Three days ago, I went through a traditional rite of passage for junior academics: I received my first rejection letter on a paper submitted for peer review. After I received the rejection letter, I forwarded the paper to two top professors in my field, who both confirmed that the basic arguments seem to be correct and important. Several top faculty members have told me they believe the paper will eventually be published in a top journal, so I am actually feeling more confident about the paper than before it got rejected.

I am also very frustrated with the peer review system. The reviewers found some minor errors, and some of their other comments were helpful in the sense that they reveal which parts of the paper are most likely to be misunderstood. However, on the whole, the comments do not change my belief in the soundness of the idea, and in my view they mostly show that the reviewers simply didn’t understand what I was saying.

One comment does stand out, and I’ve spent a lot of energy today thinking about its implications: Reviewer 3 points out that my language is “too casual”. I would have had no problem accepting criticism that my language is ambiguous, imprecise, overly complicated, grammatically wrong or idiomatically weird. But too casual? What does that even mean? I have trouble interpreting the sentence to mean anything other than an allegation that I fail at a signaling game where the objective is to demonstrate impressiveness by using an artificially dense and obfuscating academic language.

From my point of view, “understanding” something <i>means</i> that you are able to explain it in a casual language. When I write a paper, my only objective is to allow the reader to understand what my conclusions are and how I reached them. My choice of language is optimized only for those objectives, and I fail to understand how it is even possible for it to be “too casual”.

Today, I feel very pessimistic about the state of academia and the institution of peer review. I feel stronger allegiance to the rationality movement than ever, as my ideological allies in what seems like a struggle about what it means to do science. I believe it was Tyler Cowen or Alex Tabarrok who pointed out that the true inheritors of intellectuals like Adam Smith are not people publishing in academic journals, but bloggers who write in a causal language. I can’t find the quote but today it rings more true than ever.

I understand that I am interpreting the reviewers choice of words in a way that is strongly influenced both by my disappointment in being rejected, and by my pre-existing frustration with the state of academia and peer review. I would very much appreciate if anybody could steelman the sentence “the writing is too casual”, or otherwise help me reach a less biased understanding of what just happened.

The paper is available at https://rebootingepidemiology.files.wordpress.com/2016/03/effect-measure-paper-0317162.pdf . I am willing to send a link to the reviewers’ comments by private message to anybody who is interested in seeing it.

Excellent article. Do you happen to know of any evidence based research on cholesterol? Mine just came back at:

Whole Cholesterol 242
Triglycerides 73
HDL 55
LDL 172

and my doctor wants to have a talk with me about lowering my cholesterol. I'm already doing all of the easy things so I suspect he will want to put me on drugs.

I'd give people the ability to do multiple regressions in their head. Because I want to be able to do multiple regression in my head.

DALYs are just a special case of QALYs for which there is very good weighting data available (from the WHO), because they're linked to well-defined medical conditions and disabilities. Of course one could imagine other, non-health-related interventions that would affect QALYs, but these outcomes are also harder to measure.

Well, that wraps it up. This post, and some of the asinine comments to it, have persuaded me that I have no further use for this site.

How about asking "What is the single most important change that would make you want to participate more frequently on Less Wrong?"

This question would probably not be useful for the census itself, but it seems like a great opportunity to brainstorm..

I run the Less Wrong meetup group in Palo Alto. After we announced the events at Meetup.com, we often get a lot of guests who are interested in rationality but who have not read the LW sequences. I have an idea for a introductory session where we have the participants do a sorting exercise. Therefore, I am interested in getting 3D printed versions of rubes, bleggs and other items references in this post.

Does anyone have any thoughts on how to do this cheaply? Is there sufficient interest in this to get a kickstarter running? I expect that these items may be of interest to other Less Wrong meetup groups, and possibly to CFAR workshops and/or schools?

Less Wrong doesn't seem "overgrown" to me. It actually seems dried out and dying because the culture is so negative people don't want to post here. I believe Eliezer has talked about how whenever he posted something on LW, the comments would be full of people trying to find anything wrong with it.

Here's an example of what I think makes LessWrong unappealing. User Clarity wrote an interesting discussion level post about his mistakes as an investor/gambler and it was downvoted to oblivion. Shouldn't people be encouraged to discuss their failures as they relate to rationality? Do we really want to discourage this? No one even bothered to explain why they downvoted.

All discussion in Less Wrong 2.0 is seen explicitly as an attempt to exchange information for the purpose of reaching Aumann agreement. In order to facilitate this goal, communication must be precise. Therefore, all users agree to abide by Crocker's Rules for all communication that takes place on the website.

I think trying to impose strict new censorship rules and social control over communication is more likely to deal the death blow to this website than to help it. LessWrong really needs an injection of positive energy and purpose. In the absence of this, I expect LW to continue to decline.

Thanks for thinking this through.

A few questions:

Would there be a way for people who already maintain blogs elsewhere to cross-post to their LW subdomain? (Would this even be desirable?)

Do you envision LW2 continuing to include applied rationality type posts? Does that work with "everything should work towards Aumann agreement"?

users may not repeatedly bring up the same controversial discussion outside of their original context

How could we track this, other than relying on mods to be like "ugh, this poster again"?

professionally edited rationality journal

Woah. Is this really a thing that MIRI could (resources permitting) just like ... do?

I have been studying meta-research (a la METRICS, Cambridge Handbook of Expertise, Kuhnian revolution etc.) and while I'm not looking for a study partner per se (my schedule is very sporadic) I would be interested in diffing models about this topic with anyone who has done some of their own investigation in the area.