a relatively low cost way to find out exactly what format of events attracts the most people and are the most beneficial. Once you know how to win, spam it! This ability is sometimes even better than just asking people what they want out of the community, but you should probably do both.

I'll summarise a few types of meetup that I have seen here. Please feel free to help out by adding descriptions of other types of events you have seen, or variations on the ones already posted if you think there is something other communities could learn. 

Public Practical Rationality Meetups (Melbourne)

Held monthly on a Friday in Matthew Fallshaw's offices at TrikeApps. Advertised on Facebook, LessWrong, and the Melbourne LW Mailing List. About 25-40 attendees. Until January, were also advertised publicly on meetup.com, but since then the format has changed significantly. Audience was 50% Less Wrongers, and 50% newcomers, so this served as our outreach event. 

6:30pm-7:30pm Doors open, usually most people arrive around 7:15pm

7:30pm sharp-9:00pm: Content introduced. Usually around 3 topics have been prepared by 3 separate Less Wrongers, for discussion in groups of about 10 people each. After 30 minutes the groups rotate, so the presenters present the same thing multiple times. Topics have included: effective communication, giving and receiving feedback, sequence summaries, cryonics, habit formation, etc.

9:00pm - Late: Unstructured socialising, with occasional 'rationality therapy' where a few friends get together to think about a particular issue in someone's life in detail. Midnight souvlaki runs are a tradition.

Monthly Social Games Meetup (Melbourne)

Held in a private residence on a Friday, close to central city public transport. Advertised on Facebook, LessWrong, and the Melbourne LW Mailing List. About 15-25 attendees. Snacks provided by the host.

6:30pm - Late: People show up whenever and there are lots of great conversations. Mafia, (science themed) Zendo, and a variety of board games are popular, but the majority of the night is usually spent talking about what people have learned or read recently. There are enough discussions happening that it is usually easy to find an interesting group to join. Delivery dinner is often ordered, and many people stay quite late.

Large public salons (from Rafael Cosman, Stanford University)

Held on campus in a venue provided by the university. Advertised on a custom mailing list, and presumably facebook/word of mouth. Audience is mostly unfamiliar with Less Wrong Material, and this event is has not yet officially become associated with Less Wrong, but Rafael is in the process of getting a spin-off LW specific meetup happening.

7pm-7:30pm: Guests trickle in. Light background music helps inform the first arrivals that they are indeed at the right place.

7:30pm-7:45pm: Introductions, covering 1. Who you are 2. One thing that people should talk to you about (e.g. "You should talk to me about Conway's Game of Life" 3. One thing that people could come and do with you sometime (e.g. "Come and join me for yoga on Sunday mornings"

7:45pm-9:30pm: Short talks on a variety of topics. At the end of a presentation, instead of tossing it open for questions, everyone comes up to give the speaker a high-five, and then the group immediately enters unstructured discussion for 5-10 minutes. This allows people with pressing questions to go up and ask the speaker, but also allows everyone else to break out to mingle rather than being passive.

Still to come: New York, Austin, and the SF East and South Bay meetup formats.

This is the monthly thread for posting media of various types that you've found that you enjoy. Post what you're reading, listening to, watching, and your opinion of it. Post recommendations to blogs. Post whatever media you feel like discussing! To see previous recommendations, check out the older threads.

Rules:

• Please avoid downvoting recommendations just because you don't personally like the recommended material; remember that liking is a two-place word. If you can point out a specific flaw in a person's recommendation, consider posting a comment to that effect.
• If you want to post something that (you know) has been recommended before, but have another recommendation to add, please link to the original, so that the reader has both recommendations.
• Please use the comment trees for genres. There is a meta thread for comments about future threads.
• If you think there should be a thread for a particular genre of media, please post it to the Other Media thread for now, and add a poll to the Meta thread asking if it should be a thread every month.

This is the supposedly-bimonthly-but-we-keep-skipping 'What are you working On?' thread. Previous threads are here. So here's the question:

What are you working on? 

Here are some guidelines:

• Focus on projects that you have recently made progress on, not projects that you're thinking about doing but haven't started.
• Why this project and not others? Mention reasons why you're doing the project and/or why others should contribute to your project (if applicable).
• Talk about your goals for the project.
• Any kind of project is fair game: personal improvement, research project, art project, whatever.
• Link to your work if it's linkable.

This is the monthly thread for posting media of various types that you've found that you enjoy. Post what you're reading, listening to, watching, and your opinion of it. Post recommendations to blogs. Post whatever media you feel like discussing! To see previous recommendations, check out the older threads.

Rules:

• Please avoid downvoting recommendations just because you don't personally like the recommended material; remember that liking is a two-place word. If you can point out a specific flaw in a person's recommendation, consider posting a comment to that effect.
• If you want to post something that (you know) has been recommended before, but have another recommendation to add, please link to the original, so that the reader has both recommendations.
• Please use the comment trees for genres. There is a meta thread for comments about future threads.
• If you think there should be a thread for a particular genre of media, please post it to the Other Media thread for now, and add a poll to the Meta thread asking if it should be a thread every month.

About a year ago, I attended my first CFAR workshop and wrote a post about it here. I mentioned in that post that it was too soon for me to tell if the workshop would have a large positive impact on my life. In the comments to that post, I was asked to follow up on that post in a year to better evaluate that impact. So here we are!

Very short summary: overall I think the workshop had a large and persistent positive impact on my life. 

Important caveat

However, anyone using this post to evaluate the value of going to a CFAR workshop themselves should be aware that I'm local to Berkeley and have had many opportunities to stay connected to CFAR and the rationalist community. More specifically, in addition to the January workshop, I also

• visited the March workshop (and possibly others),
• attended various social events held by members of the community,
• taught at the July workshop, and
• taught at SPARC.

These experiences were all very helpful in helping me digest and reinforce the workshop material (which was also improving over time), and a typical workshop participant might not have these advantages. 

Answering a question

pewpewlasergun wanted me to answer the following question:

I'd like to know how many techniques you were taught at the meetup you still use regularly. Also which has had the largest effect on your life.

The short answer is: in some sense very few, but a lot of the value I got out of attending the workshop didn't come from specific techniques. 

