This is a proposal to replace (or supplement) the tagging system with a classification system for content that would be based on three elements: subject, type, and organization.

For me, one of the problems with current LessWrong is that it has too many interesting distractions in it. Ideally, I would want to follow just a few things, with highly groomed content. For example, I'd like to see a section devoted to summaries of recent behavioral psychology articles by someone who understands them better than I do. I suspect that other people would like to see other things that I'd prefer to filter out. Examples: artificial intelligence research, effective altruism, personal productivity. I'm not knocking these subjects; but when I allocate time, I'd like to be able to allocate 100% to what I want to see and 0% to what I don't.

That suggests that one area where Less Wrong could be improved is at the top level of organization. I'd suggest that content be organized in subjects, like Behavioral Psychology, Effective Altruism, Personal Productivity, and Artificial Intelligence. Now you might say that the tagging system does this. It kind of does, but it is insufficiently prescriptive. An article on effective altruism could have no tags, or many, or not the ones I think of.

Currently, the content is also classified by type, in Main and Discussion. Frankly, the difference between the two makes little sense to me. But I think there is another classification that would be helpful when combined with prescriptive subjects. I'd classify content type more like this: * Research, used for summarizing a publication elsewhere, with the summary provided by someone who know something about it * Link, used for identifying some information that might be of use to the community * Commentary, used for the normal kind of stuff that shows up in discussion * Sequence, assigned by moderators to the original stuff that made this site what it is, or at least was * Reading, used for reading groups for specific books * Meetups, used only to announce Meetups * Organization, used to announce and promote organized action

Then a third classification of content is by organization. The community needs to remain connected to the organizations it spawned. So the third content classification would be by organization, which could be empty. Possible initial values would be MIRI, CFAR, FLI, etc. I'd hope that those organizations would ensure that at least their own research got into the relevant subject under a Research classification, and that their own blog posts got thrown over into the relevant subject under a Link classification.

This would make it easier for me to justify coming back to read Less Wrong daily, because I wouldn't expose my self to wonderful distrations in order to find the things I'd like to keep up on.

I agree with you that the motivational bits, of wanting to acculturate to LW to be around the cool people, rely on the cool people being here.

The main reason I'm uncertain about the forum as the right model is that I don't see it in many other educational contexts and I think there are weird dynamics around the asymmetry between questioners and answerers and levels of competence/experience. (The cool people want some, but not too much, interaction with not-yet-cool people.) Perhaps the Slack and IRC channels and similar venues deserve some more of my attention as potential solutions here.

Vaniver's other suggestion for something that would serve this need better than a Redditalike is Stack Overflow. That's a better fit, but the SO model works best where what people need is answers to specific questions that have clear-cut answers.

Agreed. This dynamic gets even worse when the problems are psychological. If someone goes to Stack Overflow and posts "hey, this code doesn't do what I expect. What's going wrong?" we can copy the code and run it on our machines and find the issue. If someone goes to Sanity Overflow and posts "hey, I'm akratic. What's going wrong?" we... have a much harder time.

One of the things that comes up every now and then is the idea of rewriting the Sequences, and I think the main goal there would be to make them with as little of Eliezer's personality shining through as possible. (I like his personality well enough, but it's clear that many don't, and a more communal central repository would reduce some of the idiosyncrasy concerns.)

Some think that the Sequences could be significantly shortened, but I suspect that's optimism speaking instead of experience. There are only a handful of sections in the Sequences where Eliezer actually repeats himself, and even then it's likely one of those places where, really, it's worth giving them three slightly different versions of the same thing to make sure they get it.

(I haven't RTFA or most of the comments yet.)

Or maybe it should be a rationality-related aggregator/hub, where all relevant links get posted and discussed.

When ESRogs started /r/RationalistDiaspora, that's what I was hoping it would become.

I think the main thing that went wrong, is that not enough people saw it. It didn't pick up critical mass, or even self-sustaining mass. Now, ESRogs seems to be the only submitter, and there's not enough voting to act as a filter or to make links show up on my reddit front page.

But there's nothing stopping it from becoming that thing, if a bunch of people did start using it all at once. To that end, I just submitted something.

Something seems wrong to me about the "Welcoming Committee / Rationality Materials" section in the OP. I mean, if we imagine someone arriving in Rationalistan as a result of a link in the HPMOR author's notes or something of the kind and getting intimidated by how much stuff there is and/or how little they feel they know ... whyever would what they then need look like Wikipedia? Wikipedia is terrific and I am a huge fan, but it's not great at providing "social reinforcement" and "other people to ask questions of".

Vaniver's other suggestion for something that would serve this need better than a Redditalike is Stack Overflow. That's a better fit, but the SO model works best where what people need is answers to specific questions that have clear-cut answers. Surely that's not the situation of someone newly arriving in Rationalistan. Their questions are going to be more like "WTF is all this?" or "I think I need to reevaluate how I think about lots of important questions but I barely know where to start; what shall I do?". Stack Overflow itself (and I think most of its offshoots) strongly discourages that sort of open-ended question on the grounds that that's not what SO is good at.

The biggest weakness of Less Wrong as a welcoming committee isn't that it's a forum rather than an encyclopaedia or a Q&A site; I think a forum is the Right Thing for that purpose. The biggest weakness is the whole "ghost town of unquiet spirits" thing -- which I think is an unkind exaggeration but it's hard to deny has some truth to it. LW would make a better welcoming committee if it were livelier and more impressive, and it won't gain those attributes as a welcoming committee.

