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does something prevent you from cross posting?
previously it was suggested to post here; then in 6 months delete the text; include a link to the text on your blog. (or just leave it)
does something prevent you from cross posting?
Hassle, two comment threads to follow, probably bad for search rankings.
in 6 months delete the text; include a link to the text on your blog
More hassle.
In response to
LessWrong 2.0
The people still posting to LW seem to be getting use out of it; going archive-only doesn't seem great to me.
The two technical changes I think would most help with continued use of the site:
remove the main vs discussion distinction, and remove promotion.
make it more usable on phones
In response to
LessWrong 2.0
Hi. As a longtime lurker (my first introduction to the site may have been as early as twelve years old) I'm very glad to see this conversation finally come to a head. I'm of the opinion that the current site needs to either reinvent itself or shut down. I think that the biggest negative of the rationalist diaspora has in fact been keeping track of who has flown to what corner of the earth, further Eliezer Yudowsky and others posting on Facebook is annoying to me, because I do not use Facebook and find it to be an actual pain at times to get access to their posts. Having a less proprietary mirror would make me much more likely to read their writings. At the same time, given the implied privacy of Facebook I have to wonder if the point of posting there is so that things will not be read outside of the small audience EY now caters to.
Reinventing LessWrong as an archival site for the sequences and a hub for coordinating the diaspora would be a prudent use of its Schelling-Point real estate.
I largely agree with your analysis, though I do have some ideas on what an online community that does not waste peoples time and gets them to do interesting things would look like. If somebody would be interested in discussing this with me they may email me at:
wqcbfgntr@yvahkznvy.bet (Rot13'd to prevent email spam.)
(or here, but I'm kind of public discussion shy).
At the same time, given the implied privacy of Facebook I have to wonder if the point of posting there is so that things will not be read outside of the small audience EY now caters to.
I think this isn't a big factor. Instead people post to fb because:
low thresholds: it's socially acceptable to post anything from am odd thought you had to a big essay, and there's no expectation you polish your post or get friends to review drafts
positive comments: over the years comments on LW have gotten more and more critical, not clear why
blocking people: if there's someone who really annoys you but is well behaved enough that they meet site rules you can't ban them on LW but you can still block them on FB so you don't have to interact with them.
What keeps you off fb? I find some of my best discussions happen there these days.
That link is dead too. Here are two more links:
In response to
Open thread, Oct. 5 - Oct. 11, 2015
My employer changed their donation matching policy such that I now have an incentive to lump 2 years' donations into a single year, so I can claim the standard deduction during the year that I don't donate, thereby saving around $1200 every 2 years. I've been donating between 10 and 12.5 percent for the last few years. This year I would be donating around 21%. Has anyone here been audited because they claimed a large fraction of their income as charitable contributions? How painful was the experience? I doubt it's worth paying $1200 to avoid, but I thought I'd ask.
Julia and I donate 50% and haven't been audited yet, but I expect we will at some point. We keep good records, which should help a lot.
In response to
Open thread, Oct. 12 - Oct. 18, 2015
I'm new here. Been lurking occasionally for a few weeks. I have finally signed up. On principle should I avoid voting? (For the time being?)
Place your fingers on your pulse and feel your heartbeat. If you're sitting at rest, every beat you feel is accompanied, somewhere in the world, by two or three people running to the end of the time nature allotted and being annihilated forever.
Short term solution is exactly that. People are dying RIGHT NOW. And cryonics is a way to potentially save those lives RIGHT NOW.
The following is merely my own intuition and guess, but... I suspect that the future will look back on this era, see that we had cryonics and CHOSE not to use it, and condemn current funeral practices as systematic murder.
cryonics is a way to potentially save those lives RIGHT NOW.
"potentially" is pulling a lot of weight there. What probability do you give cryonics of working? Roughly?
Also notice that as formulated ("You are given an initial stake of $1") you don't have any of your own money at risk, so... And if the game only ends when TAILS is flipped, there is no way to lose, is there?
If the first $1 comes from you, you are basically asking about the "double till you win" strategy. You might be interested in reading about the St.Petersburg paradox.
Reading the wikipedia article on the St Petersburg paradox, that's exactly the game tetronian2 has described.
A casino offers a game of chance for a single player in which a fair coin is tossed at each stage. The pot starts at 2 dollars and is doubled every time a head appears. The first time a tail appears, the game ends and the player wins whatever is in the pot. Thus the player wins 2 dollars if a tail appears on the first toss, 4 dollars if a head appears on the first toss and a tail on the second, 8 dollars if a head appears on the first two tosses and a tail on the third, 16 dollars if a head appears on the first three tosses and a tail on the fourth, and so on. In short, the player wins 2k dollars, where k equals number of tosses (k must be a whole number and greater than zero). What would be a fair price to pay the casino for entering the game?
In response to
Open Thread - Aug 24 - Aug 30
Suppose someone offers you the chance to play the following game:
You are given an initial stake of $1. A fair coin is flipped. If the result is TAILS, you keep the current stake. If the result is HEADS, the stake doubles and the coin is flipped again, repeating the process.
How much money should you be willing to pay to play this game?
Outcomes:
1 flip --- $1 probability 1/2
2 flips -- $2 probability 1/4
3 flips -- $4 probability 1/8
4 flips -- $8 probability 1/16
...
The expected value doesn't converge but it grows extremely slowly, where almost all the benefit comes from an extremely tiny chance of extremely large gain. The obvious question is counterparty risk: how much do you trust the person offering the game to actually be able to follow through with what they offered?
If we think of this as a sum over coin flips, each flip you think is possible gives another $0.50 in expected value. So if you think they're probably only good for amounts up to $1M then because it takes 20 flips to pass $1M the expected value is $0.50 * 19 or $9.50. Similarly if you think they're good for $1B then that's 29 flips max for an expected value of $14.50. You could be fancy and try to model your uncertainty about how much they're good for, but that's probably not worth it. And you do want to take into account that someone offering something like this with no provision for how they'll handle extremely large payouts is probably not entirely on the level.
Expected value is also not the right metric here, since we all have diminishing marginal returns. Would you enjoy $1B 1,000x as much as $1M? Even if you're giving your winnings to charity there are still some limits to our ability to effectively use additional donations.
Short answer: $5. (This trusts them to be good for $1024, and is in a range where utility should still be pretty much linear in money.)
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I vote for both plans at once!
1) Make the current LW read-only. All content is still accessible, but commenting and voting is disabled. The discussion section is closed as well. Let things rest for a month or so.
2) Announce that during the next year, LW will have one post per week, at a specified time. There will be an email address where anyone can send their submissions, whereupon a horribly secretive and biased group of editors will select the best one each week, aiming for Eliezer quality or higher. The prominent posters you've contacted should create enough good content for the first couple months. Voting will be disabled for posts, and enabled only for comments. There will also be one monthly open thread for unstructured discussion.
I don't think anything short of that would work. LW's problem is the decline in quality, so the fix should be quality-oriented, not quantity-oriented.
I think it went the other way: demands for quality, rigor, and fully developed ideas made posting here unsatisfying (compared to the alternatives) for a lot of previously good posters.