Guys I'd like your opinion on something.

Do you think LessWrong is too intellectually insular? What I mean by this is that we very seldom seem to adopt useful vocabulary or arguments or information from outside of LessWrong. For example all I can think of is some of Robin Hanson's and Paul Graham's stuff. But I don't think Robin Hanson really counts as Overcoming Bias used to be LessWrong.

The community seems to not update on ideas and concepts that didn't originate here. The only major examples fellow LWers brought up in conversation where works that Eliezer cited as great or influential. :/

Another thing, I could be wrong about this naturally, but it seems to clear that LessWrong has not grown. I'm not talking numerically. I can't put my finger to major progress done in the past 2 years. I have heard several other users express similar sentiments. To quote one user:

I notice that, in topics that Eliezer did not explicitly cover in the sequences (and some that he did), LW has made zero progress in general.

I've recently come to think this is probably true to the first approximation. I was checking out a blogroll and saw LessWrong listed as Eliezer's blog about rationality. I realized that essentially it is. And worse this makes it a very crappy blog since the author doesn't make new updates any more. Originally the man had high hopes for the site. He wanted to build something that could keep going on its own, growing without him. It turned out to be a community mostly dedicated to studying the scrolls he left behind. We don't even seem to do a good job of getting others to read the scrolls. 

Overall there seems to be little enthusiasm for actually systematically reading the old material. I'm going to share my take on what is I think a symptom of this. I was debating which title to pick for my first ever original content Main article (it was originally titled "On Conspiracy Theories") and made what at first felt like a joke but then took on a horrible ring of:

Over time the meaning of an article will tend to converge with the literal meaning of its title.

We like linking articles, and while people may read a link the first time, they don't tend to read it the second or third time they run across it. The phrase is eventually picked up and used out the appropriate of context. Something that was supposed to be shorthand for a nuanced argument starts to mean exactly what "it says". Well not exactly, people still recall it is a vague applause light. Which is actually worse.

I cited precisely "Politics is the Mindkiller" as an example of this. In the original article Eliezer basically argues that gratuitous politics, political thinking that isn't outweighed by its value to the art of rationality, is to be avoided. This soon came to meant it is forbidden to discuss politics in Main and Discussion articles, though it does live in the comment sections.

Now the question if LessWrong remains productive intellectually, is separate from the question of it being insular. But I feel both need to be discussed. If our community wasn't growing and it wasn't insular either, it could at least remain relevant.

This site has a wonderful ethos for discussion and thought. Why do we seem to be wasting it?

Related to: Wikifying the Blog List

LessWrong posters and readers are generally pretty cool people. Maybe they are interesting bloggers too. And I'm not just talking about rationalist material, that we'd ideally like to be cross posted on LessWrong, no gardening blogs are also fair game. I'm making this a discussion level post so more people can see the list. Please share links to blogs by former or current LWers. Surely the authors wouldn't mind, who wouldn't like more readers? Original list here.

Anyone who wants to suggest a new blog for the list please follow this link.

Blogs by LWers:

• RobinHanson --- Overcoming Bias (Katja Grace and Robert Wiblin post here as well)
• Katja Grace --- Meteuphoric (very cool old posts and summaries)
• muflax --- muflax' mindstream, daily
• TGGP --- Entitled To An Opinion
• Yvain --- Jackdaws love my big sphinx of quartz
• juliawise --- Giving Gladly, Radiant Things
• James_G --- Writings
• steven0461 --- Black Belt Bayesian
• James Miller --- Singluarity Notes
• Jsalvati --- Good Morning, Economics
• Will Newsome --- Computational Theology
• clarissethorn --- Clarrise Thorn
• Zack M. Davis --- An Algorithmic Lucidity
• Kaj_Sotala --- A view to the gallery of my mind
• SilasBarta --- Setting Things Straight
• tommcabe --- The Rationalist Conspiracy
• Alicorn --- Irregular Updates By An Irregular Person
• MBlume --- Baby, check this out; I've got something to say.
• ciphergoth --- Paul Crowley's blog (mostly about cryonics), Paul Crowley
• XiXiDu --- Alexander Kruel
• Aurini --- Stares At The World
• jkaufman --- Jeff Kaufman
• Bill_McGrath --- billmcgrathmusic
• Sister Y --- the view from hell
• PaulWright --- Paul Wright's blog
• _ozymandias --- http://ozyfrantz.com/
• mstevens --- stdout
• HughRistik --- Feminist Critics
• Julia_Galef --- Measure of Doubt
• NancyLebovitz --- Input Junkie
• David Gerard --- a bunch of them
• Jayson_Virissimo --- Jay, Quantified
• kpreid --- Kevin Reid's blog
• hegemonicon --- Coarse Grained 
• Villiam_Bur --- bur.sk
• Emile --- The Rational Parent
• lukeprog --- Common Sense Atheism
• Grognor --- Grognor's Blog
• CarlShulman --- Reflective Disequilibrium
• OrphanWilde --- Aretae
• Alexei --- Bent Spoon Games Blog
• TimS --- Georgia Special Education Law Blog 
• loup-valliant --- @ Loup's
• RolfAndreaseen --- Yngling Saga
• arundelo --- Aaron Brown
• peter_hurtford --- Greatplay.net
• brilee --- Modern Descartes
• gwern --- gwern.net
• erratio --- The merry-go-round of life
• jimmy --- The Art and Science of Cognitive Engineering
• alexvermeer --- alexvermeer.com
• sark --- sarkology
• gjm --- Scribble, scribble, scribble
• Giles --- Prince Mm Mm
• Chris Hallquist --- The Uncredible Hallq
• EricHerboso --- EricHerboso.org
• Eneasz - Death Is Bad
• Tuxedage - Essays and other Musings
• Federico - studiolo
• Trevor Blake - OVO, editor-Dora Marsden, lead judge-George Walford International Essay Prize
• Pablo_Stafforini -- Pablo's miscellany

