this document agrees with my hypothesis about how to solve wicked problems. it says:

1. Lock down the problem definition. Develop a description of a related problem that you can solve, and declare that to be the problem. Specify objective parameters by which to measure the solution’s success.
2. Cast the problem as ‘just like’ a previous problem that has been solved. Ignore or filter out evidence that complicates the picture.
3. Give up on trying to find a good solution. Just follow orders, do your job and try not to get in trouble.
4. Declare that there are just a few possible solutions, and focus on selecting from among them. A specific way to do this is to frame the problem in ‘either/or’ terms, such as ‘Should we attack Iraq OR let the terrorists take over the world?’

Quotes from post and this: http://www.cognexus.org/Rotman-interview_SharedUnderstanding.pdf

It took me a while to realise what a wicked problem was. It is evil. It's a challenge.

"Wicked" in this context means resistance to resolution, rather than evil.

I looked to cooking. No two ingredients are the same. Even if you are cooking a thing for the 100th time, the factors of the day, the humidity, temperature, it's going to be different.

This doesn’t sound like a wicked problem to me. I think a more “wicked” problem would be something like where you have to create a meal for a whole hall full of people. Now, you want to make a meal that everyone will like and you have a limited amount of resources, so you can’t create separate meals for everyone, but some people might be vegetarians, some might have allergies, some might want one type of meal in particular etc. There is a social complexity aspect to this problem. You cannot come up with a best meal because there are different stakeholders with strongly-held beliefs about what the problem is.

As a current example there is global warming and energy policy where people from the developed world have one set of views about what needs to be done, and the developing world has a completely different set of views. Nobody ‘owns’ the problem and no-one has a clear idea of how to work out the answers

The problem is not understood until after the formulation of a solution.

This is less about quantifying things and more about how requirements change or are only realized after the solution of the problem or part of the problem is implemented. For example, let’s say you are renovating a house and there are 10 people involved. Every time you change something like a chair you need to check that it still aligns with everything else. You might need to go through many iterations of having to change and rechange things.

Every solution that is offered exposes new aspects of the problem, requiring further adjustments to the potential solutions. There is no definitive statement of ‘the problem’: these problems are ill-structured and feature an evolving set of interlocking issues and constraints.

Wicked problems have no stopping rule.

How do you make sufficient stopping rules when there are conflicts over what the problem is?

Since there is no definitive ‘the problem’, there is also no definitive ‘the solution.’ The problem-solving process ends when you run out of resources such as time, money or energy, not when an optimal solution emerges.

Every solution to a wicked problem is a 'one shot operation.'

Developing models, trying scenarios etc. all take effort and send you down a particular track in terms of the conception of the problem. I think that wicked problems are like the conglomeration of multiple problems or people's conception of the problem. Each time you try to move forward on one part of the problem you kind of entrench yourself in seeing the problem that particular way and it also spawns new problems directly related to only that one conception of the problem.

Every attempt has consequences. This is the ‘Catch 22’ of wicked problems: you can’t learn about the problem without trying solutions, but every solution is expensive and has lasting consequences that may spawn new wicked problems.

Wicked problems have no given alternative solutions.

A host of potential solutions may be devised, but another host that are never even thought of. Thus it is a matter of creativity to devise potential solutions, and a matter of judgement to determine which should be pursued and implemented.

For rationality related concepts, see this page

Yet how is a lichen 'more than the sum of fungus and alga'?

I don't know anything about lichen, but the below is what I assume "more than the sum of" in this context means:

"The symbiosis between the mycobiont and the photobiont creates an organism that is more than the sum of its parts, in other words, a lichen is an emergent property. Lets take a step back to examine this statement. On the one hand, neither the photobiont nor the mycobiont can withstand intense UV radiation, dessication, or extreme temperatures. But on the other hand, when the photobiont and mycobiont work together within the context of the lichen symbiosis, they create an organism that can withstand living in outer space – thats more extreme temperature and radiation (not to mention vacuum exposure) than is experienced on Earth! Lichen can even grow within rocks (endolithic lichen)! These are conditions that would kill a fungus or algae."

Yeah, properly done, this would be a lot of text.

My wish is to create rationalist communities which are emotionally healthy, capable of action, and successful in life. So the content of the book would be "all knowledge that is important for wannabe rationalists to become this kind of community". But I suspect that it would be a lot of material; not just to give people the necessary skills, but also to combat existing myths.

