I log in this morning on a whim, and notice I have -15 karma.  I dig around for a bit and find this:

http://lesswrong.com/lw/nsm/open_thread_jul_25_jul_31_2016/ddjm

To be clear, that's a block of four comments, each at -10, for no apparent obvious good reason other than eugine nier has a vendetta against Elo.  I've apparently just been hit as splash damage, since I had the gall to try posting on an Elo comment thread.

I dig a little more, and I find this:

http://lesswrong.com/user/Elo/overview/

That's Elo's page, and I see a pile of discussion-grade posts that are all bulk downvoted below visibility, again for no apparent obvious good reason.

I find myself incredibly disincentivized to post or comment as a result of this.  My feeble amount of karma has taken literally years to build up, and to see sizable fractions of it wiped out any time I step on a eugine nier landmine is bullshit.  Sure, it's silly to value karma, but I value it anyway and if a year of incidental effort can be burned in two days because one guy wants to be an asshole to me, then I'm done here.

This has been going on for months.  Years even.

I understand the staff of LW are pressed for time.  I understand nobody understands how the code works.  I understand that maintaining the site is hard. However, reality is that which does not go away when we close our eyes, and reality does not care:  no matter how difficult the problems are, the fact remains that this sort of thing is abusive and it is actively driving people off the site.

If you value LW, fix this.  Use the force harder, site owners.

On the other hand, if you want LW to turn into another Kuro5hin, then keep doing what you're doing.

Prediction:  50% odds this post will be downvoted below visibility within two days due to eugine, and will basically disappear without trace.

Prediction:  if this isn't dealt with soon, 50% odds I'll stop visiting LW completely other than as an article archive by year end, because there's no goddamned point in trying to use the discussion system.

Originally published here: http://bearlamp.com.au/the-problem-tm-analyse-a-conversation/
Part 2: http://lesswrong.com/r/discussion/lw/nt8/the_problem_tm_part_2/
Part 2: http://bearlamp.com.au/the-problem-analyse-a-conversation-part-2/

I had a chat with a person who admitted to having many problems themselves.  I offered my services as a problem solving amateur, willing to try to get to the bottom of this.  Presented is the conversation (With details changed for privacy).

I had my first shot at analysing the person's problems and drilling down to the bottom.  I am interested in what other people have to say is the problem.  Here we study the meta-strategy of how to solve the problem, which I find much more interesting than the object level analysis of the problem and how to solve it.

I don't think I got to the bottom of the problem, and I don't think I conducted myself in a top-notch capacity but needless to say I wonder if you have any comments about what IS TheProblem(tm), how did you come to that conclusion and what can be done about it (for the benefit of this person and anyone with a similar problem).

Zebra
Hey

ELiot
Where would you like to start?
Do you want to share about your history?

Zebra
I was previously very depressed, and then recovered for a few years. While I'm glad I was able to have those couple years, I don't think they were worth suffering through the depression, and I didn't at the time, when I didn't think it would return.

Zebra
(Though it hasn't returned as bad as it was.)

ELiot
So you are currently feeling depressed

Zebra
Yes. Possibly as a symptom of bipolar disorder (I've recently started having manic episodes), or possibly not--I've never been diagnosed with that, and until recently had never had issues with mania.

ELiot
How much are you sleeping? One Indication of bipolar swings is total sleep

Zebra
The last couple days I've slept okay, but when I had more manic symptoms sleep was very intermittent. A few weeks ago I punched a housemate in the face ten times, breaking her nose; at that point, I'd not slept in two days.

ELiot
Sounds like a bad event.

Zebra
I guess immediately I feel quite isolated, very stressed, and don't know how to proceed forward.

ELiot
Is there a specific stress?

Zebra
I guess; loneliness, numerous tensions with my girlfriend, some financial issues (to a large extent a symptom of the recent mania), extreme dissatisfaction with myself and especially my own appearance, frustrations with daily life, and a general dissatisfaction with the world.

ELiot
Manic up should correlate with little sleep, manic down with extra sleep. Manic up should also come with a variation on _feeling invincible_

Which of the things in that list do you think can't change?

Zebra
I suppose they're all changeable if you apply enough effort, but that seems like a lot of work, and frankly I've never seen much in the world that seems worth it.

As I said, I've gotten better, to some extent, previously.

Even after I had already gotten better and I no longer wanted to suicide, I wished I had previously, because even though life then was fine, it just wasn't worth what had gone before.

I don't feel invincible really.

ELiot
When in manic up states?

Zebra
When in manic states I still don't feel invincible.

ELiot
If you could remove the problems listed do you think you would want to live?

Zebra
All of them? Yes, if I could do some magically, or at a reasonable cost.

ELiot
I would say that is a good thing. But it depends on your goals.

I can offer ideas about working with those problems to make them better, but not if you don't want that.

Zebra
Well those would be good.

ELiot
Would you like to pick a specific one from the list to talk about?

I can pick one if you like

Zebra
Uhm, you can pick. I'm not sure which one would be most imminently solvable.

ELiot
I am going to write the list out

1. Loneliness
2. Girlfriend tension
3. Financial issues
4. Self + appearance
5. Daily life
6. Dissatisfied with the world

Zebra
Yep, that's most of it.

ELiot
What burdens do you currently have on your life? I. E. Supporting a child, have to show up at work each day. Etc.

Thinking about number 5 - Regular commitments

Zebra
Not a whole lot really. I've no job or school (family money, though not a large amount). My girlfriend is financially dependent on me at this point, though she's supposed to be starting a job this month.

To be honest even going downstairs to buy food, or really even to talk to a delivery person on the phone, feels like a huge burden.

ELiot
So in terms of pressure on your daily life?

Zebra
I often find myself not eating until nighttime, or sometimes not eating at all, due to wanting to avoid those stressors.

ELiot
Is that bad?

Zebra
Well, yeah. It feels very negative and causes me stress and I really don't feel life has much to offer in return for even minor inconveniences.

ELiot
is there a reason that not eating is a bad thing to do for you?

Zebra
I don't see life as particularly positive, really, and just want it to be over with so I don't have to bother with this crap every day. On the other hand, actually going about killing yourself is fucking scary.

So I guess I'm trying to find some way out of that conclusion so I won't have to face the immediately distasteful action of actually offing myself, even though it's probably preferable to suffering through a lifetime of even minor annoyances.

ELiot
Is this correct: you feel stressed about not wanting to leave to go buy food. Then you feel stressed about not buying food as well.

Zebra
Yes.

And I guess I'm kind of lonely, and even minor inconveniences, when they have no positive aspects in between, eventually get you really, really down.

I feel like what I do most days is just wait, be sad and lonely, be slightly annoyed, and wait and cry and be lonely more.

When I go out sometimes it's ok, and sometimes I realise the people around me are crap and I am too and I get even sadder.

ELiot
Here is how I see this very limited problem. Without looking at other things just yet.

When making the first choice, either stay home and not buy food or leave and buy food you choose the less stress option. To stay home. I see that as a win. You successfully made the right choice to avoid the immediate stress. Then later you decide that going out is more important/useful/(Less stress) than staying home and not having food. Seems like you also win by carrying out the choice to leave and get food have less stress.

You appear to be stressing yourself out over two reasonable choices. I would suggest that you have done well to make both the choice of staying home and later the choice to leave for food.

Zebra
The stress of not going is physiological rather than psychological, so I don't think looking at that differently can really fix it.

And really I don't want to be staying at home, as that's also very stressful.

I'm just not sure what else to do...

ELiot
In terms of where to go? Or in terms of how to spend your time?

Zebra
Both

There's nothing much I can identify that I really want to do.

ELiot
I can suggest options down those paths

Zebra
ok.

ELiot
I don't know where you are gegraphically, but if we consider specifically where to go and what to do near where you are;

I would look at; google, "things to do in *city*" as well as looking at meetups in city. As well as looking for parks, museums, monuments, walks, local history, pretty geography, public spaces I. E. Libraries, evening classes, sports to play

Zebra
I'm in Hong Kong.

I go to meetups sometimes.

ELiot
Generally the idea of exploration of the place

Also temples, religious places, hikes

Zebra
As for meetups, sometimes you meet interesting people, but often it's stressful dealing with idiots. And most people are idiots.

ELiot
You are mostly allowed to do what you like with your time. In terms of going places and later going home to sleep etc.

A large fraction of people are idiots

Zebra
And the more interesting people are often difficult to connect with more than superficially.

ELiot
"Allowed to" is a funny idea. No one needs to give you permission to do what you like.

Going to add 7. Social strategy

Zebra
True. I just don't feel like I _like_ much.

Also I'm frequently very exhausted, and it's often hard to work up the energy to do those things.

ELiot
Do you think you have tried to find many things you like or do you think the bottle neck lies before that? In trying to find them?

If you do nothing (because you are tired) is that a problem?

Zebra
Yeah, doing nothing all the time sucks. If I stay home I feel like I'm in jail...

but if I go out I feel like I've been sent as a labourer to Australia.

ELiot
At some point the desire to stay home because you are tired should weigh up against the desire to go out and feel like you are not in jail. That is a fine time to leave, feeling bad about both staying at home and leaving the house sounds like a recipe for displeasure either way... Does that make sense?

Zebra
Well it is, obviously, which is why I feel like I'm in a no-win situation, and want to die.

(or at least part of it)

I mean, occasionally there are meetups and stuff which I go to, and those are ok, but really I have so much free time and since my mental health issues started I've alienated almost everyone I knew.

And that just increases the stress and makes it difficult to make new friends.

ELiot
I would be going down the path of tracing that feeling of bad to its source because it's not really about staying or going it's about that bad pressure that appears self imposed.

Do you feel like you _should be doing_ things?

I.e. Going out

Zebra
Well, I really dislike being alone, but I don't much like most people.

I think that's what it boils down to.

And yes, I get that that might not be a healthy state to be in, but again, that I'm not in a healthy state has already been established.

ELiot
Do you know what part or kind of social interaction you like? When you say "dislike alone" what is "not alone"

Zebra
Well, I like talking with friends and drinking and doing stuff, but often it's difficult to make new friends.

ELiot
Conversation with new people is "not alone"

And you sometimes feel alone when you hang around old friends

Zebra
Yes, that's true.

ELiot
Can you financially afford to go drinking and doing stuff?

Zebra
I guess new people I meet are often very disappointing, and more than that, even when they aren't, I myself have a lot of recently developed mental issues it takes a lot of effort to control.

I kind of zone out, frequently. People find that scary.

ELiot
What kind of new people would you like to meet?

Zebra
Uhm, I dunno. It's hard to specify really.

ELiot
Is your zoning out actually absence or is it more like daydreaming?

Zebra
Absence

Or sometimes I just sort of feel sad.

But usually no internal thoughts associated.

I can sort of afford to go drinking and stuff.

ELiot
Do you recall things that happen while you are absent?

Zebra
Mostly not. I can sort of remember it happening but super vague.

ELiot
Do you feel like you are an automa - following a path you were on, and then you zone back in?

Zebra
It's not like in the middle of a sentence, but people notice that I look dead and then sometimes I don't respond until they call me a couple times, though sometimes I can respond immediately.

More like my energy's just gone, I guess.

Sometimes I'll lose track of the conversation, even when I myself am speaking.

That's not as common recently, though.

ELiot
I was going to say I suspect an absent seizure. It came up in the lw open thread this week. Let me get you a link

Zebra
My mother claims I told her I was hospitalised for a head injury around the time my mental health problems started worsening.

I can't remember the incident, though, and she has not much in the way of specific details.

ELiot
http://lesswrong.com/r/discussion/lw/niv/open_thread_apr_18_apr_24_2016/d8ow

If you have something like that I am sure it makes everything worse

Zebra
I had depression before that, but as I said, it had mostly gotten better. On the other hand, there were a lot of issues in my life around the same time which may have led to the recurrence of symptoms as well.

ELiot
Okay, what kind of person would you like to meet?

Zebra
Hmm, previously I wanted to see a neurologist because my symptoms were much worse, but they've lessened now.

ELiot
There is medication to reduce seizures to nearly nothing

Which might help

Zebra
Well, an intelligent person, but those are rare; or someone who's fun, but finding one who's willing to put up with my lethargy and depression is hard; or someone who's nice and not a complete idiot.

