Depending on the time scale of the experiment, you could run a rain-dance trial. (thinking primary school kids)
a rain dance is where you do a special dance to make it rain. spend 5 minutes each day doing the dance, (or not) and evaluating if it rained yesterday, keep a graph of rain+dancing. Run trials for as many weeks as you like.
I came here to mention raindances. You do a raindance and nothing happens. You raindance for 12 more days and suddenly it rains. That must mean if you dance for 13 days straight (or dance until some other sort of requirement you Just So on the spot) it will rain!
If you don't add the idea of falsifiability to accept that raindances might not cause rain when you get negative results, then you will always get the conclusion that some amount of raindancing will cause rain.
Ideally you would add a parameter of audience interaction though if you really want everyone to feel the impact of their failed predictions on a gut level. That's the value of the 2-4-6 game and things like making predictions before learning about scope insensitivity.
Thanks for the writeup.
Since posting it on my profile, my karma has uniformly risen when I log in. Hypothesis: people are moderating their down-karma-ing because they may think they've fallen for a bit of bait to expose their irrationality to me and the wider community
I predict that this isn't what is happening. I think it is either
or both.
It's also possible that people's perception of the landscape itself changed over time as Clarity posts often and has been here a while now. That, and if any votes were from Eugene's downvote brigades, then their removal would have helped. (I'm at 85% karma and i think almost all of the negative votes were from Eugene's accounts.)
I think weird sun twitter is really great and any of you that are weird suns are really great.
The dissolution stage is described in greater detail in the linked article. The presence of people who proudly say they never bothered to read the Sequences (available as a free book now) was a huge warning long ago, but we somehow bought the belief that caring about your garden is cultish. Well, the garden is quite trampled now.
I can imagine an improvement in creating specific subs for the "hardcore" topics.
EDIT:
I am not sure I understand Scott's explanation for the dissolution phase. He seems to suggest that it happens when "a tribe was never really that different from the surrounding population, stops caring that much about its rallying flag, and doesn’t develop enough culture". Yeah, but why does that happen?
Sometimes the difference really wasn't so big. Imagine a minority that is not that much different from he majority, but is isolated by a language barrier, and maybe both sides have a habit of avoiding each other, which all contributes to creating myths about how the other side is completely weird. -- Then at some moment people start interacting with each other, the minority learns the majority language, and suddenly they all see they were quite similar. And then the old tribal boundaries dissolve, to be replaced by new boundaries, e.g. along hobbies or social class.
But I don't think this aplies to LW. I mean, when I found LW, I was shocked to see that there actually exist people like me. (Hard to describe what exactly that means, other than "I know it when I see it".) And now, a few years later, I still perceive the huge difference between me and most of the society.
However, now the LW website is not literally the only place where I can meet "LW-style" people, because the rationalist diaspora has grown, and now I can meet them e.g. at SSC. There are also the meetups, and there are people I have met on the meetups that I would stay in contact with even if the meetups would dissolve. So the LW website no longer has a monopoly on the "LW-style" people.
But there is also another way how people can find out that they are not "really that different from the surrounding population" and that they don't care that much about their rallying flag... and that is when the community gets dilluted by the outsiders who never cared about the rallying flag, and who are closer to the general population than the old members. Then the community as a whole gets closer to the original population even if the original members didn't.
This seems similar, but there is a difference. In the second model, there are the old members who still remain different, only their community was sabotaged by the new members who "came, saw, and conquered" (not necessarily by intention). Even if they would want to start over, now they have a coordination problem, because the original rallying flag is not a good Schelling point anymore, because people now associate it with the dilluted version of the community.
Unlike Scott's explanation that people in the atheist community became bored with being only atheists, and decided to become SJWs instead because it seemed like more fun... I think it was actually the second kind of process. That the atheist community was joined by people who didn't care about atheism that much (that's not a strawman; some of them admitted it afterwards), and mostly saw it as a place where they could recruit for their own ideas. They came, converted a few members, tried to take over the whole community, found a resistance, created a schism, and now keep attacking the original group in frustration. So it's not like the old-style atheists became bored with atheism, instead the boredom with atheism came from people who never strongly identified as atheists, except instrumentally for a short time during the takeover attempt.
So far LW was successful at holding off these kinds of attack (some people even doubt they actually happened). The actual danger for us comes from... not exactly "normies", but rather from people somewhere on the scale between "LW-style" people and "normies". There is no clear dividing lines. So while "normies" will avoid this site, it may be attractive to people who are only "90% LW-ish"... and if this is something like a bell curve, they will soon make a majority, then the site will become attractive to people who are "80% LW-ish", etc. and then suddenly it is not the old community of "LW-style" people anymore, but it's not obvious where the line should have been drawn, because the process was so fluent.
