I usually have a negative reaction at first.

Then, at some later time, I find myself looking back at those times with a sense of pride.

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".

A president or prime minister will be the public face of the nation. He'd be expected to meet with foreign dignitaries and speak in public. At the very least, a debate gives people an idea of how their leaders carry themselves when under stress in full public view.

However, if I had to choose between live, in-person debates and a written format where candidates had plenty of time to formulate their thoughts and gather supporting evidence, I'd take the written format every time.

Making prepared statements is usually done by a politician's staff. The candidate might make some suggestions and approve/reject a draft, but otherwise such a debate would be staffers vs. staffers.

I'll also note that once upon a time, people attended public debates in part for entertainment.

On a related thought, I've idly mused on multiple occasions that live in-person political debates seem overweighted in importance.

Overall I do agree. I seldom watch debates, because what the candidates do say is often just a condensed version of the party position that shows up on any one of a dozen websites.

In a written format presentation and likability are also important but candidates can have all the help they need with as much time as they need in a written format.

"Help they need" sounds like an euphemism. It might very well mean that the candidate isn't directly responsible for a single word.

Before a debate the campaign of a candidate thinks about the possible questions that can be asked. Then they write talking points of how the candidate is supposed to answer the questions. The candidate memorizes those talking points and goes armed with them to the debate.

Regardles of the questions asked a good candidate sticks to his memorized talking points. If he forgets which governments departments "he" wants to eliminate he loses. If a questions comes up that isn't covered in his memorized talking points, no problem. Simply pick the talking point that's nearest to to topic of the question and run with it.

Having the questions written down wouldn't change much. It just removes the memory test that weeds out candidates who can't remember their own talking points.

The thing which would be important is to not let politicians get away with given statements of the record. Campaigns should answer all meaningful questions that journalists have on the record.

On a related thought, I've idly mused on multiple occasions that live in-person political debates seem overweighted in importance.

I mean, there is an argument to be made along the lines of these types of debates showing candidates ability to think on their feet.

However, if I had to choose between live, in-person debates and a written format where candidates had plenty of time to formulate their thoughts and gather supporting evidence, I'd take the written format every time.

We get instead definitive conclusions drawn from thought experiments only.

As a relatively new user here at LessWrong (and new to rationality) it is also curious to me that many here point me to articles written by Eliezer Yudkowsky to support their arguments. I have the feeling there is a general admiration for him and that some could be biased by that rather than approaching the different topics objectively.

Also, when I read the article about dissolving problems and how algorithms feel I didn't find any evidence that it is known exactly how neuron networks work to create these feelings.

That article was a good way of explaining how we might "feel" the existence of things and how to demystify them (like free will, time, ghosts, god, etc.) but I am not sure if the "extra dangling unit in the center" is something that we know exists or if it is another construct that was built to refute things by thought experiment rather than by empiric evidence.

I am not sure for how many people it is true, but my own bad-at-mathness is largely about being bad at reading really terse, dense, succint text, because my mind is used to verbose text and thus filtering out half of it or not really paying close attention.

I hate the living guts out of notation, Greek variables or single-letter variables. Even the Bayes theorem is too terse, succint, too information-dense for me. I find it painful that in something like P(B|A) all three bloody letters mean a different thing. It is just too zipped. I would far more prefer something more natural langauge like Probability( If-True (Event1), Event2) (this looks like a software code - and for a reason).

This is actually a virtue when writing programs, I am never the guy who uses single letter variables, my programs are always like MarginPercentage = DivideWODivZeroError((SalesAmount-CostAmount), SalesAmount) * 100. So never too succint, clearly readable.

Let's stick to the Bayer Theorem. My brain is screaming don't give me P, A, B. Give me "proper words" like Probability, Event1, and Event2. So that my mind can read "Pro...", then zone out and rest while reading "bability" and turn back on again with the next word.

This is basically the inability to focus really 100%, needing the "fillers", the low information density of natural language text for allowing my brain to zone out and rest for fractions of a second, of finding too dense, too terse notation, where losing a single letter means not understanding the problem.

This is largely a redudancy problem. Natural language is redundant, you can say "probably" as "prolly" and people still understand it - so your mind can zone out during reading half of a text and you still get its meaning. Math notation is highly not redundant, miss one single tiny itty bitty letter and you don't understand a proof.

So I guess I could be better at math if there was an inflated, more redudant, not single-letter-variables, more natural language like version of it.

I guess programming fills that gap well.

I figure Scott does not like terse, dense notation either, however he seems to be good at doing the work of inflating it to something more readable for himself.

I guess I am not reinventing warm water here. There is probably a reason why a programmer would more likely write Probability(If-True(Event1), Event2) than P(A|B) - this is more understandable for many people. I guess it should be part of math education to learn to cope with the denser, terser, less redundant second notation. I guess my teachers did not really manage to impart that to me.

This makes me think of Little Caesars pizza. They have a variety of pizza-place-type of stuff on their menus (hot wings, breadsticks, etc), but I wouldn't be surprised to find if 90% or more of their business was their $5.00 14-inch pepperoni pizza.

Around here (midwest USA), during prime pizza-buying hours, they set up a card table outside stacked with dozens of pizzas and people just drive by with a $5 bill out and grab a pizza.

This depends entirely on how you use email.

I do almost zero personal communication via email. It's all notifications, receipts, etc. Thus I check it maybe 4 or 5 times a week.

The frequency I would check my email would vary if I did personal conversations, or business conversations, or support, or etc.

On top of that, with GMail (or Google's Inbox), you can set up all sorts of filters and searches. My phone notifies me of new emails from my wife, whom I know doesn't abuse email, but new emails from my mom whom is likely to be forwarding me something...mom-ish...get read when I do my several-times-a-week look over my inbox.