ELiot
It also might help to keep a diary of what you do each day to try to keep track of how often they happen

Zebra
Maybe. I'm not at all certain I'm having seizures, though.

I have pretty bad memory, too.

ELiot
Where might you find intelligent people?

A brain scan would tell you if you are or are not having seizures

Zebra
I have no idea. I guess some of the intellectually-focused meetup groups have some, but not all that many.

Yeah, I've been meaning to go to a neurologist, but I frequently fail to get around to stuff.

ELiot
I would suggest university campus as a viable place

To find smart ones

Zebra
Maybe, but I'm not in university and probably don't have the effort to enter.

Also, somewhat smart, but not very smart, people really annoy me.

Universities have a lot of those.

ELiot
Campuses here are just places you can walk into, not sure what it's like there

If you want to get out of the house and see something, universities are a nice place to visit

Zebra
Hmm, I guess I could try.

Many offer classes to the public very cheaply.

ELiot
You can probably also work out how to sneak into a lecture anyway - they usually don't check the roll

Any topic of study fancy your interest? To sneak into a lecture about

Zebra
Hmm, not sure. Linguistics or history might be fun.

CS would probably just be a recap of basic material.

ELiot
You can usually find course details online and work out where the lectures are and just kinda walk in and sit down - For a bit of fun

Zebra
How does that translate to meeting people though?

(If it's not obvious, I've never been to uni.)

ELiot
Chat to people if you want to. Lectures have breaks, uni tries to encourage social groups too usually, barbecues and stuff

If you make yourself look approachable and friendly people will talk to you. It's how I avoid approaching others. I wear funny hats and strangers talk to me

Zebra
Really? Haha, what sort of hats?

ELiot
Pirate hat, top hats, Stetson,

I have about 50 hats

Different ones all the time

That's on the topic of appearance tho

Zebra
I don't look very approachable now :( Since I became ill again my personal health and hygeine have done very poorly.

ELiot
Do you like being hygienic? Indifferent?

Zebra
Well, I like being hygenic, but getting to that state is difficult.

Also, I've probably gained 40kg since then, so even if I was it's probably all for naught.

ELiot
What contributes to that state? For me it's having a shower and brushing my teeth.

Maybe deodorant too. And clean clothes

Zebra
Well, those things.

Now I've got so fat it's hard to buy clothes :-/

ELiot
I would say you can work on that

Both the fat and the clothes

If you want to

Exercise would help you, leaving the house to go for a walk would help you, you don't need anywhere to go other than around a block or something

Do you track your weight?

Zebra
Yes, but it's very difficult.

ELiot
Is it still climbing or staying where it is?

Zebra
I've tried some stuff. Fasting, methamphetamine, etc., but I was never able to really reduce it.

ELiot
Difficult to track? To walk? To exercise? To buy clothes?

Weight loss is difficult, Yes

Zebra
I just don't have the energy to excercise. Even when I was taking methamphetamine I didn't have the energy for it.

ELiot
Would you consider paying for a service that helped you lose weight?

Zebra
Right now I think it's not climbing, but I didn't buy a new scale when my last one broke.

Yes, if I thought it had reasonable chance of being effective.

ELiot
An option would be to look at what is available

Near to where you live

Zebra
I don't think there are any drugs that work as well for weighy loss as meth, though, and that was not effective enough.

I don't know what else such a service could provide really.

I mean, I _know_ you need to excercise and eat healthy, but I just haven't been able to do it.

ELiot
Commitment, a gym, a trainer setting a program

There are greater experts in the field of weight loss than I

Zebra
Honestly, I've tried so much, I do not realistically think I would continue to follow through with that.

ELiot
Okay

Zebra
Other than the very deepest depths of depression (which I still haven't fallen to this time around), I've never experienced anything as unpleasant as excercise.

ELiot
I can offer ideas about weight loss and exercise but maybe another time.

What types of exercise?

Zebra
I suppose there are some illnesses which might do better than meth, but trying to induce those makes me feel very squeamish.

Pretty much anything.

It'a just so hot and icky and tiring.

ELiot
Oh! Yes, a problem with your geography

Other geographies are not as hot and sticky. Even that has solutions. My exercise is walking, running, swimming, unicycle, circus skills, rock climbing, ice skating, laser tag, and trampoline, I also did pole dance for a while. Also I would kayak and hike more if I had more opportunities...

Zebra
True. I had some fun doing outdoor type stuff in the Southwestern US.

Moving has its own host of problems, though.

ELiot
Other sports I have done include table tennis, actual tennis, archery...

Zebra
The primary one being that I don't know anyone anywhere else.

ELiot
I don't imagine moving will solve all your problems

Zebra
Except my mother in Florida, USA.

ELiot
Yes I was going to say, it would certainly make loneliness harder

Especially when you don't currently know how to make new friends very well

You can exercise at night, find an indoor pool to swim in maybe.

Zebra
Yes. I did the moving thing once, and it was probably good at the time, but I had fairly exceptional circumstances then which I don't have now.

There's a pretty nice pool in my condo, but I get tired. Swimming is exhausting.

And very self-conscious doing excercise around others.

ELiot
Yes.

Zebra
That's probably equally as serious an issue as the exhaustion.

ELiot
Night time for self conscious

Take a friend or girlfriend?

Moral support?

Zebra
Makes me more self conscious :(

ELiot
You need support network not criticism

Do you trust these people?

Do you think you could track how far you swim and try to increase laps or so?

The idea being to measure progress and feel like you are going somewhere

Zebra
I don't think I've ever actually trusted anyone, even as a child.

ELiot
That is a different problem

Zebra
Yeah. I have a lot of problems. :(

ELiot
That is okay for a place to be

Better to know than not know.

To be more specific you have a lot of problems *at the same time*

Which is making it hard to work out what the biggest one is, and where to start

Zebra
Yes. That kind of sucks.

ELiot
It appears that at the bottom of each problem there is a slightly different problem, also with a solution but one that too needs implementation

I am confident that this can all be fixed, I am also confident that you can enjoy the journey of doing so.

Perhaps you might benefit from writing down the problems until you have a clearer picture for yourself

Zebra
Yes, that's how it feels to me too. There's a large web of problems which are fixable with enough effort, but inter-related so hard to fix one at a time, and I don't really feel like I have the effort to do it all at once, nor that it would be worth it.

ELiot
As you talk to me you are clarifying the problems, I imagine that can help to identify them to help solve them.

If I were in your position I would pick the first one that I encountered and try to make a little progress on it before the next one hit me, and trying to make progress on the next one too.

I firmly believe in the concept of _making it easier for future you_.

Zebra
Sometimes I feel that all of them could be fixed in one go with a more radical change, but that's a rather scary thing to do.

ELiot
It is. Especially without experience in radical changes.

Zebra
Well, I moved alone to a country I'd never been when I was 18. So I guess it's not entirely unfamiliar.

ELiot
A change of scenery would probably change the problems. Not necessarily fix them

Zebra
Yeah.

ELiot
It could be the motivation you need to help make it easier for you to make progress

But it could also leave you exhausted and worse off

Zebra
I've looked some into moving to the Republic of Georgia.

But I do have friends here, even if there are only a few remaining and I feel increasingly alienated from them.

ELiot
You might benefit from a time management system

Zebra
Why? I don't have enough to even fill one activity per day...

ELiot
A list of problems, followed by a list of ways to solve the problems followed by a plan of how to spend your next 168 hours towards solving those problems while also not making new ones...

Each week

Energy limited? That's also a problem. With a solution. You do need sleep and rest

Zebra
I usually sleep a lot, but it doesn't feel restful.

I try to go on holidays, but again, usually come back more stressed than before.

ELiot
That too has a solution. Are you getting enough light when you wake up?

Zebra
I typically keep the blinds closed.

I don't like light :(

ELiot
Bright light when you wake up will help you feel awake more. Only when you wake up.

Zebra
But then what do I do?

ELiot
Pick something you want to change and go for it.

The strategy of: "Try X"

It might help to have a notebook paper trail of ideas you have tried

Or thoughts you have had about each problem and how to solve it

Zebra
Most of the things I want to change are hard to change, computer related (and this not really helpful to not feeling terrible and alone), or things I don't have a good plan for how to change.

ELiot
You have as much to do as you want to. You can make a plan.

Zebra
I guess if I did something computer related it could make money, maybe, but I'd still feel awful. In the longer term it may be helpful, but I've tried this before and it is difficult to not get depressed and quit to go cry all day after 30 minutes.

ELiot
Even the meta strategy of "trying to plan" can help

You should write down that idea

It also seems like you apply pressure and expectations above what you have evidence of yourself being capable of.

Zebra
The idea of trying to plan, or?

ELiot
Yes and the "computer thing" idea

You should update on the estimation of your capabilities to be more of a reflection on what you have recently observed you are able to do

Zebra
I have a lot of computer thing ideas. I know pretty specifically how to do them, but sitting it down and typing it out is harder.

Well, I can walk to 7/11 if I put a lot of effort into it.

That's about it...

ELiot
Which is a way of saying to start small. Reset from the beginning (which is not easy)

Zebra
That doesn't seem helpful.

ELiot
That's what your baseline is

Anything upwards is now impressive.

Including this conversation

You have come a long way already

Zebra
Doesn't feel like it. Starting from walking to 7/11 sounds kind of exhausting and not very enjoyable.

ELiot
But that's where you are right now

I would say try habit RPG, but I never found it useful to me

Zebra
Yeah, but I mean, back on to the original point, all this seems much harder than trying to work through my hangups about suicide.

ELiot
Possibly, Yes.

All these problems are solveable, But perhaps

What about the possibility of solving the most immediate discomfort at any time?

What is the most immediate discomfort right now?

Zebra
I feel stressed about life being shit generally, I guess.

Which is generally how I feel when I have nothing specific to be stressed about.

ELiot
What can you do about that right now? How can you make life less generally shit for the you that lives 10 minutes in the future?

Or maybe make yourself feel less stressed about it

Zebra
I guess I could try to do some meditation. That used to work, but hasn't been so much recently.

For the stress part, at least.

I have no idea how to make life immediately less crap in the next ten minutes.

ELiot
I would suggest your environment or hygiene

As they are usually quick low hanging ideas.

Zebra
What sorts of things are you thinking of specifically with regard to those that could be accomplished within 10 minutes?

ELiot
A shower, a little cleaning up your space, changing clothes

Taking out the trash

Zebra
I guess that's doable.

Zebra
Welp, done that. I suppose I do feel mildly better...

ELiot
That particular strategy is called success spirals. Successfully doing a thing to help the you of the future slightly. One bit at a time.

I should add - if you want to talk about death we should have that talk too

Death, dying, pain

Zebra
Well, death seems somewhat scary in the immediate sense.

Especially death by falling, which is the most low-effort solution for someone living in a high rise building.

ELiot
You need at least 10 floors to be confident of a sudden death

Zebra
More high-effort strategies, like pentobarbital or such, seem more palatable, but not quite as immediately actionable.

I'm on the tenth floor, and I think there's 20 something.

ELiot
And it depends whether you want to impact others I. E. Seeing you fall and or the body

Zebra
I don't really care, though obviously I wouldn't want anyone seeing me "on the ledge" if I couldn't go through with it.

OTOH, nighttime is a thing.

ELiot
Yes

Zebra
But it's ... scary.

Have you ever been with someone during suicide?

ELiot
No, I recently discouraged someone from taking action in person. They were making rash decisions at the time

Zebra
Ah

ELiot
At least 3 people in my life have come close. They are not all better yet, still in limbo of up and down

I would still encourage you to do the things that you want. Have you read the guilt series by nate soares?

Zebra
No. What is it about?

ELiot
Why we have guilt and defeating it where it's not appropriate

Zebra
I don't think I experience a significant amount of guilt.

ELiot
Guilt in the sense of, "should be going out" but "should stay in". The conflicting desire of parts of you to do different things. And sorting it out
Zebra
Ah, hmm

I will read the Guilt series then...

