Discussion article for the meetup : Welcome Scott Aaronson to Texas

Discussion article for the meetup : Welcome Scott Aaronson to Texas

One of the most powerful rationalist techniques is noticing your surprise. 

It ties in to several deep issues. One of them relates to one of my favorite LW comments  (the second highest upvoted one in Main):

One of the things that I've noticed about this is that most people do not expect to understand things. For most people, the universe is a mysterious place filled with random events beyond their ability to comprehend or control. Think "guessing the teacher's password", but not just in school or knowledge, but about everything.

Such people have no problem with the idea of magic, because everything is magic to them, even science.

--pjeby

For the universe to make sense to you, you have to have a model; for that model to be useful, you have to notice what it says, and then you need to act on it. I've done many things the wrong way in my life, but the ones I remember as mistakes are the ones where some part of me *knew* it was a problem, and instead of having a discussion with that part of me, I just ignored it and marched on.

It is good to notice your surprise. But that's only the first step.

--Douglas_Knight

So any stories, of tricks you noticed, didn't notice, or successfully pulled?

The Main / Discussion division has served us well in the past, but traffic to Main has dropped to the point that it's no longer useful. In particular, the low visibility meant that authors would often have to choose between more karma and being seen by more readers. So posting to Main has been disabled, and the successor of Main is on its way. In the meantime, please move everything to discussion.

But I have a great post I've worked really hard on, and I want it to be in Main.

Save it as a draft, let me know, and I'll move it to Main for you.

There's an excellent post that should go on the RSS feed so lots of people read it.

We can still promote posts (and will).  

Okay, so Main is dead. What's next?

What's the point of having multiple subreddits? If you have a single website with several different communities, then having different subreddits allows for different rules, different moderators, and different focuses. But LW has many interests that don't seem to cleanly separate into multiple subreddits. Many distinctions overlap, and tags seem better. So there are two main paths forward:

1) Tagging, 'new to you', and customization based on tags.

1. A tagging system with user input (see Stack Overflow for inspiration) means we can have reliable filtering.
2. We already track when a user last visited a page in order to highlight new comments; we can also use that to remove it from the new posts view if it's already been read. (What about if there's a comment explosion? We can either return it if there are enough new comments, or trust that you'll see the comment explosion through the Recent Comments view.)
3. With everything going to one view, giving users control over that view is critical for keeping it clear of trash. What looks to me like a promising way to do that is subsidies and taxes based on tags; if you want to see parenting posts and don't want to see meetup posts, say, you might give the parenting tag +3 karma and the meetup tag -10 karma, so very popular meetup posts can still appear and even unpopular or new parenting posts will be visible to you.

Thanks to the reaction to this article and some conversations, I'm convinced that it's worth trying to renovate and restore LW. Eliezer, Nate, and Matt Fallshaw are all on board and have empowered me as an editor to see what we can do about reshaping LW to meet what the community currently needs. This involves a combination of technical changes and social changes, which we'll try to make transparently and non-intrusively.

Discussion article for the meetup : Austin, TX - Petrov Day Celebration

Discussion article for the meetup : Austin, TX - Petrov Day Celebration

Specialization of labor is one of the primary reasons why the modern world is as wealthy as it is. Conceptual labor is a special case of this general trend; one of the primary reasons why we seem much more knowledgeable than the past is the producers of knowledge are as specialized as producers of consumers goods, and concepts are as varied and precise as consumer goods. The rest of this post expands on that concept and discusses implications for mining wisdom from the past, as well as communicating in the present.

Another month, another rationality quotes thread. The rules are:

• Please post all quotes separately, so that they can be upvoted or downvoted separately. (If they are strongly related, reply to your own comments. If strongly ordered, then go ahead and post them together.)
• Do not quote yourself.
• Do not quote from Less Wrong itself, HPMoR, Eliezer Yudkowsky, or Robin Hanson. If you'd like to revive an old quote from one of those sources, please do so here.
• No more than 5 quotes per person per monthly thread, please.
• Provide sufficient information (URL, title, date, page number, etc.) to enable a reader to find the place where you read the quote, or its original source if available. Do not quote with only a name.