In more detail: to be honest, many of the specific techniques are kind of a chore to use (at least as of January 2013). I experimented with a good number of them in the months after the workshop, and most of them haven't stuck (but that isn't so bad; the cost of trying a technique and finding that it doesn't work for you is low, while the benefit of trying a technique and finding that it does work for you can be quite high!). One that has is the idea of a next action, which I've found incredibly useful. Next actions are the things that to-do list items should be, say in the context of using Remember The Milk. Many to-do list items you might be tempted to right down are difficult to actually do because they're either too vague or too big and hence trigger ugh fields. For example, you might have an item like

• Do my taxes

that you don't get around to until right before you have to because you have an ugh field around doing your taxes. This item is both too vague and too big: instead of writing this down, write down the next physical action you need to take to make progress on this item, which might be something more like

• Find tax forms and put them on desk

which is both concrete and small. Thinking in terms of next actions has been a huge upgrade to my GTD system (as was Workflowy, which I also started using because of the workshop) and I do it constantly. 

But as I mentioned, a lot of the value I got out of attending the workshop was not from specific techniques. Much of the value comes from spending time with the workshop instructors and participants, which had effects that I find hard to summarize, but I'll try to describe some of them below: 

Emotional attitudes

The workshop readjusted my emotional attitudes towards several things for the better, and at several meta levels. For example, a short conversation with a workshop alum completely readjusted my emotional attitude towards both nutrition and exercise, and I started paying more attention to what I ate and going to the gym (albeit sporadically) for the first time in my life not long afterwards. I lost about 15 pounds this way (mostly from the eating part, not the gym part, I think). 

At a higher meta level, I did a fair amount of experimenting with various lifestyle changes (cold showers, not shampooing) after the workshop and overall they had the effect of readjusting my emotional attitude towards change. I find it generally easier to change my behavior than I used to because I've had a lot of practice at it lately, and am more enthusiastic about the prospect of such changes. 

(Incidentally, I think emotional attitude adjustment is an underrated component of causing people to change their behavior, at least here on LW.)

Using all of my strength

The workshop is the first place I really understood, on a gut level, that I could use my brain to think about something other than math. It sounds silly when I phrase it like that, but at some point in the past I had incorporated into my identity that I was good at math but absentminded and silly about real-world matters, and I used it as an excuse not to fully engage intellectually with anything that wasn't math, especially anything practical. One way or another the workshop helped me realize this, and I stopped thinking this way. 

The result is that I constantly apply optimization power to situations I wouldn't have even tried to apply optimization power to before. For example, today I was trying to figure out why the water in my bathroom sink was draining so slowly. At first I thought it was because the strainer had become clogged with gunk, so I cleaned the strainer, but then I found out that even with the strainer removed the water was still draining slowly. In the past I might've given up here. Instead I looked around for something that would fit farther into the sink than my fingers and saw the handle of my plunger. I pumped the handle into the sink a few times and some extra gunk I hadn't known was there came out. The sink is fine now. (This might seem small to people who are more domestically talented than me, but trust me when I say I wasn't doing stuff like this before last year.)

Reflection and repair

Thanks to the workshop, my GTD system is now robust enough to consistently enable me to reflect on and repair my life (including my GTD system). For example, I'm quicker to attempt to deal with minor medical problems I have than I used to be. I also think more often about what I'm doing and whether I could be doing something better. In this regard I pay a lot of attention in particular to what habits I'm forming, although I don't use the specific techniques in the relevant CFAR unit.

For example, at some point I had recorded in RTM that I was frustrated by the sensation of hours going by without remembering how I had spent them (usually because I was mindlessly browsing the internet). In response, I started keeping a record of what I was doing every half hour and categorizing each hour according to a combination of how productively and how intentionally I spent it (in the first iteration it was just how productively I spent it, but I found that this was making me feel too guilty about relaxing). For example:

• a half-hour intentionally spent reading a paper is marked green.
• a half-hour half-spent writing up solutions to a problem set and half-spent on Facebook is marked yellow. 
• a half-hour intentionally spent playing a video game is marked with no color.
• a half-hour mindlessly browsing the internet when I had intended to do work is marked red. 

The act of doing this every half hour itself helps make me more mindful about how I spend my time, but having a record of how I spend my time has also helped me notice interesting things, like how less of my time is under my direct control than I had thought (but instead is taken up by classes, commuting, eating, etc.). It's also easier for me to get into a success spiral when I see a lot of green. 

Stimulation

Being around workshop instructors and participants is consistently intellectually stimulating. I don't have a tactful way of saying what I'm about to say next, but: two effects of this are that I think more interesting thoughts than I used to and also that I'm funnier than I used to be. (I realize that these are both hard to quantify.) 

etc.

I worry that I haven't given a complete picture here, but hopefully anything I've left out will be brought up in the comments one way or another. (Edit: this totally happened! Please read Anna Salamon's comment below.) 

Takeaway for prospective workshop attendees

I'm not actually sure what you should take away from all this if your goal is to figure out whether you should attend a workshop yourself. My thoughts are roughly this: I think attending a workshop is potentially high-value and therefore that even talking to CFAR about any questions you might have is potentially high-value, in addition to being relatively low-cost. If you think there's even a small chance you could get a lot of value out of attending a workshop I recommend that you at least take that one step. 

This is the monthly thread for posting media of various types that you've found that you enjoy. Post what you're reading, listening to, watching, and your opinion of it. Post recommendations to blogs. Post whatever media you feel like discussing! To see previous recommendations, check out the older threads.

Rules:

• Please avoid downvoting recommendations just because you don't personally like the recommended material; remember that liking is a two-place word. If you can point out a specific flaw in a person's recommendation, consider posting a comment to that effect.
• If you want to post something that (you know) has been recommended before, but have another recommendation to add, please link to the original, so that the reader has both recommendations.
• Please use the comment trees for genres. There is a meta thread for comments about future threads.
• If you think there should be a thread for a particular genre of media, please post it to the Other Media thread for now, and add a poll to the Meta thread asking if it should be a thread every month.

Over the last year, VincentYu, gwern and others have provided many papers for the LessWrong community (87% success rate in 2012) through previous help desk threads. We originally intended to provide editing, research and general troubleshooting help, but article downloads are by far the most requested service.

If you're doing a LessWrong relevant project we want to help you. If you need help accessing a journal article or academic book chapter, we can get it for you. If you need some research or writing help, we can help there too.

Turnaround times for articles published in the last 20 years or so is usually less than a day. Older articles often take a couple days.

Please make new article requests in the comment section of this thread.

If you would like to help out with finding papers, please monitor this thread for requests. If you want to monitor via RSS like I do, many RSS readers will give you the comment feed if you give it the URL for this thread (or use this link directly). 

If you have some special skills you want to volunteer, mention them in the comment section.