List of LWers on Twitter

Note: Anyone just digging for interesting blogs they would like to read but dosen't care if they are written by LWers or not should check out this thread or maybe this one. Did you guys know we have a wiki article with external resources? We do. Check that out as well. Maybe once we figure out which LWer blogs related to rationality on this list are particularly good we can add a few of them there too.

http://www.muckflash.com/?p=200

Might be a nice story to point out to people who think "friendly" is easy.

Months ago, my roommate and I were discussing someone who had tried to replicate Seth Roberts' butter mind self-experiment. My roommate seemed to be making almost no inference from the person's self-reports, because they weren't part of a scientific study.

But knowledge does not come in two grades, "scientific" and "useless". Anecdotes do count as evidence, they are just weak evidence. And well designed scientific studies constitute stronger evidence then poorly designed studies. There's a continuum for knowledge quality.

Knowing that humans are biased should make us take their stories and ad hoc inferences less seriously, but not discard them altogether.

There exists some domains where most of our knowledge is fairly low-quality. But that doesn't mean they're not worth study, if the value of information in the domain is high.

For example, a friend of mine read a bunch of books on negotiation and says this is the best one. Flipping through my copy, it looks like the author is mostly just enumerating his own thoughts, stories, and theories. So one might be tempted to discard the book entirely because it isn't very scientific.

But that would be a mistake. If a smart person thinks about something for a while and comes to a conclusion, that's decent-quality evidence that the conclusion is correct. (If you disagree with me on this point, why do you think about things?)

And the value of information in the domain of negotiation can be very high: If you're a professional, being able to negotiate your salary better can net you hundreds of thousands over the course of a career. (Anchoring means your salary next year will probably just be an incremental raise from your salary last year, so starting salary is very important.)

Similarly, this self-help book is about as dopey and unscientific as they come. But doing one of the exercises from it years ago destroyed a large insecurity of mine that I was only peripherally aware of. So I probably got more out of it in instrumental terms than I would've gotten out of a chemistry textbook.

In general, self-improvement seems like a domain of really high importance that's unfortunately flooded with low-quality knowledge. If you invest two hours implementing some self-improvement scheme and find yourself operating 10% more effectively, you'll double your investment in just a week, assuming a 40 hour work week. (ALERT: this seems like a really important point! I'd write an entire post about it, but I'm not sure what else there is to say.)

Here are some free self-improvement resources where the knowledge quality seems at least middling: For people who feel like failures. For students. For mathematicians. Productivity and general ass kicking (web implementation for that last idea). Even more ass kicking ideas that you might have seen already.

The poem is from someone whose online pseudonym is atiguhya padma.  I'll quote the first verse, the refrain, and the beginning of the second verse to give you enough flavor to decide if you want to follow the link.  There are about 9 verses total.

I was wondering if anyone has ever had the feeling, like I get sometimes, that they were addicted to 'meta-level' optimizing rather than low-level acting? As in, I'd rather think about how to encourage myself to brush my teeth more than brush my teeth. I'm guessing there's something about this under the akrasia threads?

The motivations to remain in meta and thinking about things rather than acting on them seems to be that it takes less effort to think about doing things than to do them, and there is potentially more long-term benefit in making an overall improvement than in engaging in a specific action. The drawback is that if you remain thinking about meta all the time, you won't get anything done.

Less Wrong veterans be warned: this is an exercise in going back to the basics of rationality.

Yudkowsky once wrote:

What is evidence?  It is an event entangled, by links of cause and effect, with whatever you want to know about.  If the target of your inquiry is your shoelaces, for example, then the light entering your pupils is evidence entangled with your shoelaces.  This should not be confused with the technical sense of "entanglement" used in physics - here I'm just talking about "entanglement" in the sense of two things that end up in correlated states because of the links of cause and effect between them.

And:

Here is the secret of deliberate rationality - this whole entanglement process is not magic, and you can understand it.  You can understand how you see your shoelaces.  You can think about which sort of thinking processes will create beliefs which mirror reality, and which thinking processes will not.

Much of the heuristics and biases literature is helpful, here. It tells us which sorts of thinking processes tend to create beliefs that mirror reality, and which ones don't.

Still, not everyone understands just how much we know about exactly how the brain becomes entangled with reality by chains of cause and effect. Because "Be specific" is an important rationalist skill, and because concrete physical knowledge is important for technical understanding (as opposed to merely verbal understanding), I would like to summarize¹ some of how your beliefs become entangled with reality when a photon bounces off your shoelaces into your eye.

