I don't think the site as a whole needs a "new" direction. It needs continued conversation, new sub-projects, and for the members to engage with the community.

Less Wrong has developed its own conventions for argument, reference points for logic, and traditions of interpretation of certain philosophical, computational, and every day problems. The arguments all occur within a framework which implicitly furnishes the members with a certain standard of thinking and living (which we don't always live up to).

Maybe what you really want is for people in the community to find a place where they can excel and contribute more. What we need most is to continue to develop ways people can contribute. Not force the generation of projects from above.

I would consider casual basketball a competition simply because there is a winner.

My point is that I am used to playing in a way that we don't keep score at all so there is no winner. But generally yes.

except for bailing hay, to hell with hay

People still do this manually? I spent significant amounts of my life in rather poor regions in Eastern Europe and still I see these probably machine-made, rolled-up or cubical piles of hay.

The most heroic level of manual work I saw was when a guy who could not afford a car inherited a rather crappy house built of stones. He disassembled it, hauled the stones to the other edge of the village on a hand cart (why did not he rent a truck for an hour is beyond me, they were not that poor), and built a wing to their house. As his main job shift was 12 hours 15 days a month he had 50% of the days to work on it so not just weekends - but it meant no free time at all, even not a decent sleep schedule. BTW I would like working such shifts. After 8 hours of work not so much gets done in the evenings at home. Might as well do another 4 and have more free days.

Although, I would feel a lot more manly if I could restore a bathroom competently.

This reminds me of Jack Donovan's four masculine virtues, Strength, Courage, Mastery, Honor. This is the mastery part. But it is more of an inherited romantic view than something of actual utility. If we had any sense, we would not assemble houses on the spot, we would have everything prefabricated, like with every other consumer item. We don't hand assemble cars in a garage, this makes no sense. But for houses it is still like it is done in 1880. As a contrast, I saw in an old house in London converted to a hotel, where bathrooms were added to the rooms, and they were one big cast plastic item, walls, floor, basic, toilet, shower, everything part of one huge plastic shape. This was fairly ugly and rickety, like an in-room Toi-Toi, but if low-quality prefab is possible, perhaps higher-quality prefab would also be possible.

I consider it interesting how whenever I write about this, it tends to be a bit misunderstood. Competing is a very high level thing, and it was not on my mind really here. Going from a computer chair nerd to someone who can seriously compete is a huge move and I am not even sure if it is realistic at 30+. It takes not only strength or cardio (which are fairly straightforward to develop) but also skill, speed, accuracy of movement, so motoric control, balance, and so on. I am not sure how much it is possible to develop these later if they were left to rust at a childhood and teenagerhood. What I mean under sports is more like getting at the level where you can take some enjoyment out of playing / sparring / doing it, where what you do seems roughly correct and your movements are fairly smooth and coordinate, so it is starting to get something fun and not like in the first months where you spend most of your time cursing because you are unable to accurately imitate a movement even after 5 times of having been shown it. So this is mostly what I mean under sports, to be able to do them at all, not to be able to compete, competing is a very high level.

For example, I invested about... 80-100 hours into boxing and later kick-boxing so far, at about 3-4 hours per week, and even friendly sparring seems very far as of yet, I am still at the stage where if I execute techniques slowly they are more or less correct, but if I try using realistic speeds I tend to screw them up. The next stage will be adding speed, the next stage adding strength, the next using combos, and after that some friendly sparring, which we tried actually, but I was simply overwhelmed that I am not "allowed" to stop and think after parrying 4-5 punches but there are dozens and dozens more coming. Going from there to any sort of competition, where it is not even friendly but the other person is seriously trying to win, sounds like a very high level thing and I think it is beyond the reach of people who are not young anymore. Add to it the sheer pyschological pressure of competition, of someone seriously not trying to be helpful to you but actually working against you, this is fairly scary even if it was a nerdy competition about Star Wars trivia.

In my 37 years I've yet to have an experience with people working against me instead of trying to be more or less helpful. For example, when we occasionally tried playing table tennis, ping pong, it was usually about trying to give each other easy serves, easy balls that are easy to hit back. Because if we try to be competitive and give each other difficult balls like aiming at the edge of the table or going low over the net, we would spend 80% of the time missing the ball and then having to retrieve it, and where is the fun in it? While if we give each other easy ones, we can have a more smooth game where most of the time is actually spent playing. To me the difference between being able to play table tennis on easy level, giving each other easy, high, slow balls, and between trying to be competitive and giving difficult ones, sounds rather enormous and at some level unfriendly... So I never really tried anything competitive so far, be that at sports, at work / career, or any activity. My life so was playing friendly with each other. I guess it is a bit boring at some level... for example the idea that business compete is something I saw in textbooks but does not reflect my working experience much.

So no, I mean sports mainly in the sense of active hobby, of getting to a level where doing / playing / sparring it is fun, not to that very high level that competition means.

Manual labor: pretty much all the men in my family except myself (I was the nerd, who was excused from it) were doing it and it seems it does not help much. Basic gardening is nothing, something like building a house and carrying 50kg sacks of materials up the first floor, that is more like exercise. Yet, nobody was well built from this. Partially perhaps due to poor nutritition (poor blue collar lunch in my dads youth was milk and bread from the corner shop for example), partially because working men tend to see this an excuse to drink and eat like a pig and get fat. But those who didn't were simply wiry. This things burns calories, but is surprisingly bad at building muscle.