This is the monthly thread for posting media of various types that you've found that you enjoy. Post what you're reading, listening to, watching, and your opinion of it. Post recommendations to blogs. Post whatever media you feel like discussing! To see previous recommendations, check out the older threads.

Rules:

• Please avoid downvoting recommendations just because you don't personally like the recommended material; remember that liking is a two-place word. If you can point out a specific flaw in a person's recommendation, consider posting a comment to that effect.
• If you want to post something that (you know) has been recommended before, but have another recommendation to add, please link to the original, so that the reader has both recommendations.
• Please use the comment trees for genres. There is a meta thread for comments about future threads.
• If you think there should be a thread for a particular genre of media, please post it to the Other Media thread for now, and add a poll to the Meta thread asking if it should be a thread every month.

This is the monthly thread for posting media of various types that you've found that you enjoy. Post what you're reading, listening to, watching, and your opinion of it. Post recommendations to blogs. Post whatever media you feel like discussing! To see previous recommendations, check out the older threads.

Rules:

• Please avoid downvoting recommendations just because you don't personally like the recommended material; remember that liking is a two-place word. If you can point out a specific flaw in a person's recommendation, consider posting a comment to that effect.
• If you want to post something that (you know) has been recommended before, but have another recommendation to add, please link to the original, so that the reader has both recommendations.
• Please use the comment trees for genres. There is a meta thread for comments about future threads.
• If you think there should be a thread for a particular genre of media, please post it to the Other Media thread for now, and add a poll to the Meta thread asking if it should be a thread every month.

This is the monthly thread for posting media of various types that you've found that you enjoy. Post what you're reading, listening to, watching, and your opinion of it. Post recommendations to blogs. Post whatever media you feel like discussing! To see previous recommendations, check out the older threads.

Rules:

• Please avoid downvoting recommendations just because you don't personally like the recommended material; remember that liking is a two-place word. If you can point out a specific flaw in a person's recommendation, consider posting a comment to that effect.
• If you want to post something that (you know) has been recommended before, but have another recommendation to add, please link to the original, so that the reader has both recommendations.
• Please use the comment trees for genres. There is a meta thread for comments about future threads.
• If you think there should be a thread for a particular genre of media, please post it to the Other Media thread for now, and add a poll to the Meta thread asking if it should be a thread every month.

This is the monthly thread for posting media of various types that you've found that you enjoy. Post what you're reading, listening to, watching, and your opinion of it. Post recommendations to blogs. Post whatever media you feel like discussing! To see previous recommendations, check out the older threads.

Rules:

• Please avoid downvoting recommendations just because you don't personally like the recommended material; remember that liking is a two-place word. If you can point out a specific flaw in a person's recommendation, consider posting a comment to that effect.
• If you want to post something that (you know) has been recommended before, but have another recommendation to add, please link to the original, so that the reader has both recommendations.
• Please use the comment trees for genres. There is a meta thread for comments about future threads.
• If you think there should be a thread for a particular genre of media, please post it to the Other Media thread for now, and add a poll to the Meta thread asking if it should be a thread every month.

This is the monthly thread for posting media of various types that you've found that you enjoy. Post what you're reading, listening to, watching, and your opinion of it. Post recommendations to blogs. Post whatever media you feel like discussing! To see previous recommendations, check out the older threads.

Rules:

• Please avoid downvoting recommendations just because you don't personally like the recommended material; remember that liking is a two-place word. If you can point out a specific flaw in a person's recommendation, consider posting a comment to that effect.
• If you want to post something that (you know) has been recommended before, but have another recommendation to add, please link to the original, so that the reader has both recommendations.
• Please use the comment trees for genres. There is a meta thread for comments about future threads.
• If you think there should be a thread for a particular genre of media, please post it to the Other Media thread for now, and add a poll to the Meta thread asking if it should be a thread every month.

This is the monthly thread for posting media of various types that you've found that you enjoy. Post what you're reading, listening to, watching, and your opinion of it. Post recommendations to blogs. Post whatever media you feel like discussing! To see previous recommendations, check out the older threads.

Rules:

• Please avoid downvoting recommendations just because you don't personally like the recommended material; remember that liking is a two-place word. If you can point out a specific flaw in a person's recommendation, consider posting a comment to that effect.
• If you want to post something that (you know) has been recommended before, but have another recommendation to add, please link to the original, so that the reader has both recommendations.
• Please use the comment trees for genres. There is a meta thread for comments about future threads.
• If you think there should be a thread for a particular genre of media, please post it to the Other Media thread for now, and add a poll to the Meta thread asking if it should be a thread every month.

This is the monthly thread for posting media of various types that you've found that you enjoy. Post what you're reading, listening to, watching, and your opinion of it. Post recommendations to blogs. Post whatever media you feel like discussing! To see previous recommendations, check out the older threads.

Rules:

• Please avoid downvoting recommendations just because you don't personally like the recommended material; remember that liking is a two-place word. If you can point out a specific flaw in a person's recommendation, consider posting a comment to that effect.
• If you want to post something that (you know) has been recommended before, but have another recommendation to add, please link to the original, so that the reader has both recommendations.
• Please use the comment trees for genres. There is a meta thread for comments about future threads.
• If you think there should be a thread for a particular genre of media, please post it to the Other Media thread for now, and add a poll to the Meta thread asking if it should be a thread every month.

This is the monthly thread for posting media of various types that you've found that you enjoy. Post what you're reading, listening to, watching, and your opinion of it. Post recommendations to blogs. Post whatever media you feel like discussing! To see previous recommendations, check out the older threads.

Rules:

• Please avoid downvoting recommendations just because you don't personally like the recommended material; remember that liking is a two-place word. If you can point out a specific flaw in a person's recommendation, consider posting a comment to that effect.
• If you want to post something that (you know) has been recommended before, but have another recommendation to add, please link to the original, so that the reader has both recommendations.
• Please use the comment trees for genres. There is a meta thread for comments about future threads.
• If you think there should be a thread for a particular genre of media, please post it to the Other Media thread for now, and add a poll to the Meta thread asking if it should be a thread every month.

