I suggest this be posted to Main. I go long stretches without checking discussion, and just happened to find the survey here, but I subscribe to the Main RSS feed.

[Survey Taken Thread]

By ancient tradition, if you take the survey you may comment saying you have done so here, and people will upvote you and you will get karma.

Let's make these comments a reply to this post. That way we continue the tradition, but keep the discussion a bit cleaner.

Words get loaded with bad affect because people have negative thoughts about the thing being referred to.

Or, y'know, because people who call themselves these words do bad things.

I would just like to note / point out that "SJW" is not a particularly neutral way to refer to the group of people in question -- it smuggles in (at least for some readers, and I suspect for most) a distinctly negative connotation about the group described.

Obviously if that's your intention, then by all means use the language you prefer; but if some of the commenters didn't mean it that way, and are just trying neutrally discuss a movement, I'd encourage picking a different term for it. (I normally say "the social justice movement".)

I will borrow from Error's very apt disclaimer in another comment, and note that my feelings toward the movement in question are more or less neutral -- "an affect borne of opinions that cancel out rather than a simple lack of same."

Regarding the McAfee economics book, the link appears to have changed. I believe this link directs to the appropriate text

http://www.mcafee.cc/Introecon/IEA2007.pdf

Surely "unvisited" is insignificant. There's no current science suggesting any means of faster-than-light travel. So, if you assume that extraterrestrial life would have lifespans grossly similar to terrestrial lifespans, we ought to remain unvisited.

"Saturated in the Great Silence" seems like a far more significant point.

Posts 8 and 9 were really beneficial to me. The illusion of transparency is something that has caused me great distress in the past, and it was really nice to have an explanation for why that was. I always valued my intelligence, and I used to think that when people didn't agree with things that seemed obvious to me it was a sign that they were stupid. I had come across this idea as "people have different experiences", and when I saw things through that lens it helped me to be kinder and less arrogant. These posts really crystallized that idea and made me go "oh, that's why that is".

Not a full article. Discussion-starter. Half-digested ideas perhaps if they had been fully digested this would have been better received? I think I saw what you were getting at, and I liked it for working them out collaboratively, if you are interested. Will edit article with your feedback.

Learning environments

Examples: Less Wrong, martial arts gyms, Toastmasters

I'm not sure how much LW belongs in this category, which leads me to think that that's a major weakness of the site

• Focused on improving a skill or virtue or ability

• "we are all here to learn" attitude

• Little if any status competition with that skill or ability, because it is understood your level is largely based on how long you are practicing or learning it, being better because having started 5 years before others does not make you an inherently superior person, it is the expected return of your investment which others also expect to get with time.

• If there is any status competition at all, it is in the dedication to improve

• It is allowed, in fact encouraged to admit weakness, as it both helps improving and signals dedication thereto

• The skill or ability is not considered inherent or inborn

• People do not essentialize or "identitize" that skill or ability, they generally don't think about each other in the framework of stupid, smart, strong, weak, brave, timid

Testing environment

Examples: most of life, that is the problem actually! Most discussion boards, Reddit. Workplaces. Dating.

• I should just invert all of the above, really

not sure what you mean here

• People are essentialized or "identitized" as smart, stupid, strong, weak, brave, timid

• Above abilities or other ones seen as more or less inborn, or more accurate people don't really dwell on that question much but still more or less consider them unchangable, "you are what you are"

• Status competition with those abilities

• Losers easily written off, not encouraged to improve

• Social pressure incentive to signal better ability than you have

• Social pressure incentive to not admit weakness

• Social pressure incenctive to not look like someone who is working on improving: that signals not already being awesome at it, and certainly not being "born" so

• Social pressure incentive to make accomplishing hard things look easy to show extra ability

Objections / falsification / what it doesn't predict: competition can incentivize working hard. It can make people ingenious. this bit was unclear to me Counter-objection: as long as you make it clear it is not about an innate ability. That is terrible for development this made me pause I think this is a difficult subject, but perhaps some people don't believe in the Noble Lie of downplaying innate ability? I am torn on the subject. but if it is not about ability but working on improving, you get the above social pressure incentive problems: attitudes efficient for competing are not efficient for improving I don't think you've backed this claim up. I think I might disagree with you here. Possible solution: intermittent competition.

Possible combinations?

If you go to a dojo and see someone wearing an orange or green belt, do you both see it as a combination of tests taken and thus current ability, or a signal of what the person is currently learning and improving on (the material of the next belt exam) ? Which one is stronger? Do you see them as "good"/"bad" or improving?

Tentatively: they are more learning than testing environments. I may disagree with this do you mean there are, or what are you referring to with they?

