Any progress on this? With the switchover from LW1 now imminent, I've looked at the LessWrong code on github a bit more and from a cursory review, it really does seem that the usecase or 'flow' of a user editing their own "recovery email" address is broken. The code calls the proper Meteor/Vulcan functions when creating a new user, and will in turn create new users when importing them for the first time from a legacy (LW1) database, but aside from that, there is no acknowledgement that Vulcan/Meteor has its own functions in the 'account'-related ...
Part of it is just semantics, really. In contemporary times, "art" tends to be connoted as left-wing, while "design" and "craft", which occupy much of the same space, as apolitical or even loosely on the 'right'. Wiewing website design as "art" as opposed to a "craft", or even just one design activity among many, isn't quite a value-free choice!
There's currently a lot of useful content at the LessWrong (LW1) Wiki, wiki.lesswrong.com. What will happen to it? It seems that at a very minimum, you should request a wikidump as well from Trike; it would even be relatively easy to make a public dump available, using the tools that MediaWiki makes available for this purpose.
Great news, overall. However, do notice that, by all indications, this migration will in fact break links, for the case of "links to comments on a deleted LW1 post". As I mentioned on LW1 itself, given such a LW1 "permlink", you can freely explore "parent" comments and replies. Lesser Wrong does not support individual "permlink" pages, so it simply links to the individual comment as part of an "all comments" listings, which breaks in the "deleted page" case (It also impacts the case of a page with...
Oh, I wasn't aware of that functionality. Thanks a lot for pointing this out, and we will get around to fixing this.
I actually thought the "coalitional" part did deserve a mention, precisely because it is one of the few facets of the problem that we can just fight (which is not to say that coalitions don't have a social and formal role to play in any actual political system!) Again, I think Crick would also agree with this, and ISTM that he did grapple with these issues at a pretty deep level. If we're going to go beyond our traditional "no politics!" attitude, I really have to wonder why he's not considered a trusted reference here, on a par w/ the Sequences and whatever the latest AI textbook is.
... I'll just briefly note for the benefit of others that this excerpt seems like the biggest crux and point of disagreement. ...
In tne interest of the general norm of "trying to identify cruxes and make them explicit", I'd like to endorse this - except that to me, the issue goes well beyond "human coalitions" and also encompasses many other things that would generally fall under the rubric of 'politics' in a broad sense - or for that matter, of 'ethics' or 'morality'! When people, plausibly, were 'politically' mindkilled by Duncan's...
That this can be a place where people will actually put forth the effort to get the basic everywhere everyday flawed human communication bugs out of the picture, and do deliberate and intentional communication and collaborative truth seeking on a meaningfully higher level. ... Everything Scott said in that post rings true to me about people and populations in general. But the hope is that LessWrong is not just humans doing business as usual. The hope is that LessWrong is actually different.
Look, I hate to break the news to you, but just like Soylent Gre...
I myself was wrong to engage with them as if their beliefs had cruxes that would respond to things like argument and evidence.
This is a fully-general-counterargument to any sort of involvement by people with even middling real-world concerns in LW2 - so if you mean to cite this remark approvingly as an example of how we should enforce our own standard of "perfectly rational" epistemic norms, I really have to oppose this. It is simply a fact about human psychology that "things like argument and evidence" are perhaps necessary but not ...
Thank you Qiaochu_Yuan for this much-needed clarification! It seems kinda important to address this sort of ambiguity well before you start casually talking about how 'some views' ought to be considered unacceptable for the sake of our community. (--Thus, I think both habryka and Duncan have some good points in the debate about what sort of criticism should be allowed here, and what standards there should be for the 'meta' level of "criticizing critics" as wrongheaded, uncharitable or whatever.)
... in at least some ways, it's important to have Quirrells and Lucius Malfoys around on the side of LW's culture, and not just David Monroes and Dumbledores.
This is an interesting point - and, ISTM, a reason not to be too demanding about people coming to LW itself with a purely "good faith" attitude! To some extent, "bad faith" and even fights for dominance just come with the territory of Hobbesian social and political struggle - and if you care about "hav[ing] Quirrells and Lucius Malfoys" on our side, you're clearly making a point about politics as well, at least in the very broadest sense.
I suspect they think that you're not being sufficiently polite toward those you're trying to throw out of the overton window
Actually, what I would say here is that "politeness" itself (and that's actually a pretty misleading term since we're dealing with fairly important issues of morality and ethics, not just shallow etiquette-- but whatever, let's go with it) entails that we should seek a clear understanding of what attitudes we're throwing out of the Overton window, and why, or out of what sort of specific concerns. There's nothing wrong wh...