Konkvistador's excellent List of Blogs by LWers led me to some of my favorite blogs, but is pretty well hidden and gradually becoming obsolete. In order to create an easily-update-able replacement, I have created the wiki page List of Blogs and added most of the blogs from Konkvistador's list. If you have a blog, or you read blogs, please help in the following ways:

-- Add your blog if it's not on there, and if it has updated in the past few months (no dead blogs this time, exceptions for very complete archives of excellent material like Common Sense Atheism in the last section)

-- Add any other blogs you like that are written by LWers or frequently engage with LW ideas

-- Remove your blog if you don't want it on there (I added some prominent critics of LW ideas who might not want to be linked to us)

-- Move your blog to a different category if you don't like the one it's in right now

-- Add a description of your blog, or change the one that already exists

-- Change the name you're listed by (I defaulted to people's LW handles)

-- Bold the name of your blog if it updates near-daily, has a large readership/commentership, and/or gets linked to on LW a lot

-- Improve formatting

Somebody more familiar with the Less Wrong twittersphere might want to do something similar to Grognor's Less Wrong on Twitter

This is the monthly thread for posting media of various types that you've found that you enjoy. Post what you're reading, listening to, watching, and your opinion of it. Post recommendations to blogs. Post whatever media you feel like discussing! To see previous recommendations, check out the older threads.

Rules:

• Please avoid downvoting recommendations just because you don't personally like the recommended material; remember that liking is a two-place word. If you can point out a specific flaw in a person's recommendation, consider posting a comment to that effect.
• If you want to post something that (you know) has been recommended before, but have another recommendation to add, please link to the original, so that the reader has both recommendations.
• Please use the comment trees for genres. There is a meta thread for comments about future threads.
• If you think there should be a thread for a particular genre of media, please post it to the Other Media thread for now, and add a poll to the Meta thread asking if it should be a thread every month.

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! 

CFAR is hiring an additional logistics manager.  Please click on our form for more information, or to fill out an application:

https://docs.google.com/forms/d/1ACTvM1oYsw1zzHMumrLzffCVVak3eA5A-5uJzyIYOKM/viewform

We hope to choose a candidate within the next week or so, so if you're interested, do apply ASAP.

This is the monthly thread for posting media of various types that you've found that you enjoy. Post what you're reading, listening to, watching, and your opinion of it. Post recommendations to blogs. Post whatever media you feel like discussing! To see previous recommendations, check out the older threads.

Rules:

• Please avoid downvoting recommendations just because you don't personally like the recommended material; remember that liking is a two-place word. If you can point out a specific flaw in a person's recommendation, consider posting a comment to that effect.
• If you want to post something that (you know) has been recommended before, but have another recommendation to add, please link to the original, so that the reader has both recommendations.
• Please use the comment trees for genres. There is a meta thread for comments about future threads.
• If you think there should be a thread for a particular genre of media, please post it to the Other Media thread for now, and add a poll to the Meta thread asking if it should be a thread every month.

Long-time readers may have noticed that spam on the wiki has been a very persistent problem for the past 2 years or so; I've been dealing with it so far by hand, but I recently reached a breaking point and asked Trike to resolve it or find a new wiki administrator. (Speaking of which, is anyone interested?)

So Trike has enabled a MediaWiki extension called the edit filter: a small functional programming language which lets you define predicates applied to edits which trigger one of a set of actions, like banning a user, deleting an edit/page, or stopping an edit from going through. I have so far defined one rule: page creation is forbidden for users younger than 24 hours. This so far seems to have worked well; spam pages have fallen from 5-10/day to ~5 over the past 2 weeks. This is much more manageable, and I am hopeful that this new anti-spam measure will be effective longer than the previous additions did (but if it doesn't, I'll look into adding more rules dealing with images and external links, and perhaps also ban users whose names end in a numeric digit as almost all the spam accounts do).

If you've run into this edit filter before by making a page and seeing the submission rejected with an error message, fret not: merely wait 24 hours. (If your account is more than a day old and you're still getting errors, please contact me or Trike.)

I'm officially spinning the Solstice and related ritual stuff into something distinct from Less Wrong (there are good reasons to leave LW focusing on straight-up rationality, and I think it should cater more towards "serious business intellectuals" than trying to appeal to the masses, which is essentially my goal). 

I'll be checking in from time to time to let people know what I'm doing. I just posted an introduction newsletter for Solstice and Megameetup activity for 2013. You can view it here, and if you want to participate in future discussion, you may want to join the rational-ritual mailing list. 

Some key points:

The Winter Solstice 2011 had been a bit of an experiment, and went well enough, but left us with a sense of "all right, now let's do that for real next year." I think the 2012 Solstice delivered on that. Our house was filled to the brim with 50 people, and I got a lot of profound thanks from people who described it as very emotionally affective, helping them deal with death and successful at community bonding in a way that few other things had been for them. 

Now I'm gearing up for this year's work. I have a few main goals for this year:

• Have Solstices and Megameetups at a number of cities other than New York.

• Have one very large Solstice in NY (looking to seat at least 100 people and trying to seat 800 if I can, in a large auditorium), that caters to the mainstream skeptic/freethinker/humanist crowd. (There will also be a smaller, more intimate and transhumanist Less Wrong Solstice in NYC, but I'm leaning towards it not doubling as a megameetup)

• Create an official website that ties this all together, and makes it easier for people to get involved, share music/art, and find people to collaborate with. I want it to be distinct from Less Wrong  so that people who aren't interested in ritual don't feel put out, as well as give non-LW-folk a chance to discover it. 

 

For the first goal to be successful, we're going to need other other people doing some non-trivial logistical work. A few people had expressed interest in having Solstices or megameetups in their city but weren't sure if they were able to take on that responsibility personally. Some people were interested in making a Solstice happen but hadn't actually personally experienced it and weren't sure they were qualified.

These are non-trivial obstacles, but I think they can be addressed. 

(I decided to temporarily usurp RobertLumley's place in posting this thread. I hope he doesn't mind)

This is the monthly thread for posting media of various types that you've found that you enjoy. Post what you're reading, listening to, watching, and your opinion of it. Post recommendations to blogs. Post whatever media you feel like discussing! To see previous recommendations, check out the older threads.

Rules:

• Please avoid downvoting recommendations just because you don't personally like the recommended material; remember that liking is a two-place word. If you can point out a specific flaw in a person's recommendation, consider posting a comment to that effect.
• If you want to post something that (you know) has been recommended before, but have another recommendation to add, please link to the original, so that the reader has both recommendations.
• Please use the comment trees for genres. There is a meta thread for comments about future threads.
• If you think there should be a thread for a particular genre of media, please post it to the Other Media thread for now, and add a poll to the Meta thread asking if it should be a thread every month.

This is the bimonthly 'What are you working On?' thread. Previous threads are here. So here's the question:

What are you working on? 

