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Vaniver comments on LessWrong 2.0 - LessWrong
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Comments (312)
I agree with you that the motivational bits, of wanting to acculturate to LW to be around the cool people, rely on the cool people being here.
The main reason I'm uncertain about the forum as the right model is that I don't see it in many other educational contexts and I think there are weird dynamics around the asymmetry between questioners and answerers and levels of competence/experience. (The cool people want some, but not too much, interaction with not-yet-cool people.) Perhaps the Slack and IRC channels and similar venues deserve some more of my attention as potential solutions here.
Agreed. This dynamic gets even worse when the problems are psychological. If someone goes to Stack Overflow and posts "hey, this code doesn't do what I expect. What's going wrong?" we can copy the code and run it on our machines and find the issue. If someone goes to Sanity Overflow and posts "hey, I'm akratic. What's going wrong?" we... have a much harder time.
One of the things that comes up every now and then is the idea of rewriting the Sequences, and I think the main goal there would be to make them with as little of Eliezer's personality shining through as possible. (I like his personality well enough, but it's clear that many don't, and a more communal central repository would reduce some of the idiosyncrasy concerns.)
Some think that the Sequences could be significantly shortened, but I suspect that's optimism speaking instead of experience. There are only a handful of sections in the Sequences where Eliezer actually repeats himself, and even then it's likely one of those places where, really, it's worth giving them three slightly different versions of the same thing to make sure they get it.
Not just rewriting them. My biggest problem with LW-rationality is that I haven't and probably can't internalize it on a very deep, systematic level, no matter how many times I re-read the articles. Instead of a long chain of blog-posts about everything on Earth, there should be a very focused rationality textbook with exercises, with spaced repetition and all that science of teaching and learning baked it. Luke Muehlhauser argued LW is a philosophy blog. Yet after reading RAZ I don't feel like I understand LW epistemology on a deep level. I still don't feel confident arguing with philosophers, even if I intuitively understand they are full of shit.
While I have many intuitions about how to be rational, and I'm ridiculously more sane and productive, than I was a year before, thanks to LW, my understanding of LW maths, science and philosophy is vague and not at all transparent.
I have read somewhere that all else being equal dialogues attract people's attention better than monologues, at least on television. Perhaps in some cases some ideas (including old sequence posts, especially more controversial ones) could be presented as Socratic dialogues, o perhaps, if a post is being written collaboratively by more than one person, one could write a position and the others (or two) could ask inquisitive questions or try to find holes in his or her argument. You would think that having comments already covers that, and in a sense it is indeed similar to having two waves of comments. However, in this case, the post that is saw by most people has already covered at least a few objections and thus is of relatively higher quality. Secondly, this allows "debate" posts that do not present any clear conclusion and contain only arguments for different positions (where does the controversy lies is often an interesting and informative question). Thirdly, I conjecture that is psychologically more pleasant to be nitpicked by one or two people (who you already know they were explicitly asked to do that) than a lot of commenters at once. You could call this series "Dialogues concerning (human) rationality" or something like that.
Of course, not all posts should be written as dialogues (e.g. some more technical ones might be difficult to structure this way).
I suspect the main benefit from rewriting the Sequences would actually be that it would be an excuse to post useful stuff about rationality again.