I agree - external deadlines help in many cases and it would be interesting to try this out.

In an ideal world I'd love to see a series of MOOC's on areas such as FAI, rationality, etc though I imagine working out an effective way to test some of the topics would be a challenge. Perhaps as a starting point someone could make a couple of short polls in the guise of a quiz and use voting as the answer?

Based on ill-remembered citations of the efficacy of exercise for improving focus and general mental health, and after a lot of angst about body acceptance, I I reduced trivial inconveniences to working out below the inertia setpoint and started jogging three days a week. (I settled on running after an extended period of never getting around to signing up for hot yoga, crossfit, or a membership to the Y so I could swim, all of which seem more appealing.)

Good outcomes so far: feeling of accomplishment post-workout; feeling of accomplishment when I put on shoes and leave the house (remembering that not long ago I was basically incapable of making myself do anything I found unsavory); getting a lot less winded by minor physical exertion (e.g. walking briskly up a hill or flight of stairs). Meta-good-outcome: practice at finding and focusing on successes for self-motivation.

Waiting for more data: My focus has not yet improved discernibly. To do: self-test whether focus improves globally if I focus on jogging while I'm doing it.

Of the 12 most recent posts in 'Discussion', nine are 'Meetup' related and one is a meta-level discussion about producing LW courses.

Is LW imploding into some sort of self-impressed death spiral? Where is the new non-LW meta content? Am I way off, or has the quality of posts significantly diminished over time here?

I'm curious to know what others think.

Overlapping threads are just an agreement of everyone to keep looking at old posts. This is harder to orchestrate, because it requires lots of people to change.

If the problem is that no one will post in an open thread near the end of it's lifetime, a silly solution would be to automatically create an open thread every day with 10% probability. Now someone considering posting has no reason to wait for a future day to post because the expected lifetime of a thread is always constant, and is ~10 days.

Better would be to have a single thread "Open Thread" where posts older than N days would be moved to an automatically created "Open Thread Date-Date" post.

An even easier fix would be to remove the end date from open thread titles. When someone feels like posting a new one they just do that. This is a sloppy implementation of the first solution.

Serious, non-rhetorical question: what's the basis of your preference? Anything more than just affinity for your species?

I'm not 100% sure what you mean by parasite removal... I guess you're referring to bad decision-makers, or bad decision-making processes? If so, I think existential risks are interlinked with parasite removal: the latter causes or at least hastens the former. Therefore, to truly address existential risks, you need to address parasite removal.

Sometimes I feel like looking into how I can help humanity (e.g. 80000 hours stuff), but other times I feel like humanity is just irredeemable and may as well wipe itself off the planet (via climate change, nuclear war, whatever).

For instance, humans are so facepalmingly bad at making decisions for the long term (viz. climate change, running out of fossil fuels) that it seems clear that genetic or neurological enhancements would be highly beneficial in changing this (and other deficiencies, of course). Yet discourse about such things is overwhelmingly negative, mired in what I think are irrational kneejerk reactions to defend "what it means to be human." So I'm just like, you know what? Fuck it. You can't even help yourselves help yourselves. Forget it.

Thoughts?

Implicit-association tests are handy for identifying things you might not be willing to admit to yourself.

Once EA is a popular enough movement that this begins to become an issue, I expect communication and coordination will be a better answer than treating this like a one-shot problem. Maybe we'll end up with meta-charities as the equivalent of index funds, that diversify altruism to worthy causes without saturating any given one. Maybe the equivalent of GiveWell.org at the time will include estimated funding gaps for their recommended charities, and track the progress, automatically sorting based on which has the largest funding gap and the greatest benefit.

I doubt that at any point it will make sense for individuals should be personally choosing, ranking, and donating their own money to charities as if they're choosing the ratios for everyone TDT-style, not least because of the unnecessary redundancy.

EDIT: Upvoted because it is a valid concern. The AMF reached saturation relatively quickly, and may have exceeded the funding it needed. I just disagree with the efficiency of this particular solution to the problem.