This adds so much more to my LW experience. Reading open threads just became doable, rather than an exercise in trying to remember what parts of the discussion I've already seen and which ones I hadn't. ... Although I'm not seeing everything with a pink border whenever I look at an old page, so I think that part of the explanation is false. That, or there is a bug somewhere...

Comments use Markdown, not html. The Show Help button at the lower right of of a comment box will give you details. As I recall, two spaces at the end of a line are a hard return-- it's been a while since I had to wrestle with how a list or a poem would appear.

Articles use html, sort of. There's an html button at the top. If you copy and paste from a word processor, you might get inconvenient formatting.

I don't like this system, but the only thing worse than this system is having to try to guess how it works.

[comment score below threshold] I think that's anything with -3 karma. You can see the article/thread for free by clicking on the link, but if you reply to anything on that thread, you lose 5 points.

[continue this thread]-- LW has limited nesting of comments, so this link will start a new window. You will lose your pink borders on the old window if you left click, so I recommend using a new tab for continuing threads. You get the option of a new tab by right-clicking on the link.

Something which wasn't clear to me after looking around a bit - it seems the recent comments in the bar at the right is cached, and I saw some comments with a pink border. Does the pink border mean they're new?

Quoting Eliezer2009:

Yet there is, I think, more absent than present in this "art of rationality"—defeating akrasia and coordinating groups are two of the deficits I feel most keenly. I've concentrated more heavily on epistemic rationality than instrumental rationality, in general. And then there's training, teaching, verification, and becoming a proper experimental science based on that. And if you generalize a bit further, then building the Art could also be taken to include issues like developing better introductory literature, developing better slogans for public relations, establishing common cause with other Enlightenment subtasks, analyzing and addressing the gender imbalance problem...

There were a few articles about akrasia; and CFAR is working on a curriculum for teaching rationality.

I have an idea about a sequence I would love to see, but only if it is written well (because it would be very easy and tempting!!! to make it wrong in various ways): Starting with scientifically describing human emotions, social behavior, and sexual behavior. Progressing to social skills. And culminating with community building.

I believe that these issues are so interconnected that it is almost meaningless trying to discuss them separately. They also happen to be places where the popular stereotypes say the nerds have blind spots. I suspect these may be areas where being "half correct" may harm you a lot. Which poses a problem because non-nerds usually don't care much about their maps matching the territory, and nerds talking about these topics will probably suffer from the curse of Dunning and Kruger; so we need to be extra careful here. However, without mastering this part of Art we will never achieve larger-scale rationalist communities.

(My beliefs here are a result of many pieces of evidence coming from different sources, so I am not able to disentangle them all within a comment. But generally, there are two levels here: The more superficial is that people are naturally drawn towards attractive people, and repelled from "creepy" people. This is a strong force to be ignored only at one's own peril, and it's even more true on the community level; even the wannabe rationalists are no exception to this. Some degree of social savviness is necessary for merely not having a group fall apart; even higher level is required to attract new members. These skills are learnable, but the fresh students tend to be overconfident and creepy. We also need communication skills and norms that are conductive to solving problems, because sooner or later the problems will appear. On a deeper level, many uniquely human skills are probably a result of sexual selection, even if they are not consciouslly connected. Understanding this may help to better understand "prestige", which is a required component for social success. Yeah, am I aware that this explanation is probably not very helpful.)

Another thing, we need some good introduction for newbies. At this moment, giving them Rationality: from AI to Zombies is my favorite choice, but something shorter and easier to read would be even better. I imagine 50-100 pages of text written for a above-average-IQ high-school audience. (At the end, the text should point them towards further literature, including the Rationality, but also many other books. Simply imagine that you are looking at a smart high-school bookworm who is going to read 20 or 50 books in the following years anyway; if your only influence on their life would be replacing their reading list, which specific books would you recommend?) This shorter text could then be printed and distributed among the smart high-school or college students.

And are we sure that it is a good idea to do a lot of outreach when the majority of discussion on the site is about why LW sucks?

Yeah, at this moment I would rather tell people to download and read Rationality: from AI to Zombies.

There are a bunch of "comment score below threshold" comments on this thread. Those comments are reasonable polite comments, mostly about the current difficulties with karma abuse here.

I hope to eventually prevent karma abuse, and finding out who's been downvoting discussion of karma abuse should be part of the process.

On Fox News, Trump said that regarding Muslims in the US, he would do "unthinkable" things, "and certain things will be done that we never thought would happen in this country". He also said it's impossible to tell with absolute certainty whether a Syrian was Christian or Muslim, so he'd have to assume they're all Muslims. This suggests that telling US officials that I'm a LW transhumanist might not convince them that I have no connection with ISIS. I'm not from Syria, but I have an Arabic name and my family is Muslim.

I've read Cory Doctorow's Little Brother, and this might be a generalization from fictional evidence, but I can't help asking: As a foreign student in the US, how likely is Trump to have me tortured for no reason? Should I drop everything and make a break for it before it's too late? Initially, many Germans didn't take Hitler's extremist rhetoric seriously either, right? (If I get deported in a civilized manner, well, no harm done to me as far as I'm concerned.)

I normally assume, as a rule of thumb, that politicians intend to fulfill all their promises. If a politician says he wants to invade Mars, that could be pure rhetoric, but I'd typically assume that he might try it in the worst case scenario. I have observed it is often the case that when we think other people are joking, they are in fact exaggerating their true desires and presenting them in an ironic/humorous light.

Have you considered sharing some version of this essay with your students? I think one of the bad things about conventional schooling (generalizing from myself) is getting the impression that the whole thing just happens, rather than that there's adult thought going into how teaching is done.

In re reading for pleasure: even if it isn't something you're teaching, at least you aren't spoiling it for your students.

I'm looking forward to your next installment.

On the other hand, people can only be obligated to achieve what is possible, and hedge loss might be inevitable.

There might be a long haul project of lowering the status of sloppy science journalism, but this is very long term.

I assume authors control the titles for journal articles. They don't for journalism.

Thank you! However, this appears to miss anything that is "Promoted". The only recent example is Free CFAR summer programs, and before that the LW survey. If other posts get promoted they may also get overlooked by browing from Discussion.