ELiot
I also went through a period of time when I felt purposeless, I described it as, "everything is meaningless" and it's bothering me. As distinctly different to, "everything is meaningless and it doesn't matter"

Zebra
Everything being meaningless doesn't bother me. I don't think meaningfulness is a possible thing in any universe. Everything being shitty and empty bothers me, but that's rather different.

http://mindingourway.com/dont-steer-with-guilt/ <- this?

ELiot
Yes, but that's the middle of the series, better to start in the beginning

http://mindingourway.com/guilt/

That's the table of contents

Zebra
Hmm, it's a pretty good read.

------------------------------------ Later in time...............
Zebra
Finished it. It was long!

I liked it more than Eliezer's writing. It may even have been potentially useful irl, maybe.

ELiot
do you think you can apply things to your life?

Zebra
Maybe. I've been trying to do the breaking things up part.

I made a small amount of money with stupid computer things... I guess that's a modicum of progress, maybe.

I liked the last part about changing goals. That might be useful.

Visualising bad things seems like a potentially helpful strategy as well.

Zebra
A lot of the techniques do seem effective. Hopefully it will make a positive difference.

---------------------A long time later--------------
ELiot
hey

I promised to get back to you.

how are things?

Zebra
Hi

ELiot
it's been a while..

Zebra
I'm doing somewhat better. Got on meds for bipolar disorder, which has helped a lot.

Yeah. Been trying to actually do things now, so I feel less stagnant.

ELiot
Oh! great!

Zebra
Hopefully life will end up in a better place than before.

The Problem TM

What is actually the problem?  I have a theory, but I also wanted to publish this without declaring my answer.  I will share my ideas in a few weeks but I want to know what you think and how you came to that answer.

Meta: this conversation happened over 6 months ago, this took 2 hours to collate, tidy and publish.

Originally published here: http://bearlamp.com.au/the-problem-tm-analyse-a-conversation/

(Part of a sequence on discussion technology and NNTP. As last time, I should probably emphasize that I am a crank on this subject and do not actually expect anything I recommend to be implemented. Add whatever salt you feel is necessary)¹

If there is one thing I hope readers get out of this sequence, it is this: The Web Browser is Not Your Client.

It looks like you have three or four viable clients -- IE, Firefox, Chrome, et al. You don't. You have one. It has a subforum listing with two items at the top of the display; some widgets on the right hand side for user details, RSS feed, meetups; the top-level post display; and below that, replies nested in the usual way.

Changing your browser has the exact same effect on your Less Wrong experience as changing your operating system, i.e. next to none.

For comparison, consider the Less Wrong IRC, where you can tune your experience with a wide range of different software. If you don't like your UX, there are other clients that give a different UX to the same content and community.

That is how the mechanism of discussion used to work, and does not now. Today, your user experience (UX) in a given community is dictated mostly by the admins of that community, and software development is often neither their forte nor something they have time for. I'll often find myself snarkily responding to feature requests with "you know, someone wrote something that does that 20 years ago, but no one uses it."

Semantic Collapse

What defines a client? More specifically, what defines a discussion client, a Less Wrong client?

The toolchain by which you read LW probably looks something like this; anyone who's read the source please correct me if I'm off:

Browser -> HTTP server -> LW UI application -> Reddit API -> Backend database.

The database stores all the information about users, posts, etc. The API presents subsets of that information in a way that's convenient for a web application to consume (probably JSON objects, though I haven't checked). The UI layer generates a web page layout and content using that information, which is then presented -- in the form of (mostly) HTML -- by the HTTP server layer to your browser. Your browser figures out what color pixels go where.

All of this is a gross oversimplification, obviously.

In some sense, the browser is self-evidently a client: It talks to an http server, receives hypertext, renders it, etc. It's a UI for an HTTP server.

But consider the following problem: Find and display all comments by me that are children of this post, and only those comments, using only browser UI elements, i.e. not the LW-specific page widgets. You cannot -- and I'd be pretty surprised if you could make a browser extension that could do it without resorting to the API, skipping the previous elements in the chain above. For that matter, if you can do it with the existing page widgets, I'd love to know how.

That isn't because the browser is poorly designed; it's because the browser lacks the semantic information to figure out what elements of the page constitute a comment, a post, an author. That information was lost in translation somewhere along the way.

Your browser isn't actually interacting with the discussion. Its role is more akin to an operating system than a client. It doesn't define a UX. It provides a shell, a set of system primitives, and a widget collection that can be used to build a UX. Similarly, HTTP is not the successor to NNTP; the successor is the plethora of APIs, for which HTTP is merely a substrate.

The Discussion Client is the point where semantic metadata is translated into display metadata; where you go from 'I have post A from user B with content C' to 'I have a text string H positioned above visual container P containing text string S.' Or, more concretely, when you go from this:

Author: somebody
Subject: I am right, you are mistaken, he is mindkilled.
Date: timestamp
Content: lorem ipsum nonsensical statement involving plankton....

to this:

<h1>I am right, you are mistaken, he is mindkilled.</h1>
<div><span align=left>somebody</span><span align=right>timestamp</span></div>
<div><p>lorem ipsum nonsensical statement involving plankton....</p></div>

That happens at the web application layer. That's the part that generates the subforum headings, the interface widgets, the display format of the comment tree. That's the part that defines your Less Wrong experience, as a reader, commenter, or writer.

That is your client, not your web browser. If it doesn't suit your needs, if it's missing features you'd like to have, well, you probably take for granted that you're stuck with it.

But it doesn't have to be that way.

Mechanism and Policy

One of the difficulties forming an argument about clients is that the proportion of people who have ever had a choice of clients available for any given service keeps shrinking. I have this mental image of the Average Internet User as having no real concept for this.

Then I think about email. Most people have probably used at least two different clients for email, even if it's just Gmail and their phone's built-in mail app. Or perhaps Outlook, if they're using a company system. And they (I think?) mostly take for granted that if they don't like Outlook they can use something else, or if they don't like their phone's mail app they can install a different one. They assume, correctly, that the content and function of their mail account is not tied to the client application they use to work with it.

(They may make the same assumption about web-based services, on the reasoning that if they don't like IE they can switch to Firefox, or if they don't like Firefox they can switch to Chrome. They are incorrect, because The Web Browser is Not Their Client)

Email does a good job of separating mechanism from policy. Its format is defined in RFC 2822 and its transmission protocol is defined in RFC 5321. Neither defines any conventions for user interfaces. There are good reasons for that from a software-design standpoint, but more relevant to our discussion is that interface conventions change more rapidly than the objects they interface with. Forum features change with the times; but the concepts of a Post, an Author, or a Reply are forever.

The benefit of this separation: If someone sends you mail from Outlook, you don't need to use Outlook to read it. You can use something else -- something that may look and behave entirely differently, in a manner more to your liking.

The comparison: If there is a discussion on Less Wrong, you do need to use the Less Wrong UI to read it. The same goes for, say, Facebook.

I object to this.

Standards as Schelling Points

One could argue that the lack of choice is for lack of interest. Less Wrong, and Reddit on which it is based, has an API. One could write a native client. Reddit does have them.

Let's take a tangent and talk about Reddit. Seems like they might have done something right. They have (I think?) the largest contiguous discussion community on the net today. And they have a published API for talking to it. It's even in use.

The problem with this method is that Reddit's API applies only to Reddit. I say problem, singular, but it's really problem, plural, because it hits users and developers in different ways.

On the user end, it means you can't have a unified user interface across different web forums; other forum servers have entirely different APIs, or none at all.² It also makes life difficult when you want to move from one forum to another.

On the developer end, something very ugly happens when a content provider defines its own provision mechanism. Yes, you can write a competing client. But your client exists only at the provider's sufferance, subject to their decision not to make incompatible API changes or just pull the plug on you and your users outright. That isn't paranoia; in at least one case, it actually happened. Using an agreed-upon standard limits this sort of misbehavior, although it can still happen in other ways.

NNTP is a standard for discussion, like SMTP is for email. It is defined in RFC 3977 and its data format is defined in RFC 5536. The point of a standard is to ensure lasting interoperability; because it is a standard, it serves as a deliberately-constructed Schelling point, a place where unrelated developers can converge without further coordination.

Expertise is a Bottleneck

If you're trying to build a high-quality community, you want a closed system. Well kept gardens die by pacifism, and it's impossible to fully moderate an open system. But if you're building a communication infrastructure, you want an open system.

In the early Usenet days, this was exactly what existed; NNTP was standardized and open, but Usenet was a de-facto closed community, accessible mostly to academics. Then AOL hooked its customers into the system. The closed community became open, and the Eternal September began.³ I suspect, but can't prove, that this was a partial cause of the flight of discussion from Usenet to closed web forums.

I don't think that was the appropriate response. I think the appropriate response was private NNTP networks or even single servers, not connected to Usenet at large.

Modern web forums throw the open-infrastructure baby out with the open-community bathwater. The result, in our specific case, is that if we want something not provided by the default Less Wrong interface, it must be implemented by Less Wrongers.

I don't think UI implementation is our comparative advantage. In fact I know it isn't, or the Less Wrong UI wouldn't suck so hard. We're pretty big by web-forum standards, but we still contain only a tiny fraction of the Internet's technical expertise.

The situation is even worse among the diaspora; for example, at SSC, if Scott's readers want something new out of the interface, it must be implemented either by Scott himself or his agents. That doesn't scale.

One of the major benefits of a standardized, open infrastructure is that your developer base is no longer limited to a single community. Any software written by any member of any community backed by the same communication standard is yours for the using. Additionally, the developers are competing for the attention of readers, not admins; you can expect the reader-facing feature set to improve accordingly. If readers want different UI functionality, the community admins don't need to be involved at all.

A Real Web Client

When I wrote the intro to this sequence, the most common thing people insisted on was this: Any system that actually gets used must allow links from the web, and those links must reach a web page.

I completely, if grudgingly, agree. No matter how insightful a post is, if people can't link to it, it will not spread. No matter how interesting a post is, if Google doesn't index it, it doesn't exist.

One way to achieve a common interface to an otherwise-nonstandard forum is to write a gateway program, something that answers NNTP requests and does magic to translate them to whatever the forum understands. This can work and is better than nothing, but I don't like it -- I'll explain why in another post.

Assuming I can suppress my gag reflex for the next few moments, allow me to propose: a web client.

(No, I don't mean write a new browser. The Browser Is Not Your Client.⁴)

Real NNTP clients use the OS's widget set to build their UI and talk to the discussion board using NNTP. There is no fundamental reason the same cannot be done using the browser's widget set. Google did it. Before them, Deja News did it. Both of them suck, but they suck on the UI level. They are still proof that the concept can work.

I imagine an NNTP-backed site where casual visitors never need to know that's what they're dealing with. They see something very similar to a web forum or a blog, but whatever software today talks to a database on the back end, instead talks to NNTP, which is the canonical source of posts and post metadata. For example, it gets the results of a link to http://lesswrong.com/posts/message_id.html by sending ARTICLE message_id to its upstream NNTP server (which may be hosted on the same system), just as a native client would.

To the drive-by reader, nothing has changed. Except, maybe, one thing. When a regular reader, someone who's been around long enough to care about such things, says "Hey, I want feature X," and our hypothetical web client doesn't have it, I can now answer:

Someone wrote something that does that twenty years ago.

Here is how to get it.

A few months ago, Vaniver wrote a really long post speculating about potential futures for Less Wrong, with a focus on the idea that the spread of the Less Wrong diaspora has left the site weak and fragmented. I wasn't here for our high water mark, so I don't really have an informed opinion on what has socially changed since then. But a number of complaints are technical, and as an IT person, I thought I had some useful things to say.

I argued at the time that many of the technical challenges of the diaspora were solved problems, and that the solution was NNTP -- an ancient, yet still extant, discussion protocol. I am something of a crank on the subject and didn't expect much of a reception. I was pleasantly surprised by the 18 karma it generated, and tried to write up a full post arguing the point.

I failed. I was trying to write a manifesto, didn't really know how to do it right, and kept running into a vast inferential distance I couldn't seem to cross. I'm a product of a prior age of the Internet, from before the http prefix assumed its imperial crown; I kept wanting to say things that I knew would make no sense to anyone who came of age this millennium. I got bogged down in irrelevant technical minutia about how to implement features X, Y, and Z. Eventually I decided I was attacking the wrong problem; I was thinking about 'how do I promote NNTP', when really I should have been going after 'what would an ideal discussion platform look like and how does NNTP get us there, if it does?'

