= 27d567bc2d48d9f40e9ccc20ea370b15)
I took the survey! This is my third survey.
In response to
2014 Less Wrong Census/Survey - Call For Critiques/Questions
Extra Credit: Politics, Question about the Great Stagnation: the link is too large Screenshot
In response to
Why are people "put off by rationality"?
Good writing polarizes people.
I am writing this comment because I feel like you were downvoted without a specific explanation as to why, and your post was made in good faith. If I made a post like yours and got downvoted, I would hope someone would be willing to take a karma hit to explain to me their reasoning, so I will do the same.
First, I think your sentence is partially correct. I generally believe that ineffective writing will not polarize people, because ineffective writing does not motivate people to do anything or have any serious opinions on it. Someone who posts something emptyheaded and unuseful will generally get very few upvotes and not generate a large discussion thread. I think that better writing will challenge people's assumptions, or bring interesting topics forward, and then people will have opinions, and opinions are polarized.
However, "Good writing polarizes people" is probably being downvoted because the best writing, at least in the sense of "let's write a fanfic that makes people want to learn more about rationality", would not polarize people and get them to write negative reviews on fanfiction.net. The best writing would cause people to be all like "oh, this is an interesting topic, and this writing is enjoyable to read. Not only will I read more about this topic, I will also continue reading this fanfic." I think that the best writing would somehow convince people that hpmor was awesome, and that they should come to lesswrong, read all the sequences, and then write high-quality comments. So good writing polarizes people is misleading since the best writing converts them.
If your statement is that the best writing polarizes people, I think you can expect to be downvoted because many people think the best writing convinces people, rather than just motivating them to write angry reviews. If it's true that excellent writing convinces people and good writing only polarizes, and you're making a more nuanced point, like that there's an uncanny valley of writing effectivness, this still does not make your comment super helpful, because it seems to me that the next step is "well, how could this be better so instead of just polarizing people, it convinces them" or something.
Well, here I am again, this time providing a paper backing up my claim that having a downvote mechanism at all is just pure poison.
It doesn't make any sense for this type of community. This isn't Digg. We're not trying to rate content so an algorithm can rank it as a news aggregation service.
Look at Slate Star Codex, where everybody is spending their time now - no aversive downvote mechanism, relaxed, cordial atmosphere, extremely minimal moderation. Proof of concept.
Just turn off the downvote button for one week and if LessWrong somehow implodes catastrophically ... I'll update.
In response to
comment
by
on
[meta] Policy for dealing with users suspected/guilty of mass-downvote harassment?
I do not like the voting and commenting system at Slate Star Codex.
In response to
Why don't more rationalists start startups?
This post by Yvain is my cached thought in response to "Why don't more rationalists do good thing X?"
Yvain writes:
One factor we have to once again come back to is akrasia. I find akrasia in myself and others to be the most important limiting factor to our success. Think of that phrase "limiting factor" formally, the way you'd think of the limiting reagent in chemistry. When there's a limiting reagent, it doesn't matter how much more of the other reagents you add, the reaction's not going to make any more product. Rational decisions are practically useless without the willpower to carry them out. If our limiting reagent is willpower and not rationality, throwing truckloads of rationality into our brains isn't going to increase success very much.
I suspect that your limiting factor for being successful at a start-up probably has something more to do with raw intelligence, having a good work ethic and good business partners, making the right connections, or things like being in the right field at the right time [citation needed]. The only evidence I have for this is that in the successful silicon valley start-ups I have observed, the founders have always been hard-working, intelligent people with a reasonable business plan, or at least a solid idea. It seemed that during the period between deciding to found a start-up and actually getting some revenue, there was a lot of hard work and not a lot of rationality used. Maybe you could use x-rationality instead of hard work (or in addition to it?) to be more successful? I have not been able to identify this happening at any point.
Edited for formatting and to add some more content.
Wow, how do you master Mandarin AND French with difficulties with akrasia & drive?
Ze speaks Mandarin and English natively. Ze was born in China and moved to USA at a young age. French was learned in high school, then more in college. French is also a relatively easy language to get the basics of if you speak English, and ze spent a year living in France which no doubt helped a great deal.
In response to
Open Thread for January 8 - 16 2014
My friend will have one month of unemployment in the SF Bay Area and is looking for projects, experiences, and ideas to make zirself awesome. My friend works in the biological sciences, but plans to apply to medical school. Traits include being multilingual (english, mandarin, french), very limited spanish, cooking, sub-power user competent technology use. Not widely read, not x-rational, difficulties with akrasia, drive, self-confidence, public speaking, making friends. No significant knowledge of coding, math beyond calculus II, philosophy, sociology, politics, economics. Normal fitness levels, but does not regularly exercise.
Where should ze look for advice on how to spend a month without work? What kind of activities would be good to pursue? Goals include acceptance to medical school, forming an alternative career, or other non-specified ideas about becoming a better person.
= b715d02e85f7b3b4ae65ca3d3e450868)
Subscribe to RSS Feed
= f037147d6e6c911a85753b9abdedda8d){kind=logo}
Anecdotally someone close to me did one of those and it was a quick way to burn thousands of dollars.
I tried to dissuade them, but end the end they came back with less knowledge than I did of the subject, and all I did was follow some youtube tutorials and look at stack overflow to create a couple learning apps for android.
Anecdotally two people close to me did similar crash camps on coding and ended up with high-paying coding jobs despite having no experience in software development and degrees in unrelated fields. They seemed to do well, but since this isn't a controlled experiment I can't say whether the jobs they got are jobs they'd have not been able to get if they just studied on their own for a while.