Here are some guidelines:

• Focus on projects that you have recently made progress on, not projects that you're thinking about doing but haven't started.
• Why this project and not others? Mention reasons why you're doing the project and/or why others should contribute to your project (if applicable).
• Talk about your goals for the project.
• Any kind of project is fair game: personal improvement, research project, art project, whatever.
• Link to your work if it's linkable.

This is the monthly thread for posting media of various types that you've found that you enjoy. I find that exposure to LW ideas makes me less likely to enjoy some entertainment media that is otherwise quite popular, and finding media recommended by LWers is a good way to mitigate this. Post what you're reading, listening to, watching, and your opinion of it. Post recommendations to blogs. Post whatever media you feel like discussing! To see previous recommendations, check out the older threads.

Rules:

• Please avoid downvoting recommendations just because you don't personally like the recommended material; remember that liking is a two-place word. If you can point out a specific flaw in a person's recommendation, consider posting a comment to that effect.
• If you want to post something that (you know) has been recommended before, but have another recommendation to add, please link to the original, so that the reader has both recommendations.
• Please use the comment trees for genres. There is a meta thread for comments about future threads.
• If you think there should be a thread for a particular genre of media, please post it to the Other Media thread for now, and add a poll to the Meta thread asking if it should be a thread every month.

So, the Center for Applied Rationality just ran another workshop, which Anna kindly invited me to. Below I've written down some thoughts on it, both to organize those thoughts and because it seems other LWers might want to read them. I'll also invite other participants to write down their thoughts in the comments. Apologies if what follows isn't particularly well-organized. 

Feelings and other squishy things

The workshop was totally awesome. This is admittedly not strong evidence that it accomplished its goals (cf. Yvain's comment here), but being around people motivated to improve themselves and the world was totally awesome, and learning with and from them was also totally awesome, and that seems like a good thing. 

Also, the venue was fantastic. CFAR instructors reported that this workshop was more awesome than most, and while I don't want to discount improvements in CFAR's curriculum and its selection process for participants, I think the venue counted for a lot. It was uniformly beautiful and there were a lot of soft things to sit down or take naps on, and I think that helped everybody be more comfortable with and relaxed around each other. 

Main takeaways

Here are some general insights I took away from the workshop. Some of them I had already been aware of on some abstract intellectual level but hadn't fully processed and/or gotten drilled into my head and/or seen the implications of. 

1. Epistemic rationality doesn't have to be about big things like scientific facts or the existence of God, but can be about much smaller things like the details of how your particular mind works. For example, it's quite valuable to understand what your actual motivations for doing things are. 
2. Introspection is unreliable. Consequently, you don't have direct access to information like your actual motivations for doing things. However, it's possible to access this information through less direct means. For example, if you believe that your primary motivation for doing X is that it brings about Y, you can perform a thought experiment: imagine a world in which Y has already been brought about. In that world, would you still feel motivated to do X? If so, then there may be reasons other than Y that you do X. 
3. The mind is embodied. If you consistently model your mind as separate from your body (I have in retrospect been doing this for a long time without explicitly realizing it), you're probably underestimating the powerful influence of your mind on your body and vice versa. For example, dominance of the sympathetic nervous system (which governs the fight-or-flight response) over the parasympathetic nervous system is unpleasant, unhealthy, and can prevent you from explicitly modeling other people. If you can notice and control it, you'll probably be happier, and if you get really good, you can develop aikido-related superpowers. 
4. You are a social animal. Just as your mind should be modeled as a part of your body, you should be modeled as a part of human society. For example, if you don't think you care about social approval, you are probably wrong, and thinking that will cause you to have incorrect beliefs about things like your actual motivations for doing things. 
5. Emotions are data. Your emotional responses to stimuli give you information about what's going on in your mind that you can use. For example, if you learn that a certain stimulus reliably makes you angry and you don't want to be angry, you can remove that stimulus from your environment. (This point should be understood in combination with point 2 so that it doesn't sound trivial: you don't have direct access to information like what stimuli make you angry.) 
6. Emotions are tools. You can trick your mind into having specific emotions, and you can trick your mind into having specific emotions in response to specific stimuli. This can be very useful; for example, tricking your mind into being more curious is a great way to motivate yourself to find stuff out, and tricking your mind into being happy in response to doing certain things is a great way to condition yourself to do certain things. Reward your inner pigeon.

Here are some specific actions I am going to take / have already taken because of what I learned at the workshop. 

1. Write a lot more stuff down. What I can think about in my head is limited by the size of my working memory, but a piece of paper or a WorkFlowy document don't have this limitation. 
2. Start using a better GTD system. I was previously using RTM, but badly. I was using it exclusively from my iPhone, and when adding something to RTM from an iPhone the due date defaults to "today." When adding something to RTM from a browser the due date defaults to "never." I had never done this, so I didn't even realize that "never" was an option. That resulted in having due dates attached to RTM items that didn't actually have due dates, and it also made me reluctant to add items to RTM that really didn't look like they had due dates (e.g. "look at this interesting thing sometime"), which was bad because that meant RTM wasn't collecting a lot of things and I stopped trusting my own due dates. 
3. Start using Boomerang to send timed email reminders to future versions of myself. I think this might work better than using, say, calendar alerts because it should help me conceptualize past versions of myself as people I don't want to break commitments to. 

I'm also planning to take various actions that I'm not writing above but instead putting into my GTD system, such as practicing specific rationality techniques (the workshop included many useful worksheets for doing this) and investigating specific topics like speed-reading and meditation. 

The arc word (TVTropes warning) of this workshop was "agentiness." ("Agentiness" is more funtacular than "agency.") The CFAR curriculum as a whole could be summarized as teaching a collection of techniques to be more agenty. 

Miscellaneous

A distinguishing feature the people I met at the workshop seemed to have in common was the ability to go meta. This is not a skill which was explicitly mentioned or taught (although it was frequently implicit in the kind of jokes people told), but it strikes me as an important foundation for rationality: it seems hard to progress with rationality unless the thought of using your brain to improve how you use your brain, and also to improve how you improve how you use your brain, is both understandable and appealing to you. This probably eliminates most people as candidates for rationality training unless it's paired with or maybe preceded by meta training, whatever that looks like.

One problem with the workshop was lack of sleep, which seemed to wear out both participants and instructors by the last day (classes started early in the day and conversations often continued late into the night because they were unusually fun / high-value). Offering everyone modafinil or something at the beginning of future workshops might help with this.