Follow-up to: Suffering as attention-allocational conflict.

In many cases, it may be possible to end an attention-allocational conflict by looking at the content of the conflict and resolving it. However, there are also many cases where this simply won't work. If you're afraid of public speaking, say, the "I don't want to do this" signal is going to keep repeating itself regardless of how you try to resolve the conflict. Instead, you have to treat the conflict in a non-content-focused way.

In a nutshell, this is just the map-territory distinction as applied to emotions. Your emotions have evolved as a feedback and attention control mechanism: their purpose is to modify your behavior. If you're afraid of a dog, this is a fact about you, not about the dog. Nothing in the world is inherently scary, bad or good. Furthermore, emotions aren't inherently good or bad either, unless we choose to treat them as such.

We all know this, right? But we don't consistently apply it to our thinking of emotions. In particular, this has two major implications:

1. You are not the world: It's always alright to feel good. Whether you're feeling good or bad won't change the state of the world: the world is only changed by the actual actions you take. You're never obligated to feel bad, or guilty, or ashamed. In particular, since you can only influence the world through your actions, you will accomplish more and be happier if your emotions are tied to your actions, not states of the world.
2. Emotional acceptance: At the same time, "negative" emotions are not something to suppress or flinch away from. They're a feedback mechanism which imprints lessons directly into your automatic behavior (your elephant). With your subconsciousness having been trained to act better in the future, your conscious mind is free to concentrate on other things. If the feedback system is broken and teaching you bad lessons, then you should act to correct it. But if the pain is about some real mistake or real loss you suffered, then you should welcome it.

Internalizing these lessons can have some very powerful effects. I've been making very good progress on consistently feeling better after starting to train myself to think like this. But some LW posters are even farther along; witness Will Ryan:

Designed to gauge responses to some parts of the planned “Noticing confusion about meta-ethics” sequence, which should intertwine with or be absorbed by Lukeprog’s meta-ethics sequence at some point.

Disclaimer: I am going to leave out many relevant details. If you want, you can bring them up in the comments, but in general meta-ethics is still very confusing and thus we could list relevant details all day and still be confused. There are a lot of subtle themes and distinctions that have thus far been completely ignored by everyone, as far as I can tell.

Problem 1: Torture versus specks

Imagine you’re at a Less Wrong meetup when out of nowhere Eliezer Yudkowsky proposes his torture versus dust specks problem. Years of bullet-biting make this a trivial dilemma for any good philosopher, but suddenly you have a seizure during which you vividly recall all of those history lessons where you learned about the horrible things people do when they feel justified in being blatantly evil because of some abstract moral theory that is at best an approximation of sane morality and at worst an obviously anti-epistemic spiral of moral rationalization. Temporarily humbled, you decide to think about the problem a little longer:

"Considering I am deciding the fate of 3^^^3+1 people, I should perhaps not immediately assert my speculative and controversial meta-ethics. Instead, perhaps I should use the averaged meta-ethics of the 3^^^3+1 people I am deciding for, since it is probable that they have preferences that implicitly cover edge cases such as this, and disregarding the meta-ethical preferences of 3^^^3+1 people is certainly one of the most blatantly immoral things one can do. After all, even if they never learn anything about this decision taking place, people are allowed to have preferences about it. But... that the majority of people believe something doesn’t make it right, and that the majority of people prefer something doesn’t make it right either. If I expect that these 3^^^3+1 people are mostly wrong about morality and would not reflectively endorse their implicit preferences being used in this decision instead of my explicitly reasoned and reflected upon preferences, then I should just go with mine, even if I am knowingly arrogantly blatantly disregarding the current preferences of 3^^^3 currently-alive-and-and-not-just-hypothetical people in doing so and thus causing negative utility many, many, many times more severe than the 3^^^3 units of negative utility I was trying to avert. I may be willing to accept this sacrifice, but I should at least admit that what I am doing largely ignores their current preferences, and there is some chance it is wrong upon reflection regardless, for though I am wiser than those 3^^^3+1 people, I notice that I too am confused."

You hesitantly give your answer and continue to ponder the analogies to Eliezer’s document “CEV”, and this whole business about “extrapolation”...

(Thinking of people as having coherent non-contradictory preferences is very misleadingly wrong, not taking into account preferences at gradient levels of organization is probably wrong, not thinking of typical human preferences as implicitly preferring to update in various ways is maybe wrong (i.e. failing to see preferences as processes embedded in time is probably wrong), et cetera, but I have to start somewhere and this is already glossing over way too much.)

Bonus problem 1: Taking trolleys seriously

"...Wait, considering how unlikely this scenario is, if I ever actually did end up in it then that would probably mean I was in some perverse simulation set up by empirical meta-ethicists with powerful computers, in which case they might use my decision as part of a propaganda campaign meant to somehow discredit consequentialist reasoning or maybe deontological reasoning, or maybe they'd use it for some other reason entirely, but at any rate that sure complicates the problem...” (HT: Steve Rayhawk)