However, on the not getting fat level some blue jobs help. My wife is actually a cook at IKEA and she does not want an office or cashier job pretty much because she fears it leads to ass ballooning. It seems things like unloading 400 kg Swedish meatballs into the steamer help burning calories. But this is far harder than something like gardening, they literally sell metric tons of food (well, "food") a day and moving that weight around is what apparently helps. Wherever everything is packed into 12-20kg crates and needs moved around, in these industrial kitchens. So it is almost like the construction described above. (I wonder why do people described industrial kitchens as "burger-flipping", it seems "heavy carton / sack moving" is closer.)

When I tried un-nerding myself, I tried to volunteer at building buddhist meditation centers. My experience was that 90% of construction is carrying heavy stuff to the place they are used. The unskilled guy, like me, keeps doing that all day and perhaps it counts as exercise. The skilled guy just uses the materials and that is hardly an exercise at all. Laying bricks is physically not hard when a volunteer / apprentice heaps them up in the right places. Painting is physically not hard when the volunteer / apprentice carries the bucket of paint.

Good article pulling the covers from a cultural blind spot. We do obsess over exercise as though it were something you set out to do, instead of something that is part of an activity. The logic of sports has always been more appealing to me: drive to compete and do well leads to desire to hone specific skills that will unable success in the particular context of that sport. What's exercise... can you even win that game?

You never took a turn in this article towards manual labor. I hope to hear your thoughts on gardening, home improvement, and volunteer work as they relate to exercise. What 'household/handyman' activities meet the exercise threshold, or are there any?

I am not sorry, they were smart guys, although AFAIK misusing it (justifying what they believed anyway), nevertheless if I would see the Summa Theologiae as a fantasy novel and ignore for a second that it is meant to be true, then it would be the most largest, most consistent, most logical fantasy universe ever created, really Tolkien having nothing it. Strictly as tour de force, as a showing off of sheer brilliance, it is respectable. Aquinas was a rare genius.

Unfortunately he was sitting deep in a world, culture, and organization and role, where the only possible outcome was justifying the Bible.

Oh, they are far more tricky than that. At least the Edward Feser type Scholastics. They just define love as whatever god does.

Basically, the logic is that to love someone is not to wish that they get what they want to get, but to wish that they get what is actually good for them. What is actually good for them is what is in accordance with their natural goal, telos, and this does not even contradict common sense much, to the Scholastic the natural goal of horses is to run fast, eat grass, mate etc. and yes, indeed if we wanted to build a horse heaven it would be huge grassland for long runs. So so far it even checks out for the common-sense observer.

Then they just say natural goals are determined by god and QED.

Scholastics say a true god cannot be unloving by definition, in any logically conceivable universe, because it would imply he does not want what he wants (helping beings to reach natural goals he himself determined) In other words, they think the map / language logic is something superior to reality.

I appreciate your summary of these religions' ideas on the question.

I do think the God's rock question could be answered in theory; it seems to ask whether God's power for creation exceeds his power to apply force. If we're allowing some kind of limits, I don't know that these powers would end up perfectly equal.

That aside, I want to clarify my question. I thank you again for providing what sound like somewhat technical, somewhat mysterious explanations, but in any case genuine religious teachings, especially since I could buy believers buying them.

To my mind, these answers answer not. In the best-case scenario, that these spokesmen are inspired by some other being, that being has told them that it has these qualities which keep it from deceiving.

Surely, these data are as suspect as all originating from an omnipotent being that claims to embody love. If it wants you to believe it does, it's hardly out of character to provide at least some semblance of support for its preferred conclusion.

And of course, if both a loving and a deceiving omnipotent being would provide such, its presence is not evidence for either over the other.

There is some confusion here. Asking Less Wrong flavored questions using theological terms generally requires misusing the terms. This is unfortunate, because these questions are really interesting, but most us don't have the requisite understanding of theology to do it well (including myself obviously(although, I venture that I might know more than most(#nesting))). So, my answer will be really disappointing.

In the monotheistic theology of Islam (represented by Al-Farabi), Judaism (represented by Maimonides), and, Christianity (represented by Thomas Aquinas), when it is said that God is omnipotent, they are saying God is not lacking in power, not that God can actually will to do any particular action whatsoever. In this way God is restrained. For example, God cannot create a rock so heavy that he cannot lift it because that is not a logical possibility. Or as a mathematician once said, "Nonsense is nonsense, even if you say it about God."

To your question about a loving God's possibility to deceive. This is a tough question because it is several in one. Can God deceive, can God's nature be learned about through observation of the created universe, and can God deceive about his nature? The first two questions are contested within each faith tradition, the third question (which I think is most relevant here) third is not disputed by the three philosophers. They all would say, "No."

I'm going to summarize a really long arguments the best I can: since God is a self-caused simple being (having no parts and lacking in no quality), his intellect (it's an operation) can only be directed toward Truth and his will (it's his other operation) can only be directed toward the Good (which is love).

This argument requires that we agree that Truth and Goodness have a primary level of existence, whereas falsity and evil exist contingently on the existence of truth and goodness. Since God has no parts, he cannot be oriented towards the composite essences of falsity and evil.

This is definitely an unsatisfying solution for most of us. The major problem for us approaching Theological Epistemology, as I see it, is that we have to start by explaining what metaphysics we are willing to accept and what we aren't.

Cheating on the GRE doesn't obviously hurt other people.

Except for the people whose actual ability is higher than yours, whose slot you took, or the people who get someone of lower ability that the scores suggest, and that's just the first order effects. The second order effects of having a society with less efficient information transfer are also pretty miserable.