By emotionally healthy I mean that the group wouldn't fall apart immediately because of some inconsequential squabble, but also wouldn't become some kind of a cult. That the people inside the group would be happy and would achieve their personal dreams, and the people outside of the group would be mostly positively impressed. That the group as a whole and its individuals would be rational, but not suffering from akrasia.

When you look at the existing Sequences, you see that Eliezer not only spends a lot of time arguing against supernatural stuff, but he also needs to turn around and argue against the overenthusiastic "fans of evolution", and explain that actually evolution is stupid, it can lead to extinction, and the group selectionism mostly doesn't work. I expect that the similar kind of hedging both ways would also be necessary for this topic. That people often try to avoid an extreme by running into the opposite extreme -- "if I agree with everything, it means I am a sheep; therefore I will disagree with everything" or "acting without thinking is stupid; therefore I will always think and never act" or "people often disregard their own reason because they want to fit in the group; therefore I need to be abrasive and cynical about everything" -- and it will be necessary not only to navigate them properly, but also make them notice when someone else promotes an extreme form of behavior.

I agree that the palette of the most frequent social/emotional mistakes is probably wider that the palette of the most frequent cognitive errors. But people are less unique than they imagine. For example, read Games People Play -- this book describes about a dozen patterns of dysfunctional human interaction, and most people are shocked to find their own story described there. A therapist or a religious confessor probably mostly hears the same few stories over and over again. Also, Games People Play after each pattern contains an advice "what to do if you find youself stuck in this pattern".

Something like this?

In that direction, yeah. The guide contains a lot of dense "do this, do that, don't do this, don't do that", which I get is compressed to make a long text short, but I would like to read the longer version with explanations and stories that would make it easier to memorize. (Reading all the recommended literature on the last page would probably do it.) Also, the guide is about making a successful meetup, which is a great thing, but "meetup" still feels to me like "inside the lab", and I would like something that goes beyond the time and space limitations of the meetup. Similarly how the Sequences are not about "how to think rationally during a meetup", but how to think rationally in general.

Well, there are still some things I am not sure about, so... that's one of the reasons why I am not trying to write that text myself right now. I don't see exactly how the things are connected. I never was a community leader, so this would be outside my experience. There are still skills that I don't have, and problems that I can't solve even theoretically. (For example one of my big concerns is that I think that successful groups sooner or later attract psychopaths who will try to get into positions of power and exploit the whole thing for themselves. No idea how to prevent this, though. I think I have a heuristic for detecting that it already happened: it's when people are afraid to speak openly with each other; but that is too late, if your goal is to prevent that thing from happening in the first place. I suspect that some of the seemingly irrational traditional rituals, such as "getting drunk together" could actually have been designed for this purpose; but maybe I'm completely wrong.)

Something like that, yeah, but instead of reading one full book, I would prefer reading a compilation of the important ideas from multiple books of multiple authors.

Similarly to how e.g. one LW post tells you about the concept of "belief in belief" instead of giving you a link to a several hundred pages long book from Dennett. Most of the Sequences could be replaced by a list of 20 or 50 books to read, and they would certainly provide much more information, but reading all those books would take me a few years, while the whole Sequences can be read in a month or two. And if I want to communicate the whole thing to someone else, giving them one e-book is better than telling them to read 20 or 50 books.

Just like that, I would like to see 10 or 20 books on human social behavior compiled into a single book (of course, with links to the original sources for those who want to read more). To have the option of giving someone one book and saying: "This is the kind of community I want to create; would you like to join?"

It is also important (I haven't read the specific book you linked, so I am not sure if this applies) to have some ideas actionable.

To explain what I mean, think about books like "Predictably Irrational" which contain the information that human behavior is often wrong, but all you get from them is the idea "humans are stupid". Possibly true, but it doesn't help you become stronger. On the other hand, in the Sequences there is often a hint towards a strategy that could reduce a specific bias. Because the spirit of LW is not pointing fingers towards others and laughing, but looking at the mirror and thinking strategically.

