I'm happy to see a push for increased empiricism and scientific effort on LW. But... I wish there were more focus on the word "how," and less focus on the word 'we.'
Three articles come to mind: To Lead You Must Stand Up, First, Try to Make it to the Mean, and Money: The Unit of Caring. (Only the first part of the second article will be directly relevant, but the latter parts are indirectly relevant.)
That is:
First, there's insufficient focus on what concrete steps you are taking to move the culture in that direction. (Writing blog posts exhorting action does not count for much. Do you think The Neglected Virtue of Scholarship would have shifted community actions as much if lukeprog hadn't followed it up by writing posts with massive reference lists?) The reference to yourmorals.org is fine, but what made that site important was a particular feature, not its goal or its structure. If you've thought of a similar feature that someone (ideally you) could code up, great! I will send as much karma as I can towards the person that makes that happen. But this is even more general than a call for better / easier rationality tests and exercises, and thus even less likely to cause concrete action.
Second, it really does help to be a specialist and know the prior art in a subject. The central lesson of experimental psychology is probably "designing experiments that test what you want them to test is really, really hard." If there's a specialist out there researching this stuff, then I would be happy to take part in any experiments they post on LW, and I suspect that many others here would be as well. If CFAR moves from advocacy and education to research (on cognitive science, not education), I again expect that I'd be willing to participate and so would others.
Similarly to trying to push the boundaries of life extension rather than simply making past the mean of the life expectancy, trying to push the boundaries of science when you don't know where those boundaries are is fundamentally mistaken. Knowing what experiments have already been done and what they actually show should be a major input into what you test. The Neglected Virtue of Scholarship calls out Eliezer on exactly that- "er, your n=1 theory of procrastination seems to disagree with n>1 research." I remember being fascinated by all the variants of the Wason selection task described in Thinking and Deciding. I had previously only been familiar with the basic one, and the implications of both the original and the variations are far stronger than the implications of just the original.
(Note that one of the strengths of LW might be that you gather a bunch of neurologically similar people, who can share with each other knowledge and experience not useful to the general population. I have the same experience of procrastination as Eliezer, and learning that someone else out there has that issue is valuable knowledge. Given general human neurodiversity, looking for things that help everyone is probably going to be less useful than narrowing your view.)
Third, why try to train citizen scientists when we could make better use of specialist scientists? Gary Drescher posted here, but hasn't in over a year. What would make LW valuable enough to him for him to post here? XiXiDu managed to attract the attention of some experts in AI. What would make LW valuable enough to them for them to post here?
I agree with training citizen scientists in the sense of training empiricists (who will then naturally apply science to their lives). I think that LW having a culture of supporting science- both with dollars and volunteerism- would be better than not. But I don't see you addressing the engineering problems with moving from one culture to the other, instead of just signalling that you would prefer the other culture.
I was rereading my comments (because of this post) and noticed this:
Gary Drescher posted here, but hasn't in over a year. What would make LW valuable enough to him for him to post here?
Apparently, links to drafts of novel, interesting math papers.
Related to: Science: Do It Yourself, How To Fix Science, Rationality and Science posts from this sequence, Cargo Cult Science, "citizen science"
You think you have a good map, what you really have is a working hypothesis
You did some thought on human rationality, perhaps spurred by intuition or personal experience. Building it up you did your homework and stood on the shoulders of other people's work giving proper weight to expert opinion. You write an article on LessWrong, it gets up voted, debated and perhaps accepted and promoted as part of a "sequence". But now you'd like to do that thing that's been nagging you since the start, you don't want to be one of those insight junkies consuming fun plausible ideas forgetting to ever get around to testing them. Lets see how the predictions made by your model hold up! You dive into the literature in search of experiments that have conveniently already tested your idea.
It is possible there simply isn't any such experimental material or that it is unavailable. Don't get me wrong, if I had to bet on it I would say it is more likely there is at least something similar to what you need than not. I would also bet that some things we wish where done haven't been so far and are unlikely to be for a long time. In the past I've wondered if we can in the future expect CFAR or LessWrong to do experimental work to test many of the hypotheses we've come up with based on fresh but unreliable insight, anecdotal evidence and long fragile chains of reasoning. This will not happen on its own.
With mention of CFAR, the mind jumps to them doing expensive experiments or posing long questionnaires with small samples of students and then publishing papers, like everyone else does. It is the respectable thing to do and it is something that may or may not be worth their effort. It seems doable. The idea of LWers getting into the habit of testing their ideas on human rationality beyond the anecdotal seems utterly impractical. Or is it?
That ordinary people can band together to rapidly produce new knowledge is anything but a trifle
How useful would it be if we had a site visited by thousands or tens of thousands solving forms or participating in experiments submitted by LessWrong posters or CFAR researchers? Something like this site. How useful would it be if we made such a data set publicly available? What if we could in addition to this data mine how people use apps or an online rationality class? At this point you might be asking yourself if building knowledge this way even possible in fields that takes years to study. A fair question, especially for tasks that require technical competence, the answer is yes.
I'm sure many at this point, have started wondering about what kinds of problems biased samples might create for us. It is important to keep in mind what kind of sample of people you get to participate in the experiment or fill out your form, since this influences how confident you are allowed to be about generalizations. Learning things about very specific kinds of people is useful too. Recall this is hardly a unique problem, you can't really get away from it in the social sciences. WEIRD samples aren't weird in academia. And I didn't say the thousands and tens of thousands people would need to come from our own little corner of the internet, indeed they probably couldn't. There are many approaches to getting them and making the sample as good as we can. Sites like yourmorals.org tried a variety of approaches we could learn from them. Even doing something like hiring people from Amazon Mechanical Turk can work out surprisingly well.
LessWrong Science: We do what we must because we can
The harder question is if the resulting data would be used at all. As we currently are? I don't think so. There are many publicly available data sets and plenty of opportunities to mine data online, yet we see little if any original analysis based on them here. We either don't have norms encouraging this or we don't have enough people comfortable with statistics doing so. Problems like this aren't immutable. The Neglected Virtue of Scholarship noticeably changed our community in a similarly profound way with positive results. Feeling that more is possible I think it is time for us to move in this direction.
Perhaps just creating a way to get the data will attract the right crowd, the quantified self people are not out of place here. Perhaps LessWrong should become less of a site and more of a blogosphere. I'm not sure how and I think for now the question is a distraction anyway. What clearly can be useful is to create a list of models and ideas we've already assimilated that haven't been really tested or are based on research that still awaits replication. At the very least this will help us be ready to update if relevant future studies show up. But I think that identifying any low hanging fruit and design some experiments or attempts at replication, then going out there and try to perform them can get us so much more. If people have enough pull to get them done inside academia without community help great, if not we should seek alternatives.