Having said that, I agree that there's a place for something Wikipedia-like. The LW wiki was meant to be that, but it's never had a great deal of participation. I have no idea what could be done to change that. People contribute to things to benefit others, or to benefit themselves. Editing a wiki is never going to bring much personal gain, and when all the material that would go into the wiki is already out there in other forms (e.g., the Sequences) it's hard to see that the benefit is going to be big enough to excite people doing it altruistically.

I'm somewhat curious what the reaction was. Did they notice the contradiction between wanting the kid to go to church and not wanting him to actually act on what he learned there?

My guess is that akrasia could be more effectively fought if this community called it was it is -- laziness -- instead of using a fancy Greek name.

Your writing is good, much better than mine, even though I came up with the same idea before. Please continue writing.

There is one thing I disliked, the mentioning of “liberals” and “conservatives” as the only 2 possible political positions, 2 “sides”. You already understand the package-deal fallacy, that one who identifies as a “liberal” and supports most stereotypically “liberal” policies, might still not support all of them, or support some of the “conservative” policies.

But there are policies that you can't pigeonhole into “liberal” and “conservative”. Many policies and ideas are not even binary: there are not 2 contradictory positions, but 10 contradictory positions. Therefore even the idea of a 1-dimensional continuum of left-centre-right is fallacious.

It's also important to note that not all English-speaking Internet users are from the US. There are well-educated people who live in countries you don't even know exist. So mentioning US political trends or personalities without brief explanation is an additional obstacle to understanding. If you want your texts to be widely read by non-Americans, you should make them more general, so that they don't require local American intuitions and background knowledge.

Finally, there is a point that is rarely brought up on LW, but is very important. The reason Luke Muehlhauser is so cool, is that he raised attention to the neglected virtue of scholarship, the fact that, in some sense, there is no “royal road to science”. Strictly speaking, this is not true, some roads are definitely more effective than the others. A good textbook or study methods might accelerate your learning tenfold, hundredfold.

But at the end of they day, once you have your rationality, your effective study methods, your time-management system, your Pomodoro, your Bayesian epistemology and what not, the only way you can actually understand something on a deep level is to sit your ass on the chair and read a freaking book. Sometimes more than once, with exercises, whiteboard and discussions.

You can optimize learning and thinking, for sure, but you can't skip the dumb “hard work” part. And this leads us to the fact that we have 24 hours a day. Most people have stupid jobs, little money, kids, commitments, social status to maintain. The little free time they have they can't spend efficiently on self-education, because they are tired after work, they are stressed and anxious and have lots of psychological barriers that make them think “nah, I'm too stupid to ever learn physics on my own”. And I'm not even talking about billions of people living in complete squalor, I'm talking about people with access to the Internet and books.

A middle-aged US conservative has enough time to read one book a month. Not because he's a “stupid redneck”, but because all other time is spent raising kids, fixing his car, going to the job, inviting friends for a meal etc. So when he goes to the bookstore, he sees a nice-seeming book by Ann Coulter. He has no training in political science, so how would he ever know that the book is the waste of time? He has no point of reference, no background knowledge. One might say he buys this book to assuage his tribal evo-psych desires or because he's biased. I say he simply can't make huge inferential jumps that would make him conclude reading Ann Coulter is a waste of time.

You see, saying that someone is biased, or a product of evolution in the ancestral environment, or prone to signaling and status-oriented behavior, and so on, is just a very elaborate way of saying someone is stupid. And stupid is a grave insult. People near-universally hate stupid people, and treat them with either condescension or hostility by default. It's like we constantly trying to prove that their stupidity is their “fault”. You'd think, if somebody is stupid, that is, has not enough knowledge or mental skills to come to a right conclusion, definitely the results of their stupidity are not their fault? But that's not how people think automatically, and it takes conscious effort to rewrite this default attitude towards stupid people.

Suppose the above-mentioned US conservative somehow magically decides to buy Bill Maher's book instead. He read somewhere that it's no harm to sometimes read what your political enemies write, that even in the worst propaganda might be a grain of truth, that it's virtuous to try to learn the position you dislike and evaluate it on your own. Somehow, his cognitive, social, evo-psych forces didn't stop him from buying that book. Would he now be able to support views that are closer to the truth? Most likely not, except if slightly or by epistemic luck.

Some political positions, like gay marriage, might be a “no-brainer”. But open borders is not a “no-brainer”, and so aren't negative income tax, raising minimum wage, military interventions, increasing inflation, decreasing inflation. You need to read books for that, and think with concentration for hours, and consult various sources, and maybe write down equations, and maybe even use statistical methods. Most people literally don't have time for that.

Teaching the dangers of death spirals and how politics can be a mind-killer to everyone would make the world a much better place. But I don't even think a next-door fundamentalist Christian, trained in LW rationality, would necessarily accept evolution. Because accepting evolution is not about rational thinking, it's about actually understanding how it works. Yeah, you can also accept it without understanding, and that's what happens most of the times. I'm pretty sure most /r/atheism subscribers don't actually understand evolution's mechanism and thus aren't justified in their belief.

I think this video says it all: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pIAoJsS9Ix8

Please correct this typo:

⟨Tv, v⟊

I've read parts of what is commonly called the "manosphere" and I can safely say, you have no idea what the f* you're talking about.