Tentatively: formal tests and gradings can turn the rest of the environment into a learning environment.

Tentatively: maybe it is the lack of formal tests and gradings and certifications is what is turning the rest of the world all too often a testing environment. * I don't think this is it. I think the world is default a testing environment. One thing that your learning environments seem to have in common is that there is some incentive for the groups to foster new members, and the degree to which they foster new members seems to depend on supply and demand for new members*

Value proposition: it would be good to turn as much as possible of the world into learning environments, except mission-critical jobs, responsibilities etc. which necessarily must be testing environment. I agree with this, and related to my above comment I would would say that competition between groups leads to fostering within groups when there is a high demand for new recruits. As a point of nomenclature, how about instead of "testing" competing and instead of "learning" fostering? To me those terms seem closer to the what you're describing, but that's mostly aesthetic, might make the idea clearer for some people. And I think your intuition that good tests might tease out more fostering could be correct, in that having a good test makes for better competition. This is starting to remind me of The Craft and the Community sequence, where EY talks about rationality dogos and struggles with the difficulty of measuring rationality well. Would the equivalent of a belts system in everything fix it? Figuratively-speaking, green-belt philosopher of religion: atheist or theist, but excepted to not use the worst arguments? Orange-belt voter or political-commentator: does not use the Noncentral Fallacy? More academic ranks than just Bachelor, Masters, PhD? * I don't know how this would work exactly, for some things perhaps demonstrating a high level of comprehension for certain reading lists?* If we are so stupidly hard-wired animals to always feel the need status-compete and form status hierarchies, and the issue here is largely the effort and time wasted on it plus importing these status-competing attitudes into issues that actually matter and ruining rational approaches to them, would it be better if just glancing on each others belt - figuratively speaking - would settle the status hierarchy question and we could focus on being constructive and rational?

Example: look at how much money people waste on signalling that they have money. Net worth is an objective enough measure, turning it into a belt, figuratively speaking, and signing e-mails as "sincerely, J. Random, XPLFZ", where XPLFZ is some precisely defined, agreed and hard-to-falsify signal of a net worth between $0.1M and $0.5M fix it? Let's ignore how repulsively crude and crass that sounds, such mores are cultural and subject to change anyway, would it lead to fewer unnecessarily, just showing-off and keeping-up-with-the-joneses purchases? Scott Alexander from SSC had a similar idea for his ideal world, so you're in good company there. I think this is an area effective altruists should look into, have official rankings for amount donated, though would it really be effective altruism or effective signalling? Either way, a social good I think.

Counter-tests: do captains status-compete with lieutenants in the mess-hall? No. Do Green-belts with orange-belts? No.

What it doesn't predict: kids still status-compete despite grades. Maybe they don't care so much about grades. LW has no "belts" yet status-competition is low to nonexistent.

I choreograph my morning routines to a specific playlist. I know what I'm supposed to be doing during each specific song, and I get things done on time without distractions. I started in highschool when I would occasionally miss the bus and I never missed the bus after I started.

I have one piece of advice: basic gamification.

Years ago, I wanted to write more. I was already occasionally, but I had lots of thought that I wanted to get out of my head so that I could systematize and so I could get the feedback of others's critique and get to higher levels of sophistication. I also wanted to become better writer.

I made log. It was a simple word document into which I entered everything that I wrote each week (I committed myself to writing something every week).

This was fairly effective. I got a hit of instant gratification every time I added something to my list and, over time, the log grew, and it was cool to look over all the the things I've written. Doing that was interesting because is showed what I was thinking about at various times and seeing how much I've already written is motivating (I guess because it reminds me that I'm the sort of person that writes?).

I've done somthing similar for the books I read. I keep a record of all the books I read in a year. It seems so silly, but just knowing that I get to list a book as finished motivates me to read more, even though of course, it's the actual reading is so much more interesting and worthwhile then the adding a book to a word document.

I've started experimenting with a daily point score. I've played with the formula, but basically, I have a list of daily trainings and I get a point for each one that I hit on a given day, I have a list of secondary skills for which I get a point for every half hour of work, and I get point for each of set of thirty pages I read. I want to maximize my score (and it provides a mostly objective measure of my productivity for when I'm experimenting with new routines). I think even just keeping spreadsheet in which you record the number of minutes you spend each day working on what ever matters to you, would help you get where you want to be.

I don't think this helps for accomplishing things that you just don't like doing, but in my experience, simple record keeping like this works wonders for the things that you do acctully like, when you' re doing them, and want to do more of from a global perspective, but that don't have the attraction to "pull you in" in the moment.