So I'm going to go after that first, and work on the inferential distance problem, and then I'm going to talk about NNTP, and see where that goes and what could be done better. I still believe it's the closest thing to a good, available technological schelling point, but it's going to take a lot of words to get there from here, and I might change my mind under persuasive argument. We'll see.

Fortunately, this is Less Wrong, and sequences are a thing here. This is the first post in an intended sequence on mechanisms of discussion. I know it's a bit off the beaten track of Less Wrong subject matter. I posit that it's both relevant to our difficulties and probably more useful and/or interesting than most of what comes through these days. I just took the 2016 survey and it has a couple of sections on the effects of the diaspora, so I'm guessing it's on topic for meta purposes if not for site-subject purposes.

Less Than Ideal Discussion

To solve a problem you must first define it. Looking at the LessWrong 2.0 post, I see the following technical problems, at a minimum; I'll edit this with suggestions from comments.

1. Aggregation of posts. Our best authors have formed their own fiefdoms and their work is not terribly visible here. We currently have limited support for this via the sidebar, but that's it.
2. Aggregation of comments. You can see diaspora authors in the sidebar, but you can't comment from here.
3. Aggregation of community. This sounds like a social problem but it isn't. You can start a new blog, but unless you plan on also going out of your way to market it then your chances of starting a discussion boil down to "hope it catches the attention of Yvain or someone else similarly prominent in the community." Non-prominent individuals can theoretically post here; yet this is the place we are decrying as moribund.
4. Incomplete and poor curation. We currently do this via Promoted, badly, and via the diaspora sidebar, also badly.
5. Pitiful interface feature set. This is not so much a Less Wrong-specific problem as a 2010s-internet problem; people who inhabit SSC have probably seen me respond to feature complaints with "they had something that did that in the 90s, but nobody uses it." (my own bugbear is searching for comments by author-plus-content).
6. Changes are hamstrung by the existing architecture, which gets you volunteer reactions like this one.

I see these meta-technical problems:

1. Expertise is scarce. Few people are in a position to technically improve the site, and those that are, have other demands on their time.
2. The Trivial Inconvenience Problem limits the scope of proposed changes to those that are not inconvenient to commenters or authors.
3. Getting cooperation from diaspora authors is a coordination problem. Are we better than average at handling those? I don't know.

Slightly Less Horrible Discussion

"Solving" community maintenance is a hard problem, but to the extent that pieces of it can be solved technologically, the solution might include these ultra-high-level elements:

1. Centralized from the user perspective. A reader should be able to interact with the entire community in one place, and it should be recognizable as a community.
2. Decentralized from the author perspective. Diaspora authors seem to like having their own fiefdoms, and the social problem of "all the best posters went elsewhere" can't be solved without their cooperation. Therefore any technical solution must allow for it.
3. Proper division of labor. Scott Alexander probably should not have to concern himself with user feature requests; that's not his comparative advantage and I'd rather he spend his time inventing moral cosmologies. I suspect he would prefer the same. The same goes for Eliezer Yudkowski or any of our still-writing-elsewhere folks.
4. Really good moderation tools.
5. Easy entrance. New users should be able to join the discussion without a lot of hassle. Old authors that want to return should be able to do so and, preferably, bring their existing content with them.
6. Easy exit. Authors who don't like the way the community is heading should be able to jump ship -- and, crucially, bring their content with them to their new ship. Conveniently. This is essentially what has happened, except old content is hostage here.
7. Separate policy and mechanism within the site architecture. Let this one pass for now if you don't know what it means; it's the first big inferential hurdle I need to cross and I'll be starting soon enough.

As with the previous, I'll update this from the comments if necessary.

Getting There From Here

As I said at the start, I feel on firmer ground talking about technical issues than social ones. But I have to acknowledge one strong social opinion: I believe the greatest factor in Less Wrong's decline is the departure of our best authors for personal blogs. Any plan for revitalization has to provide an improved substitute for a personal blog, because that's where everyone seems to end up going. You need something that looks and behaves like a blog to the author or casual readers, but integrates seamlessly into a community discussion gateway.

I argue that this can be achieved. I argue that the technical challenges are solvable and the inherent coordination problem is also solvable, provided the people involved still have an interest in solving it.

And I argue that it can be done -- and done better than what we have now -- using technology that has existed since the '90s.

I don't argue that this actually will be achieved in anything like the way I think it ought to be. As mentioned up top, I am a crank, and I have no access whatsoever to anybody with any community pull. My odds of pushing through this agenda are basically nil. But we're all about crazy thought experiments, right?

This topic is something I've wanted to write about for a long time. Since it's not typical Less Wrong fare, I'll take the karma on this post as a referendum on whether the community would like to see it here.

Assuming there's interest, the sequence will look something like this (subject to reorganization as I go along, since I'm pulling this from some lengthy but horribly disorganized notes; in particular I might swap subsequences 2 and 3):

1. Technical Architecture
   1. Your Web Browser Is Not Your Client
   2. Specialized Protocols: or, NNTP and its Bastard Children
   3. Moderation, Personal Gardens, and Public Parks
   4. Content, Presentation, and the Division of Labor
   5. The Proper Placement of User Features
   6. Hard Things that are Suddenly Easy: or, what does client control gain us?
   7. Your Web Browser Is Still Not Your Client (but you don't need to know that)
2. Meta-Technical Conflicts (or, obstacles to adoption)
   1. Never Bet Against Convenience
   2. Conflicting Commenter, Author, and Admin Preferences
   3. Lipstick on the Configuration Pig
   4. Incremental Implementation and the Coordination Problem.
   5. Lowering Barriers to Entry and Exit
3. Technical and Social Interoperability
   1. Benefits and Drawbacks of Standards
   2. Input Formats and Quoting Conventions
   3. Faking Functionality
   4. Why Reddit Makes Me Cry
   5. What NNTP Can't Do
4. Implementation of Nonstandard Features
   1. Some desirable feature #1
   2. Some desirable feature #2
   3. ...etc. This subsequence is only necessary if someone actually wants to try and do what I'm arguing for, which I think unlikely.

(Meta-meta: This post was written in Markdown, converted to HTML for posting using Pandoc, and took around four hours to write. I can often be found lurking on #lesswrong or #slatestarcodex on workday afternoons if anyone wants to discuss it, but I don't promise to answer quickly because, well, workday)

[Edited to add: At +10/92% karma I figure continuing is probably worth it. After reading comments I'm going to try to slim it down a lot from the outline above, though. I still want to hit all those points but they probably don't all need a full post's space. Note that I'm not Scott or Eliezer, I write like I bleed, so what I do post will likely be spaced out]

For some time now, "Promoted" has been reserved for articles written by MIRI staff, mostly about MIRI activities.  Which, I suppose, would be reasonable, if this were MIRI's blog.  But it isn't.  MIRI has its own blog.  It seems to me inconvenient both to readers of LessWrong, and to readers of MIRI's blog, to split MIRI's material up between the two.

People visiting lesswrong land on "Promoted", see a bunch of MIRI blogs, mostly written by people who don't read LessWrong themselves much anymore, and get a mistaken impression of what people talk about on LessWrong.  Also, LessWrong looks like a dying site, since often months pass between new posts.

I suggest the default landing page be "New", not "Promoted".

The Main / Discussion division has served us well in the past, but traffic to Main has dropped to the point that it's no longer useful. In particular, the low visibility meant that authors would often have to choose between more karma and being seen by more readers. So posting to Main has been disabled, and the successor of Main is on its way. In the meantime, please move everything to discussion.

But I have a great post I've worked really hard on, and I want it to be in Main.

Save it as a draft, let me know, and I'll move it to Main for you.

There's an excellent post that should go on the RSS feed so lots of people read it.

We can still promote posts (and will).  

Okay, so Main is dead. What's next?

What's the point of having multiple subreddits? If you have a single website with several different communities, then having different subreddits allows for different rules, different moderators, and different focuses. But LW has many interests that don't seem to cleanly separate into multiple subreddits. Many distinctions overlap, and tags seem better. So there are two main paths forward:

1) Tagging, 'new to you', and customization based on tags.

1. A tagging system with user input (see Stack Overflow for inspiration) means we can have reliable filtering.
2. We already track when a user last visited a page in order to highlight new comments; we can also use that to remove it from the new posts view if it's already been read. (What about if there's a comment explosion? We can either return it if there are enough new comments, or trust that you'll see the comment explosion through the Recent Comments view.)
3. With everything going to one view, giving users control over that view is critical for keeping it clear of trash. What looks to me like a promising way to do that is subsidies and taxes based on tags; if you want to see parenting posts and don't want to see meetup posts, say, you might give the parenting tag +3 karma and the meetup tag -10 karma, so very popular meetup posts can still appear and even unpopular or new parenting posts will be visible to you.

Thanks to the reaction to this article and some conversations, I'm convinced that it's worth trying to renovate and restore LW. Eliezer, Nate, and Matt Fallshaw are all on board and have empowered me as an editor to see what we can do about reshaping LW to meet what the community currently needs. This involves a combination of technical changes and social changes, which we'll try to make transparently and non-intrusively.

Chesterton's meta-fence: "in our current system (democratic market economies with large governments) the common practice of taking down Chesterton fences is a process which seems well established and has a decent track record, and should not be unduly interfered with (unless you fully understand it)".

The following is an incomplete list of suggestions for generic considerations that you might like to make when you go out to buy a thing. I have tried to put the list in order; being generic - certain things will be more or less important in different orders.

0. Do I need the thing? Am I just wanting it on a whim (you are allowed to do that, but at least try to not do that for many expensive things that don’t have resale value)?  If a month had gone by, would I still be wanting it?

1. What is the thing? What functionality considerations do you need to make?  What does it need to do?  If you already had it - what would it be doing? Will it fit in your life?
2. What is your expected use? Daily? Once-off? Occasional? (no more than 5 times in your predicted future)
3. What do I want it to do?  Does this thing do what I want it to do?  (It can be very easy to buy a thing that doesn't quite suit the need because we get distracted between wanting a thing and getting a thing)

Consider your options that avoid buying it:

1. Can I borrow one from a friend? Or a family member? (some things cannot be borrowed like a wristwatch - no sense borrowing one if it’s an item you wear every day - or other reasons to not borrow a thing)
2. Can I get one second hand?  
   Some items are perfectly fine second hand, i.e. books, whereas others are potentially less fine (i.e. cars) where more can go wrong with a second hand one.  The point of this inclusion was to encourage you to consider it when you previously would not have. for whichever reason.  Books second hand can also be occasionally out of date or damaged; and cars second hand can be excellent purchases.
3. Is anyone I know also interested in having the thing, and would they be willing to split the cost with me in order to have it on a kind of timeshare, and can we agree on a deprecation schedule such that one of us buys out the other's share in the future, if one of us is moving away or something?
4. Renting/hiring the thing - as a one off. (works for most power tools, as well as storage space, a boat, all kinds of things...).  It is also an option to rent short term while you decide if the thing fits your life.  i.e. rent a jetski.  If you find you don’t use it enough to warrant a full purchase you only needed to invest a little bit of the final cost; and might be saving money to do so.
5. Timeshare - businesses exist around sharing cars; boats; holiday houses and various other products.  You might be able to take advantage of these businesses.
6. Can I apply for credit for the thing? Can I get the item on consignment?
7. Could I earn money using the thing and return some costs? (Am I likely to do that based on my past experiences doing so with other purchases?)

Knowledge about the thing:

1. Do any of your trusted friends have opinions or knowledge in the area?
2. What do online reviews say?
3. Is there a community of enthusiasts (i.e. Online) who have resources or who you can outsource the search to? 
4. Are there experts in the field - (i.e. buying houses), is it worth engaging an expert for this transaction?
5. How much time do I want to spend on considering and shopping vs how much use will I get out of the thing? (for items under $20, try not to spend more than half an hour on it; or it’s almost better to randomly buy one available {depending on your local minimum wage})

Purchase considerations:

• What is my budget?
• Can I afford it? (see options that avoid buying it)
• Price range of the things on the market?
• Is it cheaper somewhere else in the world and posted to me?
• Can I ask for a discount?
• Can I combine postage with other items?
• How long will the thing last?
• How long do I need it for?
• How quickly do I need it?
• Do I want to be able to sell it when I'm done?
• What's the return policy of the various places selling it vs price vs shipping?
• What is the shipping time?
• Does it come with a warranty?  Does the warranty last long enough for my liking?
• Are any laws, customs or taxes applicable to it; or its purchase, or resale?
• What's the difference between the best price and the worst price, and when do you wind up spending more time (in terms of the value of your time) than that difference trying to get the best price?
• Does it have resale value?  Do some have better resale than others? (are you actually a person who re-sells things? - have you resold a thing before?)
• Can I get it in a physical store?  Can I get it online?

