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I am a lazy and selfish person. I want to get more rational myself, but I don't want to put any effort into helping others become more rational.
In response to
Ideas on growth of the community
That's cool. Do you want to have everything sorted in this forum, so that you can choose which topic you want to read? If yes, contribute to that idea, it will help you.
I hope you get rational, cure death alone, and spare me the effort.I'm lazy and selfish as well, and I'm better at that than you./s
I would be in favour of an offtopic tab separate from Main and Discussion
And then why not do the whole job, and create tab for meetups, to avoid spam in main, tab for AI, tab for decision making, tab for overcoming biases, tab for... Well, we came to my solution. =)
In response to
Ideas on growth of the community
I'd also like to see targeted interaction and outreach to the academic research community.
GiveWell has a good model of validating and checking intuitions against prominent people in development, but seems to opt for public intellectuals over less famous experts in the field who's thinking those public intellectuals may defer to. In the EA community, I feel this has lead to such confidence in deworming, when deworming is actually one of if not the most controversial topics in academic impact evaluation (nicknamed worm wars. And DALY's are the pariah outside of specific subcommunities of impact analysis looking to the future, not immediate use.
There may be many similar misunderstandings in the rationality community which are taken for granted. But unlike the EA community, the rationalist community seems to be less transparent. MIRI technical research agenda is still secret, amongst other things..
By contrasts, I can go on GiveWell, which in some ways isn't part of the EA community so much as the inspiration for it, and see how they think they think and motivating influences cleanly laid out, without even going into their methodology. Be warmed, ordinary readers, I'm playing the critic here. MIRI is much more technically complicated that GiveWell, I'm just trying to give criticism to be constructive. Path dependence and novelty of MIRI's agenda, amongst other things, are obvious barriers to doing things the EA way in the rationalist community.
Btw, I think you've misspelled 'community'. Some members of the community seem really neurotic about that sort of thing and it would be shame if you were downvoted or missed upvotes for something as trivial as that.
Thanks for the warning. I forgot to check the title. Grammar-Nazis always lurk for that fresh non-native-speaker flesh.
In response to
Ideas on growth of the community
I made a post recently that Less Wrong Lacks Direction that seems very similar to point 3. Less Wrong has moderation, but it doesn't have leadership. There is almost no concerted group action. Everyone has their own ideas of what Less Wrong needs to do next, and they are all different.
I think Why our kind can't co-operate is an excellent article. Whenever you post an idea, you might get a few upvotes, but you'll also get a lot of comments saying that something else is a better idea instead.
The reason why Less Wrong is getting less readers is because Less Wrong has much less content. Either 1) we need someone crazy like Scott Alexander who will solo producing huge amounts of content 2) we need some way to encourage the posting of new content. The ability to create separate sections of Less Wrong would be a great way to increase the amount of content posted. The programming wouldn't even be that hard, the issue is that the moderators still haven't commented on whether they'd turn it on if someone went out and did it.
I agree with you completely. Just want to point out that LW lacks directions. It's complete bullshit that we should all focus on one thing. And having all directions interfere is just making it harder to do anything sensible.
The ability to create separate sections of Less Wrong would be a great way to increase the amount of content posted.
Why do you believe that separate sections will increase the amount of content that's posted?
He just gave you a reason.
Whenever you post an idea, you might get a few upvotes, but you'll also get a lot of comments saying that something else is a better idea instead.
If you organize content, you would get rid of that sort of things. Imagine going on reddit, to math subreddit, and commenting on some theorem "yeah, but it's better to develop new political system than solving these equations". It's just bizarre, and for a reason: not everyone on this world should be solving the same problem.
In response to
Ideas on growth of the community
Before wanting to grow "the community" it makes sense to ask what "the community" happens to be. You can count Scott's blog into the community or you can decide that the community is only what's branded as LW.
This community is some kind of organization, and it has a goal. To be precise, it probably has two goals, as I see it: to make existing members more rational to get more members.
I wouldn't consider that to be the main goals.
For me one of the most important goals is developing the "art of rationality". A lot of discussion on LW is not about simply applying existing techniques of how to be rational but to develop new concepts. A while ago someone complained that he read a LW post about how to estimate whether a woman will say yes when asked out for a date as probability.