Overall

Overall, while it's too soon to tell how big an impact the workshop will have on my life, I anticipate a big impact, and I strongly recommend that aspiring rationalists attend future workshops. 

I do an informal experiment testing whether LessWrong karma scores are susceptible to a form of anchoring based on the first comment posted; a medium-large effect size is found although the data does not fit the assumed normal distribution & the more sophisticated analysis is equivocal, so there may or may not be an anchoring effect.

Full writeup on gwern.net at http://www.gwern.net/Anchoring

Kim Suozzi was a neuroscience student with brain cancer who wanted to be cryonically preserved but lacked the funds. She appealed to reddit and a foundation was set up, called the Society for Venturism.  Enough money was raised, and when she died on the January 17th, she was preserved by Alcor.  

I wasn't sure if I should post about this, but I was glad to see that enough money was raised and it was discussed on LessWrong here, here, and here.

Source

Edit:  It looks like Alcor actually worked with her to lower the costs, and waived some of the fees.

Edit 2:  The Society for Venturism has been around for a while, and wasn't set up just for her.

This is the public group instrumental rationality diary for the week of January 7th. It's a place to record and chat about it if you have done, or are actively doing, things like:

This is the monthly thread for posting media of various types that you've found that you enjoy. I find that exposure to LW ideas makes me less likely to enjoy some entertainment media that is otherwise quite popular, and finding media recommended by LWers is a good way to mitigate this. Post what you're reading, listening to, watching, and your opinion of it. Post recommendations to blogs. Post whatever media you feel like discussing! To see previous recommendations, check out the older threads.

Rules:

• Please avoid downvoting recommendations just because you don't personally like the recommended material; remember that liking is a two-place word. If you can point out a specific flaw in a person's recommendation, consider posting a comment to that effect.
• If you want to post something that (you know) has been recommended before, but have another recommendation to add, please link to the original, so that the reader has both recommendations.
• Please use the comment trees for genres. There is a meta thread for comments about future threads.
• If you think there should be a thread for a particular genre of media, please post it to the Other Media thread for now, and add a poll to the Meta thread asking if it should be a thread every month.

This is the public group instrumental rationality diary for Christmas week. It's a place to record and chat about it if you have done, or are actively doing, things like:

Consider the following statement: two heads are better than one.

It seems obvious to me that several rationalists working together can, effectively, bring more precious brainpower to bear on a problem, than one rationalist working alone (otherwise, what would be the point of having a Less Wrong forum community? You might as well just leave it as a curated community blog and excise the discussion forums.). Further, due to various efforts (HPMOR especially) it appears that LW is inevitably growing. This makes it not only desirable to find ways to effectively get groups of rationalists to think together, but also increasingly necessary.

It is also desirable that methods of getting groups to think should be feasibly doable over the Internet. (I am aware that real-life meetups and stuff exist, but please be reminded that some people in the world do have to live in shitty little third-world countries and might not at all find it economically feasible to go to first-world countries with atrociously high costs-of-living)

So first, let us start with the current "best methods" of getting groups of Traditional Rationalists to coordinate and think, while avoiding groupthink effects that diminish our aggregate rationality. Hopefully, we can then use it as the basis of part of the art of rationalist group thinking. So I'll discuss:

• Disputation Arenas - procedures with centrifugal and centripetal phases
  1. Delphi Method - members secretly answer questions, non-member summarizer anonymizes answers, members read anonymized summary, repeat
  2. Prediction Market - members place stock bets on market, market settles on price, members react to price signal, repeat
  3. Nominal Group Technique - members write down ideas privately, non-member facilitator guides members in sharing ideas, non-member facilitator guides members in paring down and cleaning up ideas, members vote
• Conclusion - strengths and weaknesses of the various disputation arenas shown here

Disputation Arenas

One of my favorite SF authors, David Brin, talks a bit about what he calls "disputation arenas". I won't discuss his ideas here, since his concept of "disputation arena" is actually a relatively "new", raw, and relatively untested procedure - what I intend to discuss for now are things that have at least been studied more rigorously than just a bunch of blog posts (or personal website pages, whatever).

However, I do want to co-opt the term "Disputation Arena" for any process that tries to achieve the following:

• Avoid groupthink - actively search for information without settling too early on an option considered desirable by certain influential members
• Achieve consensus - designate some choice as the best, given current information known by the group members

We want our group rationality process to avoid groupthink (possibly at some expense of efficiency) because actual, real-world rationalists are not perfect Bayesian reasoners - two words: Robert Aumann. Because rationalists are not perfect, we do not expect a clear consensus to form after the end of the process (i.e. Aumann's does not necessarily apply), so the process we use must force some consensus to become visible.

One thing that David Brin discusses is the general division of the procedures into two "phases":

• Centrifugal phase - members of the group generate ideas separately.
• Centripetal phase - ideas are judged by the group together.

This seems to me to be a good way of labeling parts of any group-coordination process that attempts to avoid groupthink and achieve consensus.

In my personal research, I've found three things that attempt to achieve those two goals (avoid groupthink, achieve consensus) and which might (perhaps with a stretch) be considered as approximately having two phases (centrifugal and centripetal).

Delphi Method

The Delphi Method was originally developed by RAND Corporation (Project RAND at that time, and no relation to Ayn Rand) in order to get better predictions on future military hardware. It is currently used to get better utilization of current human wetware. (^.^)v

Delphi Method: How To Do It!

Pen and paper version:

1. A panel of experts is chosen, and a questionnaire is prepared.
2. Experts answer the questionnaire, giving the answers and also justifications and reasons for those answers.
3. Summarizer provides anonymous summaries of the expert's answers and justifications.
4. Experts read the summary, and may revise their answers/justifications. The process is repeated (with the same experts and questionnaire) for a set number of rounds, or until everyone gets bored, or the military bunker everyone is in gets nuked.