General specifics:

• Is the one I want a quality item?
• Is the item disposable or not? Have you considered the merits of a similar but disposable one? (or a similar non-disposable one)
• Does it have the correct colour? Or other embellishments?
• Do I have storage space for it within my existing storage area?
• Is it big? Can I get a smaller one?
• Is it heavy? Can I get a more lightweight version?
• What are its power options? AC, DC, battery, built-in battery, built-in solar, etc.
• What is it made out of? Does it come in metal, plastic, wood, etc. what would I prefer?
• Does it suit my existing possessions?
• Will this one cost more to repair than the other similar ones?

Miscellaneous considerations:

• Do I have a backup for if this one fails?
• What are the consequences of a lower-quality thing breaking while I'm using it?
• Can I pay for it from someone who is going to donate proceeds to charitable causes?
• For any purchase under $50 (adjust for your life circumstances) it’s not so much worth running through this checklist; but for more expensive purchases - it’s likely that if you want to appreciate that you put in effort and came to a good conclusion, a process like this will be helpful.
• Is the process of buying it give me pleasure? Or I will suffer in a long line for it?
• What kind of signalling is the thing going to give me?  Do I want that?
• Does the thing have an upkeep or maintenance cost?

Nearly all of the points listed here could be expanded to its own post.  These points apply to everyone to different extents.  “Considering borrowing” is advice that is priceless to one person, and useless to another person.  similarly; “budget” might be significant to one person because they don’t spend often but then spend whatever they like when they need to; but useless to another person because they live and breathe budget.

I plan to cover this in another post about making advice applicable to you.

meta: 3 hours write up.  3-5 reviewers, slack channel inspiring the post, and giving me a place to flesh out the thoughts.

This post is certainly open to improvements.  Please add your comments below.

See also: My Table of contents for other posts in this collection.

See also other repositories on lesswrong:

• Low Hanging fruit for buying a better life - What can I purchase with $100 that will be the best thing I can buy to make my life better?
• Financial Effectiveness Repository - Recommendations and ideas about financial effectiveness?
• Boring Advice Repository - Also has quite a lot advice on how and what to buy.

My future posts

I have been living in the lesswrong rationality space for at least two years now. Recently more active than previously. This has been deliberate. I plan to make more serious active posts in the future. In saying so I wanted to announce the posts I intend on making when moving forwards from today.  This should do a few things:

1. keep me on track
2. keep me accountable to me more than anyone else
3. keep me accountable to others
4. allow others to pick which they would like to be created sooner
5. allow other people to volunteer to create/collaborate on these topics
6. allow anyone to suggest more topics
7. meta: this post should help to demonstrate one person's method of developing rationality content and the time it takes to do that.

Unpublished but written:

A very long list of sleep maintenance suggestions – I wrote up all the ideas I knew of; there are about 150 or so; worth reviewing just to see if you can improve your sleep because the difference in quality of life with good sleep is a massive change. (20mins to write an intro Actually 2 hours)

A list of techniques to help you remember names. - remembering names is a low-hanging social value fruit that can improve many of your early social interactions with people. I wrote up a list of techniques to help. (2.5hrs to get feedback on and post)

Posts so far:

The null result: a magnetic ring wearing experiment. - a fun one; about how wearing magnetic rings was cool; but not imparting of superpowers. (done)

Updated here (old: list of useful apps)- my current list of apps that I use also some very good suggestions in the comments. (done)

How to learn X – How to attack a problem of learning a new area that you don't know a lot about (for a generic thing) (done)

A list of common human goals – when plotting out goals that matter to you; so you can look over some common ones and see you fulfilling them interests you. (done)

Lesswrong real time chat - A Slack channel for hanging out with other rationalists.  Also where I talk about my latest posts before I put them up.

Future posts

Goals of your lesswrong group – Do you have a local group; why? What do you want out of it (do people know)? setting goals, doing something particularly, having fun anyway, changing your mind. (4hrs)

Goals interrogation + Goal levels – Goal interrogation is about asking <is this thing I want to do actually a goal of mine> and <is this the best way to achieve that>, goal levels are something out of Sydney Lesswrong that help you have mutual long term goals and supporting short term goal. (2hrs)

How to human – A zero to human guide. A guide for basic functionality of a humanoid system. (4hrs)

General buying things considerations – New to the whole adult thing?  wondering what to ask yourself when considering purchases?  Here is a list of general considerations. (3hrs)

List of strategies for getting shit done – working around the limitations of your circumstances and understanding what can get done with the resources you have at hand. (4hrs)

List of superpowers and kryptonites – when asking the question "what are my superpowers?" and "what are my kryptonites?". Knowledge is power; working with your powers and working out how to avoid your kryptonites is a method to improve yourself. (6hrs over a week)

List of effective behaviours – small life-improving habits that add together to make awesomeness from nothing. And how to pick them up. (8hrs over 2 weeks)

Memory and notepads – writing notes as evidence, the value of notes (they are priceless) and what you should do. (1hr + 1hr over a week)

Suicide prevention checklist – feeling off? You should have already outsourced the hard work for "things I should check on about myself" to your past self. Make it easier for future you. Especially in the times that you might be vulnerable. (4hrs)

Make it easier for future you. Especially in the times that you might be vulnerable. - as its own post in curtailing bad habits. (5hrs)

A p=np approach to learning – Sometimes you have to learn things the long way; but sometimes there is a short cut. Where you could say, "I wish someone had just taken me on the easy path early on". It's not a perfect idea; but start looking for the shortcuts where you might be saying "I wish someone had told me". Of course my line now is, "but I probably wouldn't have listened anyway" which is something that can be worked on as well. (2hrs)

Rationalists guide to dating – attraction. Relationships. Doing things with a known preference. Don't like stupid people? Don't try to date them. Think first; an exercise in thinking hard about things before trying trial-and-error on the world. (half written, needs improving 2hrs)

Training inherent powers (weights, temperatures, smells, estimation powers) – practice makes perfect right? Imagine if you knew the temperature always, the weight of things by lifting them, the composition of foods by tasting them, the distance between things without measuring. How can we train these, how can we improve. (2hrs)

Strike to the heart of the question. The strongest one; not the one you want to defeat – Steelman not Strawman. Don't ask "how do I win at the question"; ask, "am I giving the best answer to the best question I can give", (2hrs)

Posts not planned at the original writing of the post:

Sensory perception differences and how it shapes personal experience - Is a sound as loud to you as everyone else?  What about a picture?  Are colours as clear and vivid to you as they are to other people?  This post is a consideration in whether the individual difference in experiences can shape our experience and choices in how we live our lives.  Includes some short exercises in sensory perceptions.

Posts added to the list:

Exploration-Exploitation and a method of applying the secretary problem to real life.  I devised a rough equation for application of the secretary problem to real life dating and the exploration-exploitation dilemma.

How to approach a new problem - similar to the "How to solve X" post.  But considerations for working backwards from a wicked problem: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wicked_problem, as well as trying "The least bad solution I know of", Murphy-jitsu, and known solutions to similar problems.  0. I notice I am approaching a problem.

being the kind of person that advice works for - The same words of advice can work for someone and not someone else.  Consider why that is; and how you can better understand the advice that you are given, and how you might become the kind of person that advice works for.

New Year's Resolutions: Things worth considering - At the time of writing; New-year is fast approaching.  As a natural shelling point here is a list of considerations on what you might like to get around to doing next year.  (Not a post on how; only about making those considerations)

2015: a year in review - All of humanities science and technology milestones that I could find; gathered into one exciting list; originally created for the solstice, but now everyone can share it and celebrate in humanities successes!

Inbox zero - You should do inbox zero; this is a brief guide on how to do the laziest form of inbox zero I know of.

Procrastination checklist - a process to go through to try to break out of procrastination

Black box thinking - A way to describe known unknowns, or excuse yourself from knowing things

Preference over preference - If an entity has preference, and an entity prefers another entity to have a particular preference, I call this preference over preference.  And it's worth talking about.

Cultivate the desire to X - You maybe want to do a thing; maybe don't know if you do.  There is a helpful middle ground.  You want to do the thing; but don't seem to have actually managed to make yourself do it?  Try this.

Purposeful Anti-Rush - Instrumental process of slowing down.

Lesswrong potential changes - Everything that everyone things should change about lesswrong.  All compiled together, it took a long time to create.

The lesswrong 2016 survey - the demographic survey of lesswrong users and visitors. 

A very quick values exercise - A value is like a direction - you go north, or south. You may hit goal mountains and hang a right past that tree but you still want to be going north. Specifically you may want to lose weight on the way to being healthy, but being healthy is what you value.

Adversity to success - Why are there so many adversity to success stories?

Edit: links adding as I write them.

This guide is in response to a request in the open thread.  I would like to improve it; If you have some improvement to contribute I would be delighted to hear it!  I hope it helps.  It was meant to be a written down form of; "wait-stop-think" before approaching a new area.

This list is mean't to be suggestive and not limiting.

I realise there are many object-level opportunities for better strategies but I didn't want to cover them in this meta-strategy.

It would be very easy to strawman this list. i.e. 1 could be a waste of time that people of half a brain don't need to cover.  However if your steelman each point it will hopefully make entire sense.  (I would love this document to be stronger, if there is an obvious strawman I probably missed it; feel free to make a suggestion for it to obviously read in the steel-form of the point.

Happy readings!

0. make sure you have a growth mindset. Nearly anything can be learnt or improved on. Aside from a few physical limits – i.e. being the best marathon runner is very difficult; but being a better marathon runner than you were yesterday is possible. (unknown time duration, changing one's mind)

1. Make sure your chosen X is aligned with your actual goals (are you doing it because you want to?). When you want to learn a thing; is X that thing? (Example: if you want to exercise; maybe skiing isn't the best way to do it. Or maybe it is because you live in a snow country) (5-10 minutes)
2. Check that you want to learn X and that will be progress towards a goal (or is a terminal goal – i.e. learning to draw faces can be your terminal, or can help you to paint a person's portrait). (5 minutes, assuming you know your goals)
3. Make a list of what you think that X is. Break it down. Followed by what you know about X, and if possible what you think you are missing about X. (5-30 minutes, no more than an hour)
4. Do some research to confirm that your rough definition of X is actually correct. Confirm that what you know already is true, if not – replace that existing knowledge with true things about X. Do not jump into everything yet. (1-2 hours, no more than 5 hours)
5. Figure out what experts in the area know (by topic area name), try to find what strategies experts in the area use to go about improving themselves. (expert people are usually a pretty good way to find things out) (1-2 hours, no more than about 5 hours)
6. Find out what common mistakes are when learning X, and see if you can avoid them. (learn by other people's mistakes where possible as it can save time) (1-2 hours, no more than 5 hours)
7. Check if someone is teaching about X. Chances are that someone is, and someone has listed what relevant things they teach about X. We live in the information age, its probably all out there. If it's not, reconsider if you are learning the right thing. (if no learning is out there it might be hard to master without trial and error the hard way) (10-20mins, no more than 2 hours)
8. Figure out the best resources on X. If this is taking too long; spend 10 minutes and then pick the best one so far. These can be books; people; wikipedia; Reddit or StackExchange; Metafilter; other website repositories; if X is actually safe – consider making a small investment and learn via trial and error. (i.e. frying an egg – the common mistakes probably won't kill you, you could invest in 50 eggs and try several methods to do it at little cost) (10mins, no more than 30mins)
9. Confirm that these are still the original X, and not X2, or X3. (if you find you were actually looking for X2 or X3, go back over the early steps for Xn again. (5mins)
10. Consider writing to 5 experts and asking them for advice in X or in finding out about X. (5*20mins)
11. Get access to the best resources possible. Estimate how much resource they will take to go over (time, money) and confirm you are okay with those investments. (postage of a book; a few weeks, 1-2 hours to order the thing maximum)
12. Delve in; make notes as you go. If things change along the way, re-evaluate. (unknown, depends on the size of the area you are looking for.  consider estimating word-speed, total content volume, amount of time it will take to cover the territory)
13. Write out the best things you needed to learn and publish them for others. (remembering you had foundations to go on – publish these as well) (10-20 hours, depending on the size of the field, possibly a summary of how to go about finding object-level information best)
14. try to find experiments you can conduct on yourself to confirm you are on the right track towards X. Or ways to measure yourself (measurement or testing is one of the most effective ways to learn) (1hour per experiment, 10-20 experiments)
15. Try to teach X to other people. You can be empowering their lives, and teaching is a great way to learn, also making friends in the area of X is very helpful to keep you on task and enjoying X. (a lifetime, or also try 5-10 hours first, then 50 hours, then see if you like teaching)

What's up with that?

