A lot of Less Wrong frames becoming more rational in terms of correcting biases. When Scott Alexander is asked how he does it, he doesn't seem to actually have an answer-- if I recall correctly, he's just said that all he's got in his life is his job, his girlfriend, and his blog, which doesn't begin to explain his remarkable flow of interesting posts.

It's a good thing to have fewer and weaker biases, but it's better if de-biasing can be applied to new ideas which have a good chance of paying off.

Is there LW material about creativity that I'm not remembering? Any recommendations for information about creativity elsewhere? I'm especially interested in material which you've seen help you or other people become more creative, as distinct from material which has been plausible and/or fun to read.

Edited to add: While I think this is a generally applicable topic, I also have a local interest. I'm fond of LW, but it seems to be in a doldrums, and at least part of the cause is a lack of interesting new material.

I told an intelligent, well-educated friend about Less Wrong, so she googled, and got "Less Wrong is an online community for people who want to apply the discovery of biases like the conjunction fallacy, the affect heuristic, and scope insensitivity in order to fix their own thinking." and gave up immediately because she'd never heard of the biases.

While hers might not be the best possible attitude, I can't see that we win anything by driving people away with obscure language.

Possible improved introduction: "Less Wrong is a community for people who would like to think more clearly in order to improve their own and other people's lives, and to make major disasters less likely."

My favorite is that people get credit for updating based on evidence.

The more common reaction is for people to get criticized (by themselves and others) for not having known the truth sooner. 

This is an analysis of the Yom Kippur war (Egypt vs. Israel, 1973)-- the Israelis were interested in how Egypt managed a surprise attack, and it turned out that too many Israelis believed that the Egyptians would only attack if they had rockets which could reach deep into Israel. The Egyptians didn't have those rockets, so the Israeli government ignored evidence that the Egyptians were massing military forces on the border.

The rest of the article is analysis of the recent Israeli election, but to put it mildly, an election has much less in the way of well-defined factors than a surprise military attack, so it's much harder to say whether any explanation is correct. 

I'm sure there are many examples of plausible theories keeping people from getting to the correct explanation for a long time. Any suggestions? Also, is there a standard name for this mistake?

Pratchett's lecture at Trinity

For a long time, I've been dubious about "rationality is winning". While it protects against one dangerous line of thought (I was right! It's just that the universe didn't cooperate), it fails to mention a time scale-- sometimes you lose before you win. And sometimes you wander around for a while with no apparent purpose, and then you find something unlikely and valuable.

Pratchett's lecture includes a description of his early life, and I don't think any rational person or any rational parent would have seen his early life as any sort of sensible goal-seeking, or likely to lead to winning in any sense.

Pratchett was a fairly bad student, though he did better when he had less competition. He read all the bound volumes of Punch (the major British satirical magazine), and learned from that classic.

He became a reporter for a local newspaper, a job with modest status and low salary. (In one of his novels, he mentions the voracious appetite of a newspaper-- it's got to have news every day. Somehow, this seemed more intensely true than the large number of other sensible things he said in his books. Looks like I was on to something.)

It seems to me that LW-style rationality would have had him working on being a better student and looking for ways to make more money early on, and he probably wouldn't have written Discworld.

On the other hand, Eliezer is doing quite well, and on yet another and possibly gripping hand, I doubt that going for increasing the probability of success would have started with "think really hard about existential risks".

One of the themes of current scientific progress is getting more and more information out of tiny amounts of data. Who'd have thought that we could learn so much of distant and recent biological history from DNA, and so much about distant planets, stars, galaxies, and the cosmos from tiny differences in very small amounts of light?

Pratchett's death puts an extra edge on the question-- to what extent can people be re-created from what they've left behind them, especially if they've written novels which include a lot of their personality?

Any thoughts about theoretical limits of how much can be figured out from small amounts of data?

A friend of mine told me she got very good results from Vitamin World melatonin, and little or no effect from Natrol melatonin, and that reminded me of recent news that many herbal supplements don't have any herbal content.

Does anyone have information, whether based in personal experience or from studies, about which brands are more reliable about their contents?

Viliam Bur made the announcement in Main, but not everyone checks main, so I'm repeating it here.

During the following months my time and attention will be heavily occupied by some personal stuff, so I will be unable to function as a LW moderator. The new LW moderator is... NancyLebovitz!

From today, please direct all your complaints and investigation requests to Nancy. Please not everyone during the first week. That can be a bit frightening for a new moderator.

There are a few old requests I haven't completed yet. I will try to close everything during the following days, but if I don't do it till the end of January, then I will forward the unfinished cases to Nancy, too.

Long live the new moderator!

http://reducing-suffering.org/predictions-agi-takeoff-speed-vs-years-worked-commercial-software/

I was looking at a discussion of what should be in a college curriculum, and as such discussions seem to go, there was a big list of things everyone should study, and some political claims about what's being offered but shouldn't be. 

Instead, what do you wish you'd studied in college? What do you wish other people had studied in college? On the latter, do you think everyone should have studied it, or do you just wish more people knew about it? Approximately what percentage of people?

Of course, this doesn't have to be limited to college. People could learn the same things earlier or later.