EDIT2:
What I mean by "X% LW-ish" is something like "I enjoy talking with the smart people whom I find on LW, and I find some of their topics quite interesting, but I don't care about the artificial intelligence, and I am not that obsessed with increasing my rationality. I don't have time to read Sequences, but here are some interesting links that I wanted to share, and I would also like to debate personal opinions on X, Y, and Z." There is nothing wrong with that per se, and on some days I would enjoy that kind of debates, but I don't want to see LW replaced by this. I would like to see that on a different website, or if that is not possible, at least on a different sub within LW.
I made a comment related to this on the SSC post about the rationalists I met in person in the Bay Area. I think it's the continued and extended version of what you stated above with some people in the Bay Area calling themselves rationalists while being in the 20% LW-ish (or lower) crowd. I primarily focused on the overcoming biases and getting stronger parts.
"I witnessed some trends in rationalists during a visit in the Bay Area recently that make far more sense to me now when seen through the lens of your generation descriptions. The instrumental rationalists seemed to fit into 3 Generation type groups.
Generation 1 agreed with 50% or greater of The Sequences and attempt to use the ideas from it, CFAR, and other sources in their daily lives to improve themselves. They seemed to take all of it quite seriously.
Generation 2 possessed a mild respect for CFAR, less respect for The Sequences themselves (and likely read next to none of it), made sure to make a comment of disdain for EY almost as if it was a prerequisite to confirm tribe membership (maybe part of the “i’m not one of THOSE rationalists”?), and had a larger interest in books that their friends recommended for overall self-improvement.
Generation 3 hadn’t read any of The Sequences, had read only a few blog posts, loosely understood some of the terms being regularly thrown around (near/far mode, far mode, object level, inside/outside view, map/territory etc.) but didn’t know the definitions well enough to actually use the mental actions of the techniques themselves, and considered themselves rationalists via group affiliation, showing up to events, and having friendships rather than being rationalists due to becoming more rational themselves and attempting to optimize their own lives and brains.
I had limited exposure to the Bay Area and would be very interested if anyone else thinks these categories actually match the territory there. This also leaves out epistemic rationalists (some of whom I met) who don’t fit into the three generations presented above."
Are there any non-obvious identities that people have which might be useful to burn away?
Generally I'd say: make a list of all things you do, and for each of them ask yourself a question: "Is this something I do because I got used to thinking about myself as 'the person who does this'? If I would right now magically reincarnate as someone else, who is 'not the person who does this', would I want to start doing it again?"
Specifically think about the people you interact with. If you would magically reincarnate as someone else (so you would remember these people, but they wouldn't recognize the new you) would you want to meet them again?
I recently noticed that I have an internal identity of Unattractive Person
Just a random thought: could you reframe this as statement about your skills? For example "I am a person who doesn't dress well" or "I am a person who cannot hold an interesting conversation". Then, simply add "...yet" at the end of each statement. And then start learning (you can ask for a learning advice in LW Open Thread anytime).
Generally I'd say: make a list of all things you do, and for each of them ask yourself a question: "Is this something I do because I got used to thinking about myself as 'the person who does this'? If I would right now magically reincarnate as someone else, who is 'not the person who does this', would I want to start doing it again?"
I like this technique. I like this a lot.
Happily, my friends do meet that criteria now. The Unattractive Person part is primarily a delayed updating. I'm working on those various skills but also haven't updated my internal impression of myself to reflect the improvements I've made. I expect to get a more realistic impression of myself after more time, getting better at reading people's attraction signals, and seeing social results
I was fooled by Gmail's "Drop The Mic" prank
I was a bit confused about how it's a prank on people at all. Ideally a prank is localized to one person and is set up so that it doesn't run out of control.
What happened to you?
I'm not able to see the post Ultimate List of Irrational Nonsense on my Discussion/New/ page even though I have enabled the options to show posts that have extremely negative vote counts (-100) while signed in. I made a request in the past about not displaying those types of posts for people who are not signed in. I'm not sure if that's related to this or not.
How exactly would a person burn an identity away?
Are there any non-obvious identities that people have which might be useful to burn away?
I recently noticed that I have an internal identity of Unattractive Person which may have been valid in the past but isn't any longer considering repeated signals in a variety of social interactions over the past few months.
Did they delete posts?
They deleted the worst ones. Screenshots can be found on other websites.
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It is wrong. Or, rather, the original hypothesis was about which axis dominates in political discourse and yes, purity/disgust does not dominate, but it is not completely absent either.
A clear example of the left doing the purity/disgust axis is environmentalism, opposition to GMOs, organic food, etc.
If I take a few dozen pictures of one person talking, I can find in them most any microexpression you want including ridiculous ones. These expressions are not representative of anything.
By the way, there is Kling's three-axis model and there is Haidt's moral foundations model. They are different.
Tabloid news are a great example of this. If you take thousands of pictures of the most gorgeous and breathtaking people in the world, you can find one where they look like deranged freaks.