In a discussion thread, I can karma vote on anyone. 

But if I select a person to see all their posts, for some people, karma is disabled while looking at them, and for others, it's not disabled. Same thing if I look at their posts under the list of all my posts.

Note: Three data points were removed from the sample due to my subjective opinion that they were fake. Any self-reported IQs of 0 were removed. Any self-reported income of 0 was removed. 

*89% of the LW population is between the age of 15 and 34.

**88% of the LW population has an IQ between 125 and 155, with an average IQ of 138. 

****Median numbers were adjusted down by a factor of 1.15 to account for the fact that the source data was calculating household median income rather than individual median income. 

[1] Internal Revenue Service, Charitable Giving by Households that Itemize Deductions (AGI and Itemized Contributions Summary by Zip, 2012), The Urban Institute, National Center for Charitable Statistics 

[2] U.S. Census Bureau, Current Population Survey, 2013 and 2014 Annual Social and Economic Supplements.

[3] Do you have to be smart to be rich? The impact of IQ on wealth, income and financial distress Intelligence, Vol. 35, No. 5. (September 2007), by Jay L. Zagorsky

Update 1: Updated chart 1&2 to account for the fact that the source data was calculating household median income rather than individual income.

Update 2: Reverted Chart 1 back to original because I realized that the purpose was to compare LWers to those in similar income brackets. So in that situation, whether it's a household or an individual is not as relevant. It does penalize households to an extent because they have less money available to donate to charity because they're splitting their money three ways. 

Update 3: Updated all charts to include data that is filtered for US only.

I know this reeks of witch-hunting, but... I have a hunch that u/Eugine_Nier is back under the guise of u/Azathoth123. Reasons:

•  Same political views, with a tendency to be outspoken about them
• Karma hovering in the 70s% for both accounts, occasionally going into the 60s%, significantly lower than the LW average
• The dates match up. Kaj Sotala announced on July 03, 2014 that Eugine was to be permanently banned. The first comment from Azathoth123 was on July 12, 2014.
• The one that got my attention was the posting pattern. Particularly, Eugine_Nier had a pervasive pattern of exceeding the quote limits per rationality thread. That's actually the first thing I had noticed about the guy back when he was first active, and a few times I thought about drawing attention to the way he flouted the rules, but never got around to it/cared enough about the matter. Now, I see Azathoth123 doing the same thing. The current Rationality Quotes thread has four quotes from him already and it hasn't even been a week since the thread was posted; all of them have something to do with his political views. As do basically all of his postings so far.
• Each one of these points, separately, has a small prior probability if the two of them are not the same person. Together, they have an even smaller probability. Especially the predilection for posting one too many rationality quotes; seriously, how common an occurrence is that one in particular?
• My experience so far with the internet has been that people like Eugine never really leave an online community they have pestered for so long. It doesn't matter if they're IP banned or something. They always come back, just under a different name, and they come back shortly.

I don't have an axe to grind against the guy, I've only spoken to him a couple of times and didn't notice any particularly large karma hits afterwards, I just really dislike it when someone skirts the rules like that. Disruptive users evading permanent bans never helped any community ever.

Obviously I'm posting this here because I think a moderator should look into the matter. Usually I would be posting a disclaimer of some sort, apologizing in advance to Azathoth123 for attacking his standing with slanderous accusations if this turned out not to be the case. Well, I won't. The more I look into the matter, the more confident I get that they're the same person. Azathoth, if you're reading this and you're not Eugine_Nier, then I strongly advise you go search for your twin brother, I think you'll get along very well. Seriously, I'm saying this in good faith. You have a suspiciously great deal of things in common.

If retributive downvoting is (still) a concern (if not, then disregard this paragraph): I'd like to request, if such a thing is possible, that a mod karma-blocks me until the issue is over, so as to not incur undeserved downvotes (it would also mean I'd get no upvotes). In turn, I promise not to abuse the system by spamming the boards with garbage without consequences, but then again given my history so far on LW I don't think that such an abuse should be expected from me. For the record, I could have made a throwaway account just to say this, and not risk being karmassassinated, but 1) a zero karma account has no credibility and 2) for signalling reasons I prefer to put my money where my mouth is.

P.S. I only made this announcement its own post because the latest open thread was about to "expire".

It's that time of year again. Actually, a little earlier than that time of year, but I'm pushing it ahead a little to match when Ozy and I expect to have more free time to process the results.

The first draft of the 2014 Less Wrong Census/Survey is complete (see 2013 results here) .

You can see the survey below if you promise not to try to take the survey because it's not done yet and this is just an example!

2014 Less Wrong Census/Survey Draft

I want two things from you.

First, please critique this draft (it's much the same as last year's). Tell me if any questions are unclear, misleading, offensive, confusing, or stupid. Tell me if the survey is so unbearably long that you would never possibly take it. Tell me if anything needs to be rephrased.

Second, I am willing to include any question you want in the Super Extra Bonus Questions section, as long as it is not offensive, super-long-and-involved, or really dumb. Please post any questions you want there. Please be specific - not "Ask something about taxes" but give the exact question you want me to ask as well as all answer choices.

Try not to add more than a few questions per person, unless you're sure yours are really interesting. Please also don't add any questions that aren't very easily sort-able by a computer program like SPSS unless you can commit to sorting the answers yourself.

I will probably post the survey to Main and officially open it for responses sometime early next week.

All of these things I mentioned in the most recent open thread, but since the first one is directly relevant and the comment where I posted it somewhat hard to come across, I figured I'd make a post too.

Custom Comment Highlights

NOTE FOR FIREFOX USERS: this contained a bug which has been squashed, causing the list of comments not to be automatically populated (depending on your version of Firefox). I suggest reinstalling. Sorry, no automatic updates unless you use the Chrome extension (though with >50% probability there will be no further updates).

You know how the highlight for new comments on Less Wrong threads disappears if you reload the page, making it difficult to find those comments again? Here is a userscript you can install to fix that (provided you're on Firefox or Chrome). Once installed, you can set the date after which comments are highlighted, and easily scroll to new comments. See screenshots. Installation is straightforward (especially for Chrome, since I made an extension as well).

Bonus: works even if you're logged out or don't have an account, though you'll have to set the highlight time manually.

Delay Before Commenting

Slate Star Codex Comment Highlighter

Note for LW Admins / Yvain

My stupid fanfic chapter was banned without explanation so I reposted it; somehow it was at +7 when it was deleted and I think silently deleting upvoted posts is a disservice to LessWrong. I requested that a justification be given in the comments if it were to be deleted again, so LessWrong readers could consider whether or not that justification is aligned with what they want from LessWrong. Also I would like to make clear that this fanfic is primarily a medium for explaining some ideas that people on LessWrong often ask me about; that it is also a lighthearted critique of Yudkowskyanism is secondary, and if need be I will change the premise so that the medium doesn't drown out the message. But really, I wouldn't think a lighthearted parody of a lighthearted parody would cause such offense.

The original post has been unbanned and can be found here, so I've edited this post to just be about the banning.

"If you give George Lukács any taste at all, immediately become the Deathstar." — Old Klingon Proverb

There was no nice way to put it: Harry James Potter-Yudkowsky was half Potter, half Yudkowsky. Harry just didn’t fit in. It wasn't that he lacked humanity. It was just that no one else knew (P)Many_Worlds, (P)singularity, or (P)their_special_insight_into_the_true_beautiful_Bayesian_fractally_recursive_nature_of_reality. Other people were roles—and how shall an actor, an agent, relate to those who are merely what they are, merely their roles? Merely their roles, without pretext or irony? How shall the PC fuck with the NPCs? Harry James Potter-Yudkowsky oft asked himself this question, but his 11-year-old mind lacked the g to grasp the answer. For if you are to draw any moral from this tale, godforsaken readers, the moral you must draw is this: P!=NP.

 

One night Harry Potter-Yudkowsky was outside, pretending to be Keats, staring at the stars and the incomprehensibly vast distances between them, pondering his own infinite significance in the face of such an overwhelming sea of stupidity, when an owl dropped a letter directly on his head, winking slyly. “You’re a wizard,” said the letter, while the owl watched, increasingly gloatingly, “and we strongly suggest you attend our school, which goes by the name Hogwarts. 'Because we’re sexy and you know it.’”

 

Harry pondered this for five seconds. “Curse the stars!, literally curse them!, Abra Kadabra!, for I must admit what I always knew in my heart to be true,” lamented Harry. “This is fanfic.”

 

“Meh.”

 

And so, as they'd been furiously engaged in for months, the divers models of Harry Potter-Yudkowsky gathered dust. In layman’s terms...

 

Harry didn’t update at all.

 

Harry: 1

Author:  0

(To be fair, the author was drunk.)

Next chapter: "Analyzing the Fuck out of an Owl"

...

Criticism appreciated.

As previously discussed, on June 6th I received a message from jackk, a Trike Admin. He reported that the user Jiro had asked Trike to carry out an investigation to the retributive downvoting that Jiro had been subjected to. The investigation revealed that the user Eugine_Nier had downvoted over half of Jiro's comments, amounting to hundreds of downvotes.

I asked the community's guidance on dealing with the issue, and while the matter was being discussed, I also reviewed previous discussions about mass downvoting and looked for other people who mentioned being the victims of it. I asked Jack to compile reports on several other users who mentioned having been mass-downvoted, and it turned out that Eugine was also overwhelmingly the biggest downvoter of users David_Gerard, daenarys, falenas108, ialdabaoth, shminux, and Tenoke. As this discussion was going on, it turned out that user Ander had also been targeted by Eugine.

I sent two messages to Eugine, requesting an explanation. I received a response today. Eugine admitted his guilt, expressing the opinion that LW's karma system was failing to carry out its purpose of keeping out weak material and that he was engaged in a "weeding" of users who he did not think displayed sufficient rationality.

Needless to say, it is not the place of individual users to unilaterally decide that someone else should be "weeded" out of the community. The Less Wrong content deletion policy contains this clause:

Harrassment of individual users.

If we determine that you're e.g. following a particular user around and leaving insulting comments to them, we reserve the right to delete those comments. (This has happened extremely rarely.)

Although the wording does not explicitly mention downvoting, harassment by downvoting is still harassment. Several users have indicated that they have experienced considerable emotional anguish from the harassment, and have in some cases been discouraged from using Less Wrong at all. This is not a desirable state of affairs, to say the least.

I was originally given my moderator powers on a rather ad-hoc basis, with someone awarding mod privileges to the ten users with the highest karma at the time. The original purpose for that appointment was just to delete spam. Nonetheless, since retributive downvoting has been a clear problem for the community, I asked the community for guidance on dealing with the issue. The rough consensus of the responses seemed to authorize me to deal with the problem as I deemed appropriate.

The fact that Eugine remained quiet about his guilt until directly confronted with the evidence, despite several public discussions of the issue, is indicative of him realizing that he was breaking prevailing social norms. Eugine's actions have worsened the atmosphere of this site, and that atmosphere will remain troubled for as long as he is allowed to remain here.

Therefore, I now announce that Eugine_Nier is permanently banned from posting on LessWrong. This decision is final and will not be changed in response to possible follow-up objections.