Then of course there is the whole PUA industry that tries to be actionable, and that specific aspect I admire, but they are horrible from the epistemic point of view: "schools proliferating without evidence", overgeneralizations, confirmation bias, etc. What I'd like to see is someone who gives a correct explanation, supported by science, and then a few actionable ideas for people who want to improve themselves. Focusing on general human interaction (not just seeking one-night stands in loud pubs), considering also long-term consequences. But then I'd like to see people taking those ideas seriously.

Another important part would be debunking the existing myths; e.g. showing that human morality is more then mere cooperation in iterated prisoners' dilemmas (why do tourists tip in foreign restaurants even if they are unlikely to ever return there again?).

A few books that come to my mind are "The Theory of Moral Sentiments", "The Mating Mind", "Nonviolent Communication", "Games Prople Play", "Creating a Life Together", maybe even "Don't Shoot the Dog". I probably forgot something important.

(meta: I'm not sure if I should make a Discussion post for this, so I'm posting here. Feedback most welcome)

I'm exploring the following hypothesis : sometimes, you have to give up constructive actions for the sake of focus.

Most productivity methods suggest the obvious, to keep wasteful activities in check. It could be gaming, chatting, checking news websites. They all share a common trait: you don't gain any significant utility (nor money, nor fun, nor rest) for spending more time on it. You achieve the same result by spending a little time on it, rather than a full day.

With productive activites, time spent and value created aren't proportional. Sometimes you're lacking energy, inspiration, and it's okay: you don't have to work yourself ragged.

If you have multiple tasks to be achieved in parallel, you should treat them as sequential anyway. Focusing on one task at a time yields better results than task switching all the time.

Problems arise when you find inspiration, or a sudden peak of interest for a certain task which is, useful in isolation, but which doesn't fit in your schedule. Maybe a discussion with a friend sparked the idea of a story to write. Maybe you're considering moving some furniture because you're well-rested and full of energy.

Even if you could be maximally productive for a given useful task, you should treat it as a wasteful activity if you have something else you planned to do. If the idea sounds good, write it down. If it's really good, hype will come back another time. If you're energetic, do the most physical thing you had planned to do. Energy will come back another time.

The goal is not to add another task on your current schedule and mess with the plan you've set for the day, like you'd do with "classical" wasteful activities. You can convince yourself easily that news websites can wait another day. The unintuitive part is this also holds with most productive activities, even though you're training yourself to not defer work!

At some point the Internet decided it didn't feel like using a standard protocol for discussion anymore

That's an interesting point. What are the reasons NNTP and Usenet got essentially discarded? Are some of these reasons good ones?

We are facing similar problems now. A lot of people have their own sites where they host their own content.

The solution to reading all that content is RSS. The solution to, basically, cross-linking comments haven't been devised yet, I think.

websites could be created that act like views in a database. They would show only the content from a particular group or author.

So, that's Reddit with more freedom to set up custom CSS for subreddits? Or there are deeper differences?

Is this a good summary of your argument?

NNTP was a great solution to a lot of the problems caused by mailing lists. The main ones being:

• content duplication - mailing lists are bad because everyone gets their own copy of each article.
• reduced content accessibility - mailing lists suck because you miss out on great articles if they were sent before you were part of the mailing list.

We are facing similar problems now. A lot of people have their own sites where they host their own content. We either miss out on great content if we don't trawl through a ton of different sites or we try to make lesswrong a central source for content and face problems with:

• content duplication - through needing to cross post content (essentially duplicating it)
• harder content accessibility - the alternative to cross posting is providing a link, but this is an annoying solution that can be jarring as you need to go to an entirely different site to access the content you want.

NNTP would solve the problems we have now in a similar way to how it solved the problems with mailing lists. That is, it would provide a central repository for content and a way to access this content.

I am currently thinking that the best way to think about the last point is that it means that we should set up a Web API similar to the Blogger Web API. Discussing NNTP, at least to me, is making the solution appear a lot more complicated than it needs to be. Although, I don't know much about NNTP, so I could be overlooking something very important and am interested about what your future posts will explore.

With a Less Wrong Web API, websites could be created that act like views in a database. They would show only the content from a particular group or author. This content would, of course, be styled according to the style rules on the website.

These websites could be free, dns name and web development costs aside, using services like github pages. This is because there should be no need for a back-end as the content and user information is all hosted on Less Wrong. You post, retrieve content and vote using the API. It should also be fairly easy to create more complicated websites that could aggregate and show posts based on user preferences or even to create mobile applications.