Internet version (Wikipedia:Real-time Delphi):

1. Username/passwords are chosen and emailed, and a questionnaire is prepared. The questionnaire in the online version is somewhat restricted, however. Here are some ideas:
   • Use a "poll" question. Experts select one of the choices given.
   • Use "multiple-choice" questions. Experts then select from a range of (e.g.) 1 for (strongly disagree) to 10 (strongly agree) for each possible choice.
   • Use "multiple-choice" questions, and also give different aspects such as "feasibility", "desirability", "good side-effects", etc. Experts answer 1 to 10 for each combination of choice and aspect.
2. Experts answer the online questionnaire. Aside from the numerical or selection (quantitative) answer, experts should also supply a short sentence or two justifying each answer (qualitative).
3. After the expert submits his or her answers, he or she is shown the current averages (for scoring-type questionnaires) or current poll results - this is the quantitative group answer. Expert is also shown (or provided links to) randomly-sorted (and randomly-chosen, if groups are very large and the number of answers may overwhelm a typical human) qualitative answers for each poll item / choice / choice+aspect - the qualitative group answers - for each score or aspect.
   • IMPORTANT: individual qualitative answers should not show the username of the expert who gave them!
   • In effect, the average (or poll results) plus the randomized sample of qualitative answers are a simple, anonymous, machine-generated summary.
4. Experts may change their own quantitative and/or qualitative answers at any time, and see the current quantitative group answers and qualitative group answers at any time after they have submitted their own answers.
5. The questionnaire is kept open until some specified time, or somebody hacks the server to put LOLcats instead.

Delphi Method: Analysis

Delphi methods avoid groupthink largely by anonymity: this avoids the bandwagon effect, the halo effect, and the mind-killer. Anonymity and constant feedback also encourage people to revise their positions in light of new information from their peers (by reducing consistency pressure): in non-anonymous face-to-face meetings, people tend to stick to their previously stated opinions, and to conform to the meeting leader(s) or their own bosses in the meeting. A lot of those effects is reduced by anonymity. Pen-and-paper form makes anonymity much easier, since the summary gets the tone and language patterns of the summarizer; some amount of anonymity is lost in the online version (since language patterns might theoretically be analyzed) but hopefully the small sample size (just a short sentence or two) can make language pattern analysis difficult. Note that randomizing the order of the comments in the online version is important, as this reduces the effects of anchoring; sorting by time or karma may increase groupthink due to anchoring on earlier comments, but if each expert sees different "first comments", then this bias gets randomized (hopefully into irrelevancy).

Delphi methods achieve consensus by the summary (which often serves as the "final output" when the process is finished). Arguably, the pen-and-paper version is better at achieving consensus due to the "turn-based" arrival of the summary, which makes the expert pay more attention to the summary, compared to the real-time online system.

The Delphi method's centrifugal phase is the expert's private answering of the questionnaire: each expert makes this decision, and provides the justification, without other's knowledge or help.

The Delphi method's centripetal phase is the act of summarizing, and having the experts read the summary.

Delphi Method: Other Thoughts

I think that forum polls, in general, can be easily adapted into online real-time Delphis by adding the following:

• Members will be required to give a short sentence or two (probably limited to say 200 chars or so) justifying their poll choice.
• Members should be allowed to change their poll choice and their justification at any time until the poll closes or the forum is hacked by LOLcat vandals.
• Members should be able to click on a poll choice on the poll results page to get a random anonymous sampling of the justifications that the other members have made in choosing that poll choice.

The procedure says "experts" but I think that in something more democratic than the military you're supposed to read that as "anyone who bothers to participate".

Prediction Market

Prediction markets are speculation markets built around bets on what things will happen in the future. They are also the core of Robin Hanson's Futarchy, and which you can see somewhere in the background of LW's favorite tentacle alien porn novella (O.o);;.

Prediction Market: How To Do It!

Pen and paper version:

1. Convince a trusted monetary institution to sell you "X is gonna happen" stock and "X is not gonna happen" stock for $1 a pair (i.e. $1 for a pair of contracts, one that says "If X happens, Monetary Institution pays you $1" and another that says "If X doesn't happen, Monetary Institution pays you $1", so the pair costs $1 total since X can't both happen and not happen). You may need to pay some sort of additional fee or something if the monetary institution is for-profit.
2. Sell the stock (i.e. the contract) you think is false for as high as you can get on the open market. Buy more stock of what you think is true from others who are willing to sell to you.
3. Just buy and sell stocks depending on what you think is the best prediction, based on what you hear on the news, gossip you hear from neighbors, and predictions from the tea leaves. Keep doing this until X definitely happens or X definitely does not happen (in which case you cash in your stock contracts, if you bet correctly on what happened), or a market crash results because someone discovers that the weak nuclear force actually allows you to make nuclear bombs out of orange juice, and Einstein and the gang were lying about it and distracting you by talking about dice-playing gods.

(what I described above is the simplest and most basic form I found; refer to the Wikipedia article for better elaborations)

Internet version:

1. Hack Intrade so that the topic you want to bet on is in their list of markets. Or better yet just hack Intrade and put one million dollars into your account.

Prediction Market: Analysis

Prediction markets avoid groupthink by utilizing the invisible hand. Someone selling you a stock might be an idiot who can't read the tea leaves properly. Or the seller might have knowledge you do not possess, so maybe buying the stock wasn't such a good idea after all? Remember: if you can't find who the sucker on the table is, that sucker is you!! You can't simply assume that what your neighbor says is true and you should sell as many stock of X as possible: maybe he or she is trying to take advantage of you to get your hard-earned cash. Groupthink in such a mistrusting environment gets hard to sustain. Prediction markets work better with very large groups of people, so that you get practical anonymity (although not perfect, in theory you or anyone else can keep track of who's selling to who; online versions are also likely to hide user identities). Anonymity in the prediction market also has the advantages previously described under Delphi Method above.

Prediction markets achieve consensus by utilizing the invisible hand. The price point of any sale serves as an approximate judgment of the epistemic probability of X occurring (or not occurring, depending on the contract that got sold). This gives a real-time signal on what the group of traders as a whole think the probability of X occurring is.

The prediction market's centrifugal phase is each individual trader's thought process as he or she considers whether to buy or sell stock, and at what price.

The prediction market's centripetal phase is any actual sale at any actual price point.

Prediction Market: Other Thoughts

Prediction markets are well-represented online; Intrade is just one of the more famous online prediction markets. Prediction markets appear to be the most popular and widely-known of the disputation arenas I've researched. These all tend to suggest that prediction markets are one of the better disputation arenas - but then remember that the Internet itself has no protection against groupthink.

Nominal Group Technique

Nominal group technique is a group decision-making process, appropriate for groups of many different sizes. This procedure's pen-and-paper form is faster than the pen-and-paper forms of the other disputation arenas discussed here.

Nominal Group Technique: How To Do It!

