I think this post misses a lot of the scope and timing of the Less Wrong diaspora. A lot of us are on Tumblr now; I've made a few blog posts at the much more open group blog Carcinisation, there's a presence on Twitter, and a lot of us just have made social friendships with enough other rationalists that the urge to post for strangers has a pressure release valve in the form of discussing whatever ideas with the contents of one's living room or one's Facebook friends.

The suggestions you list amount to "ask Scott to give up his private resource for a public good, even though if what he wanted to do was post on a group blog he still has a LW handle", "somehow by magic increase readership of the EA forum", and "restructure LW to entice the old guard back, even though past attempts have disintegrated into bikeshedding and a low level of technical assistance from the people behind the website's actual specs". These aren't really "solutions".

Mike Vassar should have his own television show.

I would probably be able to get the same amount of work done in a 30 or even 20 hour week, given the amount of time wasted on meetings/email/waiting for data in an average office. Boss wouldn't want to pay me the same for a 20hr work week though.

Feminists believe that women are paid less than men for no good economic reason. If this is the case, feminists should invest in companies that hire many women, and short those which hire few women, to take advantage of the cheaper labour costs.

I suspect that the effect, if real, is likely small enough to be masked by confounders, like CEO competence, market conditions, various other biases of the executives and the board,random chance etc. I wonder if any statistics exist on the matter.

Can you think of any unusual LW-type beliefs that have strong economic implications (say over the next 1-3 years)?]

Given that MIRI and CFAR are still struggling to get enough funding despite presumably employing the most LW-rational people in the world, I severely doubt that LW rationality has "strong economic implications".

Being strategic is nothing more than taking literally 5 minutes to examine the problem of achieving your goal with an open mind, and translating that into next actions. The trouble is that most people don't bother linking goals to actions at all, they'd apparently rather aimlessly wander through life seemingly hoping to end up at a goal state by random chance.

Fixing this requires two things: (1) an ability to admit you're wrong (meaning what you are doing now, and what you have done in the past is/was not in fact effective at achieving your goals, and you should be doing something else instead), and (2) an ability to avoid bias in the brain storming process.

Suggested exercise: drop all preconceived notions of what you should be doing, and think for a literal five minutes -- set a timer on your phone or something -- doing nothing but enumerating possible pathways to achieving your goal. Do not evaluate, simply enumerate with pen and paper. When the buzzer goes off, evaluate and organize the options, then repeat, this time focusing on what tactics are necessary to implement the strategic pathways. After theroughly brainstorming at that level, make some decisions about which strategies and tactics to follow, for now, and repeat one more time the brain storming session, this time coming up with next actions.

This can take less than an hour, no matter the size of the goal. For example, it took me only 40 minutes to reduce "permanent and sustainable expansion of human settlements into the cosmos" to a next action related to Bitcoin commodity markets.

Since LW is going to get a lot of visitors someone should put an old post that would make an excellent first impression in a prominent position. I nominate How to Be Happy.

Hi Algernoq,

Thanks for writing this. This sentence particularly resonated:

LW members who are conventionally successful (e.g. PhD students at top-10 universities) typically became so before learning about LW, and the LW community may or may not support their continued success (e.g. may encourage them, with only genuine positive intent, to spend a lot of time studying Rationality instead of more specific skills).

I was definitely explicitly discouraged from pursuing a PhD by certain rationalists and I think listening to their advice would have been one of the biggest mistakes of my life. Unfortunately I see this attitude continuing to be propagated so I am glad that you are speaking out against it.

EDIT: Although, it looks like you've changed my favorite part! The text that I quoted the above was not the original text (which talked more about dropping out of PhD and starting a start-up).

Neither arguments nor evidence. That is the exact point of my post.

But to answer a more lenient reading of your request: After making an effort to be less hostile to group celebrations, people in general and local cultures and traditions I could relax enough to take part in those and/or enjoy them. As a result I both feel more belonging to the country I live in and also I appreciate other cultures and cultural traditions more.

Does that answer your question?

I would be interested in a month-long experiment to see how the quality of Discussion changes with you banning whatever you felt like.

I've gone and done 20 problems on Project Euler, and learned a little, but it didn't seem like the fastest way to learn. Some of the problems took me awhile, but mostly they could be done with things I already knew. There was just one that I had to resort to Googling how to do, which led to learning a bit more about Python's max command. But maybe I should take most of Project Euler seeming relatively easy as encouragement?