Meta thread

(I've mostly only skimmed.)

It can be hard to find good content in the diaspora. Possible solution: Weekly "diaspora roundup" posts to Less Wrong. I'm too busy to do this, but anyone else is more than welcome to (assuming both people reading LW and people in the diaspora want it).

This is what /r/RationalistDiaspora was intended to do. It never really got traction, and is basically dead now, but it still strikes me as a good solution. If that's not going to revive though, I agree that a weekly thread on LW is worth trying. By default, I'll make one later this week. (I'm not currently sure I'll have anything to post in it myself, I'll be asking people to post links in the comments.)

Go tell Scott Alexander you'll build an online forum to his specification, with SSC community feedback, to provide a better solution for his overflowing open threads.

He tried to move people to /r/SlateStarCodex, but that didn't work. We'd want to understand why. (Some hypotheses: it wasn't actually on SSC, where people go directly; posts there don't pop up in their RSS readers; people have an aversion to comment systems with voting; people have an aversion to reddit specifically.)

As Scott features more and more posts, he gains a moderation team full of people who wrote posts that were good enough to feature.

I'm not sure that "writes good posts" and "would make a good moderator" are sufficiently correlated for this to work. A lot of people like Eliezer's writing but dislike his approach to moderation.

(On the other hand: maybe, if we want Eliezers to stick around, we need them to be able to shape the community? Even if that means upsetting people who don't write much.)

It also creates weird incentives, like: "I liked this post that was highly critical of our community, but I don't want the author to be a mod". (This is the problem that Scott Aa points to of "this system can only improve on ordinary democracy if the trust network has some other purpose" - I worry that voting-for-comment-scores isn't a sufficiently strong purpose to outweigh voting-for-moderators.)

Another system to consider would be to do it based on the way people administer votes, not the way they remove them. If your votes tend to correlate with others', they have more weight in future. If posts you flag tend to get removed, your flags count for more. (I'm not convinced that this works either.)

Yes; I hear that he's the second largest donor to MIRI this year, and I've been working with him successfully on esports betting (with half of the proceeds earmarked for MIRI). I don't know if anyone has taken him up on the match offer.

How do you solve interpersonal problems when neither sides can see themselves as the one in fault?

I've had a a fight with my sister regarding my birthday present. She bought me - boosted with a contribution of my mom and dad - a bunch of clothes. I naturally got mad because: 1. it's a large investment for an unsafe return (my disappointment) 2. I always hated getting clothes for my birthday and the trend haven't changed. I always just asked for money instead.

It has caused a little bit of bitterness. I understand her point of view, which was to make me happy on my birthday but I still can't excuse the invalidity of the function she was using, especially considering that I previously mentioned that I hate clothes for birthday.

What should I do in order to ease the situation? Also, do you think that my reaction was inappropriate?

I talked about this with other people and what people said was 'it's the intention that matters' and that sounds like an excuse (and at this point I'm curious if I actually am looking for criticism or just subconsciously hoping I'll get a bunch of chocolate frogs) so get the best criticism you can give.

Any advice on what is the best way to buy index funds and/or individual stocks? Particularly for people in the UK?

I know this has probably been asked before on a 'basic knowledge' thread, but I can't find the answer.

Isn't that a completely different fallacy?

I took the meaning to be "therefore you think there are some nonsentient things I should be forbidden to eat". I agree that as written the other meaning is a more natural interpretation, but in the context of the rest of the article I think my interpretation is more likely (exactly because otherwise it would involve an entirely different logical error). philh, would you like to confirm or refute?

[EDITED to fix an idiotic mistake: for some reason I thought Elo, not philh, was the author. My apologies to both.]

Polyamory is the whole motivation for polyhacking, I guess, so that "another step" is actually very small.

And polyamory is usually advertised here as an opportunity to have more sexual freedom and be a part of the happy rationalist family. So it seems relevant to note that it may also come with a price, and that even the happy rationalist family is not perfect in avoiding the price.

(My personal opinion is that if you are 20 and you are not planning to have kids during the nearest decade, go poly. There is almost nothing to lose, because the probability of staying with the same partner ten years later is low, so you might as well share them now and get something nice in return. But I predict that as soon as children start getting born, most poly relationships will fall apart.)

And this one.

Isn't admitting preference for someone the the coup de grace of romance?

To avoid only reading filtered evidence, people interested in polyhacking might also look at this SSC thread.