I think it was more a case of people looking at the works with the hammer of rationality in their hand and seeing lots of nails for the characters to knock in. For example, The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya sets up a problem (Unehuv vf Tbq naq perngrq gur jbeyq 3 lrnef ntb ohg qbrfa'g ernyvfr vg, naq vs fur rire qbrf gura fur zvtug haperngr vg whfg nf rnfvyl), but I found that setup fading into the background as the series of DVDs that I watched went on. By the fourth in the series (the murder mystery on the island isolated by storms), it was completely absent.

With Fate/Stay Night, one problem is that I was looking at ripped videos on Youtube, while the original material is a "visual novel" with branching paths, so it's possible (but unlikely) that the people who put up the videos missed all the rationality-relevant bits.

I've not tried Death Note, but I suspect I'd find the same dynamic as in Haruhi Suzumiya. A hard problem is set up (how does a detective track down someone who can remotely kill anyone in the world just by knowing their name?), which makes it possible to read it as a rationality story, but unless the characters are actually being conspicuously rational beyond the usual standards of fiction, that won't be enough.

I'm also not part of the anime/manga community: I watched these works without any context beyond the mentions on LessWrong and a general awareness of what anime and manga are.

It's weird how the girls all look like cosplay characters. :)

The rationality content was my only interest, so I haven't particularly looked for any other source of anime recommendations. However, I have seen Princess Mononoke, Howl's Moving Castle, and Spirited Away, and all I can say of them is that they were pleasant enough.

Since, as you have noted, we have already had a joke thread, perhaps it would have been better to ask for, e.g. funniest rationality quotes or funniest LessWrong comments? Or perhaps make it more specific than the previous thread. For example, some jokes that are thought of as nerdy, math-y or intellectual are actually quite simple, as their reputation as intellectual is based on the subject matter they touch and not on the joke's "structure" itself (e.g. their humour derives from puns, cultural references, or parodies of the cultural references). In short, these are the jokes that, to paraphrase The Ig Nobel Prize description, make you think, and then laugh. On the other hand, some jokes might have mundane subject matter, but their structure may impress you more than the subject matter itself. These could be called jokes that make you laugh and then think. Obviously, there are many fewer jokes of the latter type. A couple examples that, I think, qualify, both taken from LessWrong comments:

From here

Once there was a miser, who to save money would eat nothing but oatmeal. And what's more, he would make a great big batch of it at the start of every week, and put it in a drawer, and when he wanted a meal he would slice off a piece and eat it cold; thus he saved on firewood. Now, by the end of the week, the oatmeal would be somewhat moldy and not very appetising; and so to make himself eat it, the miser would take out a bottle of good whiskey, and pour himself a glass, and say "All right, Olai, eat your oatmeal and when you're done, you can have a dram." Then he would eat his moldy oatmeal, and when he was done he'd laugh and pour the whiskey back in the bottle, and say "Hah! And you believed that? There's one born every minute, to be sure!" And thus he had a great savings in whiskey as well.

-- Norwegian folktale.

Another one from here:

"“It seems a Christian missionary was visiting with remote Inuit (aka, Eskimo) people in the Arctic, and had explained to this particular man that if one believed in Jesus, one would would go to heaven, while those who didn’t, would go to hell.

The Inuit asked, “What about all the people who have never heard of your Jesus? Are they all going to hell?’

The missionary explained, “No, of course not. God wants you to have a choice. God is a merciful God, he would never send anyone to hell who’d never heard of Jesus.”

The Inuit replied, “So why did you tell me?”

Well, the second one might remind some people a local cultural reference, but it is definitely not a part of the joke itself.

The only time the word incorrectly isn't spelled incorrectly is when it's spelled incorrectly.

Showerthoughts

Every night as I'm lying in bed trying to fall asleep, I think of five of six things I want to remember habitually or in the short-run, so I get up and write them down. This costs me at least 25 minutes of sleep. I'm sure I'm not the only one with this problem; does anyone know good ways to store or record these ideas?

Eliezer's writing, fiction and non-fiction tends to attract hostility, and all LWers are automatically labeled "Yudkowskians". On a somewhat related note, the idea of AGI x-risk he's been pushing for years has finally gone mainstream, yet the high-profile people who speak out about it avoid mentioning him, like he is low-status or something.

Context: Elon Musk thinks there's an issue in the 5-7 year timeframe (probably due to talking to Demis Hassabis at Deepmind, I would guess). By that standard I'm also less afraid of AI than Elon Musk, but as Rob Bensinger will shortly be fond of saying, this conflates AGI danger with AGI imminence (a very very common conflation).

What about Vassanation? That one would be pronounced slightly differently, but would also work as the name for the push to make a geographically remote rationalist colony.

That's interesting. What criterion/criteria does "Best" use, then?

And on a different but related note: does it really negate the strategy? I note that, despite using the "Best" setting, this page still tends to display higher-karma comments near the top; furthermore, most of those high-karma comments seem to have been posted pretty early in the month. That suggests to me that Gondolinian's strategy may still have a shot.

Given the writing style, it seems to me that the author intended this piece to be read as a travelogue ("a trip to a far away land") rather than an article that tries to explain something to the readers. It is my impression that he does not try to think about the subject matter, he tries to feel it as a traveler who accidentally wandered here. Thus the author writes about his experiences, pays attention to small and idiosyncratic things (instead of trying to analyze anything), short sentences and quick leaps of thought is probably the authors way to give reader a dizzying feeling which, I guess, was what the author was feeling during his trip to an unfamiliar place due to meeting so many people in a short period of time. So, I guess, the author didn't care that much about whether his travelogue would give magazine's readers an accurate and insightful understanding of MIRI, CFAR and LessWrong. Instead, he probably cared about conveying his emotions and experiences to his readers.

It seems to me that the author didn't intend this piece to be thought of as a review of MIRI's activities. It seems to be as much (or maybe even more) about his trip as it is about the community he visited. Once you put this piece in a travelogue reference class, some of its flaws seem to be simply peculiarities of the writing style that is typical to that genre.