Unfortunately, it looks like while a ban prevents posting, it does not actually block a user from casting votes. I have asked jackk to look into the matter and find a way to actually stop the downvoting. Jack indicated earlier on that it would be technically straightforward to apply a negative karma modifier to Eugine's account, and wiping out Eugine's karma balance would prevent him from casting future downvotes. Whatever the easiest solution is, it will be applied as soon as possible.

EDIT 24 July 2014: Banned users are now prohibited from voting.

[Based on Alexandros's excellent dataset.]

I haven't done any statistical analysis, but looking at the charts I'm not sure it's necessary. The discussion section of LessWrong has been steadily declining in participation. My fairly messy spreadsheet is available if you want to check the data or do additional analysis.

Enough talk, you're here for the pretty pictures.

The number of posts has been steadily declining since 2011, though the trend over the last year is less clear. Note that I have excluded all posts with 0 or negative Karma from the dataset.

The total Karma given out each month has similarly been in decline.

Is it possible that there have been fewer posts, but of a higher quality?

No, at least under initial analysis the average Karma seems fairly steady. My prior here is that we're just seeing less visitors overall, which leads to fewer votes being distributed among fewer posts for the same average value. I would have expected the average karma to drop more than it did--to me that means that participation has dropped more steeply than mere visitation. Looking at the point values of the top posts would be helpful here, but I haven't done that analysis yet.

These are very disturbing to me, as someone who has found LessWrong both useful and enjoyable over the past few years. It raises several questions:

1. What should the purpose of this site be? Is it supposed to be building a movement or filtering down the best knowledge?
2. How can we encourage more participation?
3. What are the costs of various means of encouraging participation--more arguing, more mindkilling, more repetition, more off-topic threads, etc?

Here are a few strategies that come to mind:

Idea A: Accept that LessWrong has fulfilled its purpose and should be left to fade away, or allowed to serve as a meetup coordinator and repository of the highest quality articles. My suspicion is that without strong new content and an online community, the strength of the individual meetup communities may wane as fewer new people join them. This is less of an issue for established communities like Berkeley and New York, but more marginal ones may disappear.

Idea B: Allow and encourage submission of rationalism, artificial intelligence, transhumanism etc related articles from elsewhere, possibly as a separate category. This is how a site like Hacker News stays high engagement, even though many of the discussions are endless loops of the same discussion. It can be annoying for the old-timers, but new generations may need to discover things for themselves. Sometimes "put it all in one big FAQ" isn't the most efficient method of teaching.

Idea C: Allow and encourage posts on "political" topics in Discussion (but probably NOT Main). The dangers here might be mitigated by a ban on discussion of current politicians, governments, and issues. "Historians need to have had a decade to mull it over before you're allowed to introduce it as evidence" could be a good heuristic. Another option would be a ban on specific topics that cause the worst mindkilling. Obviously this is overall a dangerous road.

Idea D: Get rid of Open Threads and create a new norm that a discussion post as short as a couple sentences is acceptable. Open threads get stagnant within a day or two, and are harder to navigate than the discussion page. Moving discussion from the Open Threads to the Discussion section would increase participation if users could be convinced thatit was okay to post questions and partly-formed ideas there.

The challenge with any of these ideas is that they will require strong moderation. 

At any rate, this data is enough to convince me that some sort of change is going to be needed in order to put the community on a growth trajectory. That is not necessarily the goal, but at its core LessWrong seems like it has the potential to be a powerful tool for the spreading of rational thought. We just need to figure out how to get it started into its next evolution.

I think the LessWrong user pages are underutilized. There isn't even a wiki pages describing them (or at least I can't find it, otherwise I would have linked it here).

The user pages are what is shown when you click on a user like you would do to see that users other contributions, his karma and to send a personal message. These user pages are maintained and editable in the wiki but embedded in the blog view. This link makes these pages highly visible in everyday LW browsing and could create an awareness of LWers preferences.

Example: me in LW vs. me in LWWiki

Currently only 3 of the top ten poster have one (including EY). And this despite it being so easy to create them via the LWWiki (switch to the Wiki via the link in the nav bar and then click on your name). I guess it's partly because the sync-feature is relatively new.

JoshuaFox recently proposed to indicate your interest in business networking on the user page. But that is only one bit of information you could put there. Another information I'd like to see are the tags proposed on the LW Community Weekend Berlin which could indicate

• your openness to personal messages
• your willingness to answer questions (to specific topics); one special sub-case might be willingness to proofread posts of non-native speakers (the welcome page mentions four persons explicitly three of whom have not posted recently). 
• whether you operate under Crockers rules (a tag seen very often on the Berlin badges)
• other information of this kind like offers of help, dating, ...

Follow-up to: What have you recently tried, and failed at?

Related-to: Challenging the Difficult Sequence

ialdabaoth's post about blockdownvoting and its threads have prompted me to keep an eye on controversial topics and community norms on LessWrong. I noticed some things.

I was motivated: My own postings are also sometimes controversial. I know beforehand which might be (this one possibly). Why do I post them nonetheless? Do I want to wreak havoc? Or do I want to foster productive discussion of unresolved but polarized questions? Or do I want to call in question some point the community may have a blind spot on or possibly has taken something for granted too early.

‘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.)

Given LW’s keen interest in bias, it would seem pertinent to be aware of the biases engendered by the karma system. Note: I used to be strictly opposed to comment scoring mechanisms, but witnessing the general effectiveness in which LWers use karma has largely redeemed the system for me.

In “Social Influence Bias: A Randomized Experiment” by Muchnik et al, random comments on a “social news aggregation Web site” were up-voted after being posted. The likelihood of such rigged comments receiving additional up-votes were quantified in comparison to a control group. The results show that users were significantly biased towards the randomly up-voted posts:

The up-vote treatment significantly increased the probability of up-voting by the first viewer by 32% over the control group ... Uptreated comments were not down-voted significantly more or less frequently than the control group, so users did not tend to correct the upward manipulation. In the absence of a correction, positive herding accumulated over time.

At the end of their five month testing period, the comments that had artificially received an up-vote had an average rating 25% higher than the control group. Interestingly, the severity of the bias was largely dependent on the topic of discussion:

We found significant positive herding effects for comment ratings in “politics,” “culture and society,” and “business,” but no detectable herding behavior for comments in “economics,” “IT,” “fun,” and “general news”.

The herding behavior outlined in the paper seems rather intuitive to me. If before I read a post, I see a little green ‘1’ next to it, I’m probably going to read the post in a better light than if I hadn't seen that little green ‘1’ next to it. Similarly, if I see a post that has a negative score, I’ll probably see flaws in it much more readily. One might say that this is the point of the rating system, as it allows the group as a whole to evaluate the content. However, I’m still unsettled by just how easily popular opinion was swayed in the experiment.

This certainly doesn't necessitate that we reprogram the site and eschew the karma system. Moreover, understanding the biases inherent in such a system will allow us to use it much more effectively. Discussion on how this bias affects LW in particular would be welcomed. Here are some questions to begin with:

• Should we worry about this bias at all? Are its effects negligible in the scheme of things?
• How does the culture of LW contribute to this herding behavior? Is it positive or negative?
• If there are damages, how can we mitigate them?

Notes:

In the paper, they mentioned that comments were not sorted by popularity, therefore “mitigating the selection bias.” This of course implies that the bias would be more severe on forums where comments are sorted by popularity, such as this one.

For those interested, another enlightening paper is “Overcoming the J-shaped distribution of product reviews” by Nan Hu et al, which discusses rating biases on websites such as amazon. User gwern has also recommended a longer 2007 paper by the same authors which the one above is based upon: "Why do Online Product Reviews have a J-shaped Distribution? Overcoming Biases in Online Word-of-Mouth Communication"

[Summary: Trying to use new ideas is more productive than trying to evaluate them.]

I haven't posted to LessWrong in a long time. I have a fan-fiction blog where I post theories about writing and literature. Topics don't overlap at all between the two websites (so far), but I prioritize posting there much higher than posting here, because responses seem more productive there.

The key difference, I think, is that people who read posts on LessWrong ask whether they're "true" or "false", while the writers who read my posts on writing want to write. If I say something that doesn't ring true to one of them, he's likely to say, "I don't think that's quite right; try changing X to Y," or, "When I'm in that situation, I find Z more helpful", or, "That doesn't cover all the cases, but if we expand your idea in this way..."

Whereas on LessWrong a more typical response would be, "Aha, I've found a case for which your step 7 fails! GOTCHA!"

It's always clear from the context of a writing blog why a piece of information might be useful. It often isn't clear how a LessWrong post might be useful. You could blame the author for not providing you with that context. Or, you could be pro-active and provide that context yourself, by thinking as you read a post about how it fits into the bigger framework of questions about rationality, utility, philosophy, ethics, and the future, and thinking about what questions and goals you have that it might be relevant to.

If you want people to ask you stuff reply to this post with a comment to that effect.

More accurately, ask any participating LessWronger anything that is in the category of questions they indicate they would answer.

If you want to talk about this post you can reply to my comment below that says "Discussion of this post goes here.", or not.

Looking at the discussion section recently, it seems like over half of the posts are meetups.  I think it's really great that so many LessWrongers are able to get together and do interesting stuff.  Looking at a lot of the topics, I often find myself thinking "I wonder what they ended up talking about."  I looked at the meetups page and it looks like many give a description of the topic, but there is rarely any public followup.  I also did a search which turned up surprisingly few post-meetup posts.

For example, this Los Angeles meetup from a few days ago about resolutions looked really interesting to me and I'm curious to hear what kinds of strategies were proposed and if there were any insights or anecdotes that came up that would be useful to share with those of us that couldn't attend.

I remember reading a meetup report back in November that told the story of the exercises they went through and it seemed to spark some good discussion.  It even forced me to make a note to try some things on my own.  This one was atypical in that it was very detailed and was a crosspost from a personal blog, but I feel like even short reports would give a chance for the rest of the community to chime in and give praise, suggestions, and feedback.  

When I tried to think of reasons not to share what happened in meetups, I came up with a few potential factors:

1. It's extra work
2. Keeping it private increases the feeling of community within the group
3. Meetups are supposed to be a safe place where your actions or comments won't be broadcast to the world
4. Nothing really post-worthy happened

In 2011, I added an anonymous feedback form to gwern.net. It has worked well (116 entries) and justified the time it took to set up because it encourages people to correct various problems or tip me off on things. If you have a site, maybe you should add one too.

For the full writeup, see http://www.gwern.net/About#anonymous-feedback

Thanks to everyone who brainstormed possible titles for MIRI’s upcoming ebook on machine intelligence. Our leading contender for the book title is Smarter than Us: The Rise of Machine Intelligence.

What we need now are suggestions for a book cover design. AI is hard to depict without falling back on cliches, such as a brain image mixed with computer circuitry, a humanoid robot, HAL, an imitation of Creation of Adam with human and robot fingers touching, or an imitation of March of Progress with an AI at the far right.

A few ideas/examples:

1. Something that conveys ‘AI’ in the middle (a computer screen? a server tower?) connected by arrow/wires/something to various ‘skills/actions/influences’, like giving a speech, flying unmanned spacecraft, doing science, predicting the stock market, etc., in an attempt to convey the diverse superpowers of a machine intelligence.

2. A more minimalist text-only cover.

3. A fairly minimal cover with just an ominous-looking server rack in the middle, with a few blinking lights and submerged in darkness around it. A bit like this cover.

4. Similar to the above, except a server farm along the bottom fading into the background, with a frame composition similar to this.

5. A darkened, machine-gunned room with a laptop sitting alone on a desk, displaying the text of the title on the screen. (This is the scene from the first chapter, about a Terminator who encounters an unthreatening-looking laptop which ends up being way more powerful and dangerous than the Terminator because it is more intelligent.)

Alex Vermeer sketched the first four of these ideas:

Some general inspiration may be found here.

We think we want something kinda dramatic, rather than cartoony, but less epic and unbelievable than the Facing the Intelligence Explosion cover.

Thoughts?

MIRI's ongoing effort to publish the sequences as an eBook has given us the opportunity to update their contents and organization.

We're looking for suggested posts to reorder, add, or remove.

