CFAR uses double sided badges and they helped me substantially in memorizing people's names by the end of the workshop.

I've also talked to many of the prominent posters who've left about the decline of LW, and pointed out that the coordination problem could be deliberately solved if everyone decided to come back at once. Everyone that responded expressed displeasure that LW had faded and interest in a coordinated return, and often had some material that they thought they could prepare and have ready.

High value is assigned to many original top posters. This leads me to three questions:

1. What demand will LW 2.0 satisfy that will keep these prominent original posters returning to LW regularly in the future over the course of 2+ years?

2. Do you think the reasons that led them to leave the first time can be prevented this time and will not be soon reiterated?

3. How can new top posters as good or better than the old ones be found/recruited/marketed to?

Rationalist community needs to learn a little humility. Do you realize the disparity in intellectual firepower between "you guys" and theoretical physicists?

A few points:

1. I would hate to see LW close and I don't think that would be a helpful step in getting people exposed to rationality unless a new central hub rose to take its place. I found LW through HPMOR just this year and have very little idea of what LW looked in it's supposed glory days. Things aren't great now, but if LW had been completely dead I likely wouldn't have moved from wanting to be rational to reading 600+ pages of Rationality:From AI to Zombies, making tons of connections and rationalist friends, attending CFAR, starting a LW meetup in my area, and more. A completely dead website would have given the impression of a dead philosophy that was abandoned by the people who followed it because it wasn't actually that useful after all.

2. Decreases to the level of polish, rigor, and rationality knowledge publicly deemed necessary before posting in the various areas could be helpful (in current LW or a LW 2.0). I mainly post in Open and Stupid Question threads because of this.

3. People here can be pretty cold and harsh in their replies. I've also heard of issues regarding downvote brigades or mass downvoting of people's posts due to personal disagreements. If this place really is full of "unquiet spirits" then a method of removing them, discouraging that kind of conduct, or changing them into kind benevolent spirits should be included in the works.

Well, it depends on what you mean by "rationality". Here's something I posted in 2014, slightly revised:

If not rationality, then what?

LW presents epistemic and instrumental rationality as practical advice for humans, based closely on the mathematical model of Bayesian probability. This advice can be summed up in two maxims:

1. Obtain a better model of the world by updating on the evidence of things unpredicted by your current model.
2. Succeed at your given goals by using your (constantly updating) model to predict which actions will maximize success.

Or, alternately: Having correct beliefs is useful for humans achieving goals in the world, because correct beliefs enable correct predictions, and correct predictions enable goal-accomplishing actions. And the way to have correct beliefs is to update your beliefs when their predictions fail.

We can call these the rules of Bayes' world, the world in which updating and prediction are effective at accomplishing human goals. But Bayes' world is not the only imaginable world. What if we deny each of these premises and see what we get? Other than Bayes' world, which other worlds might we be living in?

To be clear, I'm not talking about alternatives to Bayesian probability as a mathematical or engineering tool. I'm talking about imaginable worlds in which Bayesian probability is not a good model for human knowledge and action.

Suppose that making correct predictions does not enable goal-accomplishing actions. We might call this Cassandra's world, the world of tragedy — in which those people who know best what the future will bring, are most incapable of doing anything about it.

In the world of heroic myth, it is not oracles (good predictors) but rather heroes and villains (strong-willed people) who create change in the world. Heroes and villains are people who possess great virtue or vice — strong-willed tendencies to face difficult challenges, or to do what would repulse others. Oracles possess the truth to arbitrary precision, but they accomplish nothing by it. Heroes and villains come to their predicted triumphs or fates not by believing and making use of prediction, but by ignoring or defying it.

Suppose that the path to success is not to update your model of the world, so much as to update your model of your self and goals. The facts of the external world are relatively close to our priors; not much updating is needed there — but our goals are not known to us initially. In fact, we may be thoroughly deceived about what our goals are, or what satisfying them would look like.

We might consider this to be Buddha's world, the world of contemplation — in which understanding the nature of the self is substantially more important to success than understanding the external world. In this world, when we choose actions that are unsatisfactory, it isn't so much because we are acting on faulty beliefs about the external world, but because we are pursuing goals that are illusory or empty of satisfaction.

There are other models as well, that could be extrapolated from denying other premises (explicit or implicit) of Bayes' world. Each of these models should relate prediction, action, and goals in different ways: We might imagine Lovecraft's world (knowledge causes suffering), Qoheleth's world (maybe similar to Buddha's), Job's world, or Nietzsche's world.

Each of these models of the world — Bayes' world, Cassandra's world, Buddha's world, and the others — does predict different outcomes. If we start out thinking that we are in Bayes' world, what evidence might suggest that we are actually in one of the others?

My two cents:

• Merge Main and Discussion

• Make new content more visible. Right now the landing page, and in particular the first screen, mostly consists of boilerplate. You have to scroll or click in order to view if new content has been posted. In the current attention scarce era of Facebook and Twitter streams, this is not ideal.

• Discourage/ban Open threads. They are an unusual thing to have on a an open forum. They might have made sense when posting volume was higher, but right now they further obfuscate valuable content.

What are the strongest arguments that you've seen against rationality?

I'm from Baltimore, MD. We have a Baltimore meetup coming up Jan 3 and a Washington DC meetup this Sun Dec 13. So why do the two meetups listed in my "Nearest Meetups" sidebar include only a meetup in San Antonio for Dec 13 and a meetup in Durham NC for Sep 17 2026 (!)?