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Earlier today I wanted to quantify whether lesswrong has stopped being a well kept garden.
Then you probably should start by quantifying what does "being a well kept garden" mean.
True. I guess I was being a bit cheeky. LW is no longer being kept at all AFAICT (or just on maintenance), just wanted to see if it's on an upward or downward trajectory. I obviously think there is a problem, and I have a solution to suggest, but I wanted to double check my intuition with the numbers.
Authors might be an interesting field to add; one of the more plausible measures mentioned in the other thread was a drop in posts from specific prolific authors.
post updated with code, go crazy! number of comments is another one I'd add if I ran it again.
for +10 points, post the scraper. (but put a throttle in by default)
done
I wanted to quantify whether lesswrong has stopped being a well kept garden.
I'm very curious about you results.
Well, it's not being 'kept' anymore for one, but I didn't need analysis for that. I guess the question is if it is flourishing or dying out.
All discussion post titles, points, and dates as an excel sheet
You can find it here.
Earlier today I wanted to quantify whether lesswrong has stopped being a well kept garden. So I wrote a scraper to produce the above dataset, so that anyone that wants to do the analysis, can.
All data is as of a few minutes ago.
For programmers: You can see the source here, it's made to run on scraperwiki, but it will time out after about 3000 articles. At that point you need to adjust the initial value of the uri variable to be the last uri printed. Repeating this process once more will allow you to reach the end. Have fun.
If an altruistic group of numbers-inclined people was to start working together to improve the world in a non-existential risk reducing kind of way, it strikes me that a dating site may be a fantastic thing to try.
Why altruistic? If it's worth anything, it's worth money. If it won't even pay its creators for the time they'll put in to create it, where's the value?
I am not convinced it is the optimal route to startup success. If it was, I would be doing it in preference over my current startup. It is highly uncertain and requires what looks like basic research, hence the altruism angle. If it succeeds, yes, it shouldake a lot of money and nobody should deprive it's creators of the fruits of their labour.
It strikes me that it is much more plausible to argue that the dating market suffers from market failure through information asymmetry, market power and high search costs than to argue the same about economic activity. Yet although people search high and low to find (often non-existent) market failures to justify economic interventions, interventions in the dating market are greeted with near-uniform hostlility. I predict that, outside of LessWrong, your proposal will generate a high "Ick" factor as a taboo violation. "Rationality-based online dating will set you up with scientifically-chosen dates..." this is likely to be an anti-selling point to most users.
Obviously you'd take a different angle with the marketing.
Off the cuff, I'd pitch it as a hands-off dating site. You just install a persistent app on your phone that pushes a notification when it finds a good match. No website to navigate, no profile to fill, no message queue to manage.
Perhaps market it to busy professionals. Finance professionals may be a good target to start marketing to. (busy, high-status, analytical)
There would need to be some way to deal with the privacy issues though.
Have you seen this TED talk?
fantastic, thanks!
What you say sounds intuitive to me at first, but as of now I would say that rationality training may boost start up success rates up just a little.
Here is some reasons why rationality might not matter that much:
People tend to be a bit more rational when it counts, like making money. So having correct beliefs about many things doesn't really give you an edge because the other guy is also pretty rational for business stuff.
self-delusion, psychopathy, irrationality, corruption, arrogance, and raw driven determination, have good if not better anecdotal evidence of boosting success than rationality training I think.
Well, at this point we're weighing anecdotes, but..
Yes! They do tend to push their rationality to the limit. Hypothesis: knowing more about rationality can help push up the limit of how rational one can be.
Yes! It's not about rationality alone. Persistent determination is quite possibly more important than rationality and intelligence put together. But I posit that rationality is a multiplier, and also tends to filter out the most destructive outcomes.
In general, I'd love to see some data on this, but I'm not holding my breath.
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Stratton's perceptual adaptation experiments a century ago have shown that the brain can adapt to different kinds of visual information, e.g. if you wear glasses that turn the picture upside down, you eventually adjust and start seeing it right side up again. And recently some people have been experimenting with augmented senses, like wearing an anklet with cell phone vibrators that lets you always know which way is north.
I wonder if we can combine these ideas? For example, if you always carry a wearable camera on your wrist and feed the information to a Google Glass-like display, will your brain eventually adapt to having effectively three eyes, one of which is movable? Will you gain better depth perception, a better sense of your surroundings, a better sense of what you look like, etc.?
I've thought about taking this idea further.
Think of applying the anklet idea to groups of people. What if soccer teams could know where their teammates are at any time, even if they can't see them? Now apply this to firemen. or infantry. This is the startup i'd be doing if I wasn't doing what I'm doing. plugging data feeds right into the brain, and in particular doing this for groups of people, sounds like the next big frontier.