Pen and paper version:

1. The facilitator informs the group of the issue to be discussed.
2. Silent idea generation: group members are provided pen and paper, and are told to write down all ideas they can think of about the issue on the paper. They are given a fixed amount of time to do this (usually 10 to 15 minutes).
   • IMPORTANT: members are not allowed to discuss, show, or otherwise share their ideas with others during this stage. There's a reason it's called "silent".
3. Idea sharing: the facilitator asks group members, one at a time, to discuss their own ideas, until all members have shared their ideas. The facilitator writes the shared ideas into a whiteboard, or a similar location visible to all members.
   • IMPORTANT: debate is not allowed at this stage; only one member at a time can speak at this stage.
   • Group members may also add additional ideas and notes to their written-down ideas while waiting for their turn.
4. Group discussion: members may ask for clarification or further details about particular ideas shared by other group members. The group may agree to split ideas, or merge ideas, or group ideas into categories.
   • IMPORTANT: the facilitator must ensure that (1) all members participate, and (2) no single idea gets too much attention (i.e. all ideas must be discussed).
   • The discussion should be as neutral as possible, avoiding judgment or criticism.
   • The final result of this stage should be a set of options to be chosen among.
5. Ranking: members secretly rank the options from 1 (best) to N (worst), where N is the number of options generated in the previous stage. The facilitator then tallies the (anonymous) rankings (by adding the rankings for each option) and declares the option with the lowest total as the group consensus.

Unlike the previous procedures, which have been extrapolated into Internet versions, there is currently no Internet version of nominal group technique.

Nominal Group Technique: Analysis

Nominal group techniques avoid groupthink by the two "secret" steps: silent idea generation, and the secret ranking. Having members write down their ideas in the silent idea generation step helps them precommit to those ideas in the idea sharing step, even though more influential group members may present opposite or incompatible ideas. Although the group discussion step disallows explicit criticism of ideas, those criticisms are implicitly expressed during the secret ranking step (i.e. if you have a criticism of an idea, then you should rank it lower).

Nominal group techniques achieve consensus by the idea sharing, group discussion, and ranking steps. In particular, tallying of option rankings is the final consensus-achieving step.

The nominal group technique's centrifugal phase is largely the silent idea generation step, and is the most explicit centrifugal phase among the disputation arenas discussed here.

The nominal group technique's centripetal phase is largely the rest of the procedure.

Nominal Group Technique: Other Thoughts

A modified form of nominal group technique eats up a quarter of my recently-finished novel, Judge on a Boat, which I talked about on LessWrong here, and whose latest raw text source you can read online. Yes, this entire article is just a self-serving advertisement to garner interest in my novel o(^.^o)(o^.^)o.

Compared to the other procedures here, nominal group technique is more complicated and much more dependent on the centralized facilitator; the extreme dependency on the facilitator makes it difficult to create an automated online version. On the other hand, a small group of say 5 to 10 people can finish the nominal group technique in 1 to 2 hours; the other procedures tend to work better when done over several days, and are largely impossible (in pen-and-paper form) to do in a similar time frame. Even the real-time online versions of the other procedures are difficult to do within 2 hours. Prediction markets in particular tend to fail badly if too thin (i.e. not enough participants); for small groups with tight schedules, nominal group technique tends to be the best.

Conclusion

For small groups that need to make a decision within one or two hours, use nominal group technique. It's relatively unwieldy compared to the other disputation arenas, and is less ideal (it has fewer protections against groupthink, in particular), but is fast compared to the others. Also, one might consider parallelizing nominal group technique: split a large group into smaller, randomly-selected sub-groups, have each perform the procedure independently, and then have them send a representative that performs the idea sharing, group discussion, and ranking steps with other representatives (i.e. each sub-group's nominal group technique serves as the silent idea generation of the super-group of representatives). This tends to bias the super-group towards the agendas of the chosen representatives, but if speed is absolutely necessary for a large group, this may be the best you can do.

As mentioned above, prediction markets tend to fail badly if there are too few participants in the speculation market; use it only for extremely large groups that are impossible to coordinate otherwise. In addition, using prediction markets for policy decisions is effectively futarchy; you may want to see the (defunct?) futarchy_discuss Yahoo! group's message archives. In particular the earlier messages in the archive tend to discuss the general principles of prediction markets. Prediction markets are the most famous of the disputation arenas here, but remember that the Internet is not a decent disputation arena.

The Delphi methods seem to be a "dark horse" of sorts. I don't see much discussion online about Delphi methods; I'm not sure whether it's because it's been tried and rejected, or if it simply isn't well known enough to actually be tried by most people. I tend to suspect the latter, since if the universe were in the former case I would at least see some "Delphi Methods suck!!" blog posts.

Both prediction markets and Delphi methods are continuously repeated methods. At any time, the procedure may be stopped or repeated in order to make decisions. However, unlike the nominal group techniques, both are targeted more towards generating advice for decision-makers, rather than making actual decisions themselves.

It may be possible to organize a large, hierarchical group (say a company) with a prediction market for the rank-and-file, some key experts (who should be aware of the prediction market's results) running a Delphi method, and the key decision-making individuals (who read the Delphi method's report) at the top who form a decision using nominal group technique. For more democratic processes, a "poll-style" real-time online Delphi method by itself may work.

This is the public group instrumental rationality diary for the week of December 10th. It's a place to record and chat about it if you have done, or are actively doing, things like:

This is the sixth bimonthly 'What are you working On?' thread. Previous threads are here. So here's the question:

What are you working on? 

Here are some guidelines:

• Focus on projects that you have recently made progress on, not projects that you're thinking about doing but haven't started.
• Why this project and not others? Mention reasons why you're doing the project and/or why others should contribute to your project (if applicable).
• Talk about your goals for the project.
• Any kind of project is fair game: personal improvement, research project, art project, whatever.
• Link to your work if it's linkable.

This is the monthly thread for posting media of various types that you've found that you enjoy. I find that exposure to LW ideas makes me less likely to enjoy some entertainment media that is otherwise quite popular, and finding media recommended by LWers is a good way to mitigate this. Post what you're reading, listening to, watching, and your opinion of it. Post recommendations to blogs. Post whatever media you feel like discussing! To see previous recommendations, check out the older threads.

Rules:

• Please avoid downvoting recommendations just because you don't personally like the recommended material; remember that liking is a two-place word. If you can point out a specific flaw in a person's recommendation, consider posting a comment to that effect.
• If you want to post something that (you know) has been recommended before, but have another recommendation to add, please link to the original, so that the reader has both recommendations.
• Please use the comment trees for genres. There is a meta thread for comments about future threads.
• If you think there should be a thread for a particular genre of media, please post it to the Other Media thread for now, and add a poll to the Meta thread asking if it should be a thread every month.