If you think the goal is effective action, there are a lot of reasons why that's not a good way to approach the subject of asking out a woman. If you on the other hand care about how probability estimates are made in emotionally charged real life situations the inquiry is a lot more interesting.
When it comes to gathering new members quality is more important than quantity. At our Berlin LW meetup we could trivially increase the attendance by putting it on meetup.com. We don't and as a result have a meetup with the kind of people who find the event without having to check meetup.
I would STRONGLY encourage new topics
So, what's stopping you from posting new topics yourself?
When it comes to gathering new members quality is more important than quantity.
Exactly the reason why I posted. Nobody wants to make a big community by destroying the quality. That's the main topic of this course I recommended.
For me one of the most important goals is developing the "art of rationality". Would it be easier if there were 10 times more people like you, who want to do the same? Would it be easier if existing people were more rational? Your goal has nothing(or very little) to do with my goals, which is self- and world-improvement. So I would call your and my goals as subgoals with regard to community. If any of our goals would be main goal to the community, the other guy would not have interest to contribute. This is the reason i ask for separation of topics.
So, what's stopping you from posting new topics yourself? I just did, my friend. This topic is on growth of the community. What you want to say is "it's not the topic I'm interested in", and that's the reason I want separation of topics. So that I can speak about growth of the community without bothering you.
In response to
The Best Textbooks on Every Subject
Non-relativistic Quantum Mechanics: Sakurai's Modern Quantum Mechanics
This is a textbook for graduate-level Quantum Mechanics. It's advantages over other texts, such as Messiah's Quantum Mechanics, Cohen-Tannoudji's Quantum Mechanics, and Greiner's Quantum Mechanics: An introduction is in it's use of experimental results. Sakurai weaves in these important experiments when they can be used to motivate the theoretical development. The beginning, using the Stern-Gerlach experiment to introduce the subject, is the best I have ever encountered.
I found this book very good as well. I want to add a comment, though.
If you start reading it, and you get lost, just stop reading that chapter and go to the next one. Read this book lightly at first, then start clarifying everything afterwards. Reading introduction of every chapter first is very clever.
What are the prerequisites for reading this? What level of mathematics and background of classical physics?
You need some solid Linear Algebra: Vector Space, dual vector space, unitary and hermitian matrices, eigenvectors and eigenvalues, trace... Mind that you should learn these things with mathematical approach, for example, vectors are elements of vector space which has certain axioms, and not 3D arrows, like pupils learn in school. Since book has this approach (matrix mechanics, rather than wave mechanics), you don't need too strong analysis, you can just trust that some things are working that way, but if you want to understand it fully, i recommend taking some analysis course as well, to be able to understand decomposition in eigenfunctions. Integrals and derivatives are MUST, however.
In response to
Decision Theory: Value in Time
Ok, this thing is harder then it looked. Writing demands time and concentration, and I am not sure if i can explain things as good as they were explained to me.
I am absolutely sure it would be highly beneficial for people to understand basics of economics and finance, but I think I am not the right person to do this. So, I give up, and I will just recommend some literature/video lessons. I think i saw some book list on this forum, so, if you want to hear more about this stuff, head there.
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To be honest, that's basically why I post in open threads. I want other people to tell me something else is better, or that I'm missing something, etc. I don't recall ever being offended by that, but I have been disappointed by how few replies I've received.
I was not talking about "this elevation is higher than yours". I mean, if you got better idea that solves my problem more efficiently, thank you very much. I was talking about the ideas which are at the same level. You need hot chocolate, which is hot and sweet, but all you have is coffee and lemonade. You can drink coffee, it's warm but bitter, and you can drink lemonade, which is sweet, but cold. Someone says, take lemonade, someone says take coffee. In the end, it doesn't matter which one you take. Both solve the problem partially, but community will take none, because it's not perfect. Translated to the case I wanted to cover: let's say we have part of the community which wants to improve the world we live in. Some think building better government will help, some think doing research, improving technology etc will help, some think we should start at the bottom and help the ones in the greatest need. They will fight each other, although they could give each team it's task and do it that way. This is my intention on the long stick. To make teams. Each member could help solving problems he feels he could solve, without spam from other teams, etc.
In the end, I just wanted to help solving our inability to organize.