I've enjoyed the article, and I look forward for the parts, though it required me three/fourth re-reads to dig out the actual tips, they are scattered and sort-of buried amidst jokes and story.

Wasn't sure if should have stayed at a job or applied for grad school, so I quarter-assedly worked on school applications while quarter-assedly pretending to work until I got fired.

You're the author of putanumonit?? I'd like to take this opportunity to say that your blog is amazing and I love it. Please write more soon!

I started a rationality-adjacent blog about applying math to life last year and a couple of weeks ago I achieved my first major goal for the blog: a place on Scott's blogroll which bumped my readership by around 10x.

This is something that I always found weird hanging out with LWers, how people almost take pride in being anti-sports. I'm not athletic at all and yet I play a dozen different sports and watch everything from figure skating to college football. Is this because the nerd/jock dichotomy actually happens in American schools and not in movies? All my friends from the math club in high school in Israel played soccer several times a week, every chance that we could.

I encourage everyone to try playing a sport, if you've never tried then something like ping pong or even throwing a frisbee around can be good entry level activities for people who think they're horrible athletes.

A question about donating:

AFAIK about half of the payment for attending a workshop (~$2,000) is considered a charitable donation, is tax-deductible etc. Would it be possible for me to donate to the winter fundraiser and have the donation amount deducted from my workshop participation fee if and when I choose to attend in the future?

I think it works out great for CFAR to allow this: either you get a pre-commited attendee or a free donation.

One more use I have for LessWrong: learning about subjects from people whom I trust to be smart and rational. A while back I wanted to learn up on perceptual control theory, I found RichardKenneways' and Vaniver's posts a hundred times better than Wikipedia.

This is an invaluable resource for me that I would hate to lose. Even if the quality of new stuff being written on LW is declining, the quality of stuff that I'm reading on LW is still consistently excellent. I really hope we would find a way to keep this aspect going.

You bring up a number of important points. Perhaps I missed this when reading, but one role LessWrong plays and continues to play is a good source of discussion. Often I'll find the discussion to be more interesting than a particular article. It's not uncommon for me to be linked to a particular comment divorced from its larger context and not be interested in the larger context. I don't know how common this behavior is, but this is not uncommon for me, and I don't think replacing the rationalist materials with a wiki or Q&A site would suit this well at all. This is one reason to favor something like Reddit.

I'm also generally not a fan of shutting down even semi-active forums. In one online community I've participated in, there were several major forum closures, and each time there was a period of confusion about what to do if you're interested in discussion, along with basically sectarian posturing to get active posters. The sectarian stuff caused major problems down the line, and the current discussion forum for this community more or less voluntarily avoids those conflicts now. There also are a number of roles LessWrong plays that I'm not sure would survive a transition to the diaspora, like the page about sharing academic papers. I also often enjoy reading the open threads. Perhaps transitioning LessWrong more towards discussion would be a good middle ground.

Edit: On a related note, I find following discussions on Tumblr to be a huge pain, and hope either this improves in the future or that more discussions happen elsewhere.

Announce that during the next year, LW will have one post per week, at a specified time. There will be an email address where anyone can send their submissions, whereupon a horribly secretive and biased group of editors will select the best one each week, aiming for Eliezer quality or higher.

Functionally, this is turning LW into a magazine with one article per week. I think that's a decent approach, though I have some reservations.

Remember the shift from OB to LW, and one of the big changes being that people went from having to email Hanson about posting something (and maybe getting shot down) to being able to post something themselves. I worry that this creates too much in the way of inconvenience and risk of failure for posters, and means that they'll post it somewhere else instead of on LW.

But I think the tournament nature of it--there's a post every week, and so we need people to contribute, and if your post doesn't make it (or gets waitlisted or so on) it's not because you're absolutely bad, just relatively bad--does improve the idea significantly.

I'm also not sure how well this plays with the fragmentation in interests of people in the community.

Having just read this post for the first time has made me so happy!

Let me explain: Eliezer doesn't sound optimistic at all in this essay, especially compared to the gung-ho "we got this!" spirit of almost every other call to action post. And here I am, someone who's so new to LW I only just got to this post, and yet in the last year I have:

• Enjoyed rationalist parties with dozens of people.
• Went to over 20 weekly rationalist gatherings.
• Ran an EA charity research meetup.
• Got 3 other people hooked on the sequences.
• Am taking my girlfriend to Soltice next month.

With all that I don't even consider myself a central part of the community (either LW or EA) just someone hanging around the margins and trying to contribute occasionally.

Here's another thing to keep in mind with the Catholic Church: they've been around for 2,000 years, and they're one of 2,000 cults that made it. Can it be that there's nothing going on besides time and survivor bias? 6 years after this post was written, Givewell is affecting millions and MIRI just raised $600k by itself. I don't know if we should really still be looking up to the church for organization tips.