To help with this, here is a breakdown of the current planned contents of the eBook and any currently planned modifications. Following that is a list of the most popular links within the sequences to posts that are not included therein.

Now's a good time to suggested changes or improvements!

———

Map and Territory

Added …What's a Bias Again? because it's meant to immediately follow Why Truth, And….

Mysterious Answers to Mysterious Questions

No changes.

A Human's Guide to Words

No changes.

How to Actually Change Your Mind

Politics is the Mind-Killer

Removed The Robbers Cave Experiment because it already appears in Death Spirals and the Cult Attractor, and there in the original chronological order which flows better.

Death Spirals and the Cult Attractor

Removed The Litany Against Gurus because it already appears in Politics is the Mind-killer.

Seeing with Fresh Eyes

Removed Asch's Conformity Experiment and Lonely Dissent because they both appear at the end of Death Spirals. Removed The Genetic Fallacy because it's in the Metaethics sequence: that's where it falls chronologically and it fits better there with the surrounding posts.

Noticing Confusion

Removed this entire subsequence because it is entirely contained within Mysterious Answers to Mysterious Questions.

Against Rationalization

Added Pascal's Mugging (before Torture vs Dust Specks) because it explains the 3^^^3 notation. Added Torture vs Dust Specks before A Case Study of Motivated Continuation because A Case Study refers to it frequently.

Against Doublethink

No changes.

Overly Convenient Excuses

Removed How to Convince Me that 2+2=3 because it's already in Map & Territory.

Letting Go

No change.

The Simple Math of Evolution

Added Evolutionary Psychology because it fits nicely at the end and it's referred to by other posts many times.

Challenging the Difficult

No change.

Yudkowsky's Coming of Age

No change.

Reductionism

No change. (Includes the Zombies subsequence.)

Quantum Physics

No change. Doesn't include any "Preliminaries" posts, since they'd all be duplicates

Metaethics

No change.

Fun Theory

No change.

The Craft and the Community

No change.

Appendix

Includes:

• The Simple Truth
• An Intuitive Explanation of Bayes' Theorem
• A Technical Explanation of Technical Explanation

———

Here are the most-frequently-referenced links within the sequences to posts outside of the sequences (with a count of three or more). This may help you notice posts that you think should be included in the sequences eBook.

• Newcomb's Problem and Regret of Rationality => 24
• The Second Law of Thermodynamics, and Engines of Cognition => 22
• Terminal Values and Instrumental Values => 16
• Burdensome Details => 16
• Expecting Short Inferential Distances => 15
• Thou Art Godshatter => 14
• Religion's Claim to be Non-Disprovable => 14
• Scope Insensitivity => 13
• The Ultimate Source => 13
• No One Knows What Science Doesn't Know => 12
• The Design Space of Minds-In-General => 11
• Think Like Reality => 10
• Passing the Recursive Buck => 9
• Lost Purposes => 9
• The Hidden Complexity of Wishes => 9
• Scientific Evidence, Legal Evidence, Rational Evidence => 9
• A Priori => 8
• Beautiful Probability => 8
• Possibility and Could-ness => 8
• Why is the Future So Absurd? => 8
• Fake Utility Functions => 8
• Availability => 7
• Ghosts in the Machine => 7
• Nonsentient Optimizers => 7
• Fake Fake Utility Functions => 7
• Searching for Bayes-Structure => 7
• Outside the Laboratory => 7
• Dreams of AI Design => 6
• Surface Analogies and Deep Causes => 6
• Artificial Addition => 6
• Not for the Sake of Happiness (Alone) => 6
• Superstimuli and the Collapse of Western Civilization => 5
• Decoherence is Falsifiable and Testable => 5
• The Cartoon Guide to Löb's Theorem => 5
• Can't Unbirth a Child => 5
• The Psychological Unity of Humankind => 5
• Humans in Funny Suits => 5
• Rationality is Systematized Winning => 5
• The True Prisoner's Dilemma => 5
• Zen and the Art of Rationality => 5
• The "Intuitions" Behind "Utilitarianism" => 5
• For The People Who Are Still Alive => 4
• The Two-Party Swindle => 4
• Conjunction Fallacy => 4
• Anthropomorphic Optimism => 4
• The Modesty Argument => 4
• Rational evidence => 4
• Priors as Mathematical Objects => 4
• The Unfinished Mystery of the Shangri-La Diet/ => 4
• I Defy the Data! => 4
• Bystander Apathy => 3
• We Don't Really Want Your Participation => 3
• You Only Live Twice => 3
• Lawful Creativity => 3
• One Life Against the World => 3
• Locate the hypothesis => 3
• Cynical About Cynicism => 3
• Optimization => 3
• Illusion of Transparency: Why No One Understands You => 3
• Detached Lever Fallacy => 3
• Circular Altruism => 3
• The Allais Paradox => 3
• The Martial Art of Rationality => 3
• Fake Morality => 3

Suggestions?

Less Wrong is based on reddit code, which means we can create subreddits with relative ease.

Right now we have two subreddits, Main and Discussion. These are distinguished not by subject matter, but by whether a post is the type of thing that might be promoted to the front page or not (e.g. a meetup announcement, or a particularly well-composed and useful post).

As a result, almost everything is published to Discussion, and thus it is difficult for busy people to follow only the subjects they care about. More people will be able to engage if we split things into topic-specific subreddits, and make it easy to follow only what they care about.

To make it easier for people to follow only what they care about, we're building the code for a Dashboard thingie.

But we also need to figure out which subreddits to create, and we'd like community feedback about that.

We'll probably start small, with just 1-5 new subreddits.

Below are some initial ideas, to get the conversation started.

Idea 1

• Main: still the place for things that might be promoted.
• Applied Rationality: for articles about what Jonathan Baron would call descriptive and prescriptive rationality, for both epistemic and instrumental rationality (stuff about biases, self-improvement stuff, etc.).
• Normative Rationality: for articles about what Baron would call normative rationality, for both epistemic and instrumental rationality (examining the foundations of probability theory, decision theory, anthropics, and lots of stuff that is called "philosophy"). 
• The Future: for articles about forecasting, x-risk, and future technologies.
• Misc: Discussion, renamed, for everything that doesn't belong in the other subreddits.

Idea 2

• Main
• Epistemic Rationality: for articles about how to figure out the world, spanning the descriptive, prescriptive, and normative.
• Instrumental Rationality: for articles about how to take action to achieve your goals, spanning the descriptive, prescriptive, and normative. (One difficulty with the epistemic/instrumental split is that many (most?) applied rationality techniques seem to be relevant to both epistemic and instrumental rationality.)
• The Future
• Misc.

Is Less Wrong, despite its flaws, the highest-quality relatively-general-interest forum on the web? It seems to me that, to find reliably higher-quality discussion, I must turn to more narrowly focused sites, e.g. MathOverflow and the GiveWell blog.

Many people smarter than myself have reported the same impression. But if you know of any comparably high-quality relatively-general-interest forums, please link me to them!

In the meantime: suppose it's true that Less Wrong is the highest-quality relatively-general-interest forum on the web. In that case, we're sitting on a big opportunity to grow Less Wrong into the "standard" general-interest discussion hub for people with high intelligence and high metacognition (shorthand: "intellectual elites").

Earlier, Jonah Sinick lamented the scarcity of elites on the web. How can we get more intellectual elites to engage on the web, and in particular at Less Wrong?

Some projects to improve the situation are extremely costly:

1. Pay some intellectual elites with unusually good writing skills (like Eliezer) to generate a constant stream of new, interesting content.
2. Comb through Less Wrong to replace community-specific jargon with more universally comprehensible terms, and change community norms about jargon. (E.g. GiveWell's jargon tends to be more transparent, such as their phrase "room for more funding.")

Code changes, however, could be significantly less costly. New features or site structure elements could increase engagement by intellectual elites. (To avoid priming and contamination, I'll hold back from naming specific examples here.)

To help us figure out which code changes are most likely to increase engagement on Less Wrong by intellectual elites, specific MIRI volunteers will be interviewing intellectual elites who (1) are familiar enough with Less Wrong to be able to simulate which code changes might cause them to engage more, but who (2) mostly just lurk, currently.

In the meantime, I figured I'd throw these ideas to the community for feedback and suggestions.

Recently, issues with the way open threads currently work were brought up. Open threads aren't very visible and get crowded with comments quickly. This causes people to post things that belong in open threads in r/discussion, to not post in open threads more than a few days old, or to ignore/be unaware of new comments in open threads. I think we can do better.

Some possible solutions that were pointed out, or that I thought of are:

• Put the most recent open thread at the top of the 'Recent Comments' sidebar.
• Having open threads more often.
• Put a link to it on the main page.
• Make a new subreddit for open threads.
• Create a new medium for open threads.

Note that not all of these are orthogonal.

Having them more often has the advantage of being especially easy to implement. Adding new links seems to be relatively easy to implement as well. As far as I know, making a new subreddit isn't too difficult, but making a new medium would probably be a waste of development resources.

Personally, I like the idea of having a new subreddit for open threads. It  would increase visibility, not get overcrowded, and have the right atmosphere for a casual open thread. My evidence for believing this comes from being familiar the way Reddit works. It seems like there is some resistance to creating new subreddits here, so I don't expect this to be implemented. I would like to see the reasoning for this attitude, if it indeed exists.

There are similar issues for the repository threads. For repositories, having them more often defeats the purpose of having one place for a certain type of idea, and a different subreddit doesn't seem right either. Giving them their own wiki pages might be a better medium, with new threads to encourage new ideas every once in a while. The main problem for this is the trivial inconvenience of going to the wiki, and logging in. It would be nice if there was a unified log-in for this part of the site and the wiki, but I realize this may be technically difficult. I might organize a wiki page for some of the repositories myself if people think this is a good idea but no one else feels like doing it (depends on if I feel like doing it too :p ).

Thoughts?

I'm spending the summer working to update lesswrong, and one of the changes we're looking to implement is changing the "New on Overcoming Bias" part of the sidebar to a more general "New on Rationality Blogs".  What blogs would you like to see represented?

After a recent comment thread degenerated into an argument about trolling, moderation, and meta discussions, I came to the following conclusions:

1. Meta conversations are annoying to stumble across, I'd rather not see them unless I think it's important, and I think other people mostly feel the same way. Moreover, moderators can't easily ignore those conversations when they encounter them, because they're usually attacks on the moderators themselves; and people can't simply avoid encountering them on a regular basis without avoiding LW altogether. This is a perfect recipe for a flamewar taking over Top Comments even when most people don't care that much.
2. Officially banning all meta conversations, however, is a bad precedent, and I don't want LW to do that.

Ideally, Less Wrong would implement a separate "META" area (so that people can read the regular area for all the object-level discussions, and then sally into the meta area only when they're ready). After talking to Luke (who also wants this), though, it seems clear that nobody is able to implement it very soon. So as a stopgap measure, I'm personally going to start doing the following, and I hope you join me:

Whenever a conversation starts getting bitterly meta in a thread that's not originally about a LW site meta issue, I'm going to tell people to start a thread on the LW Uncensored Reddit Thread instead. Then I'm going to downvote anyone who continues the meta war on the original thread.

I know it's annoying to send people somewhere that has a different login system, but it's as far as I can tell the best fix we currently have. Since some meta conversations are important, I'm not going to punish people for linking to meta thread discussions that they think are significant, and the relevant place for those links is usually the Open Thread. I don't want LessWrong to be a community devoted to arguing about the mechanics of LessWrong, so that's my suggestion.

Thoughts? (And yes, this thread is obviously open to meta discussion. I'm hopefully doing something constructive about the problem, instead of just complaining about it, though.)

EDIT: Changed the link to the uncensored thread more specifically, at Luke's request; originally I linked to the general LW subreddit, which is more heavily moderated.

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! 

Yesterday, someone moved one of my posts from Main to Discussion without telling me.  Again.

I encourage the site administrators to show some basic courtesy to the posters who provide the content for the site.  I believe this would be a better way of doing things:

1. Have a policy on what has to happen to move a post from Main to Discussion.  Who can do it?  How many admins are there who can do this?  State this policy in a FAQ.

2. When you move a post from Main to Discussion, make a comment on the post saying you have done so and why you have done so.