I don't think the difference between "talking about internet stuff" and "talking about stuff that's happening IRL" has any meaningful relevance when it comes to standards of discourse.
Well, human psychology says that "stuff that's happening IRL" kinda has to play by its own rules. Online social clubs simply aren't treated the same by common sense 'etiquette' (much less common-sense morality!) as actual communities where people naturally have far higher stakes.
...I don't want to carve out an exception that says "intelle
I think it's important to have public, common-knowledge deterrence of that sort of behavior. I think that part of what allowed it to flourish on LessWrong 1.0 is the absence of comments like my parenthetical, making it clear that that sort of thing is outside the Overton window
There is a very important distinction to be made here, between criticism of an online project like LessWrong itself or even LessWrong 2, where the natural focus is on loosely coordinating useful work to be performed "IRL" (the 'think globally, act locally' strategy) and ...
Huh, apologies for not being available for 'realtime chat' then. I just tried this quickly with a JS console, but weirdly enough I don't see any message when pressing that button - all I see is the usual error message "user not found" popping up in the browser webview (This is probably an issue on my end, though - I'm not really familiar with how the browser console works). What I do see (though in the network view, not quite in the console) is the info being updated when I submit the "edit account" form, and I notice that the resulting...
Um, yes I did? (The email does appear in my 'account' page, after all.) Anyway, this issue is not so critical to me that I need "real-time support" from the site devs or anything like that. I only really care to the extent that other users may be similarly affected (as seen, e.g. from recent discussions on LW1!). So if it turns out that this is not a generalized problem w/ the site that would also hit other people, I'd think it preferable to just wait until other work on LW2 is completed and perhaps revisit the issue at a later time.
Aside from whpearson's point (which I broadly agree with), it's just a fact of life that most people are boring. And folks who literally pay for ordinary social interaction (seriously, that's what she's selling: Social Interaction As A Service!) are likely to be far more boring/awkward than average. A lot of dating success is simply "be less boring, and mske sure that you're aware of when you're boring someone to death, so you can course-correct". Perhaps it's just me, but I see this as fairly obvious.
Um, now there is a "reset password" link, but it does not work properly at least in my case. My recovery address from LW1 was not in the version of the database that was imported to Lesser Wrong, and apparently setting that address as an 'email' in the "edit account" page did not help, either - it is not seen by the "reset password" functionality as a recovery address associated with my user. Weird.
I do agree that as soon as you log in, we should strongly encourage the user to create a new password. I will try to implement that soon.
Was the "change password" page actually tested to work for users who have logged in with 'legacy' LW1 credentials? E.g. I notice that there's a textfield asking for my 'current' password on that page, and I have no idea how that would interact with your solution. I also edited the 'email' field in my user options, expecting it to set a 'recovery' address, but I have no idea if that worked properly. (I didn't...
Thanks! Do you plan to add support for the new-to-LW2 "log in with LW1 credentials" flow? It seems to need some special-cased client-side support, according to this post - I suppose you can check out the related commits on LW2 code for the details of how to make it work! (Logging in and participating on LW2 itself is still unbearably slow for lower-powered devices-- and I'm not willing to go through the whole prospect of having to change (or worse, "reset") my credentials there in order to make them usable on GreaterWrong-- at least, n...
This is insecure if LW1 hashes get leaked or were leaked at some point.
Isn't this vulnerability inherent in the whole "hashing passwords on the client" setup? (indeed, it seems to miss the whole point of hashing?) Or am I misunderstanding what Meteor does?
Indeed, it's working properly with the show=posts and show=comments URL parameters, and no content seems to be lost. Great news, but that was definitely non-obvious - thanks! (I'd naïvely assumed that if the individual chronological listings were available, that the combined listing would be built by searching for offset_posts and offset_comments such that offset_posts + offset_comments = offset, and the timestamps for the post at offset_posts and comment at offset_comments are as close as possible. Shouldn't require more than log(N) reqs in the worst case...
So it seems that I have to wait until I've been locked out of lw1.0 and only then I can try if I can log into lw2.0 ...
Good catch. It would make sense to keep some version of LW1.0 running for a while even after the "final import" is done, purely for the sake of supporting existing users in migrating to LW2. However, I understand that the reddit-derived LW1 code is practically unmaintained by now, so Trike (the folks who host LW1) aren't willing to keep it going for much longer. This means that the site devs' hands are somewhat tied at this po...
Are you saying that Greater Wrong is currently requesting the whole 1000 comments history when you go to a user page and browse the user history? If so, I think you should get in contact with the Greater Wrong dev(s) and work on a solution that can work with the current pagination on that site. In practice, making sure that full comment history works on Greater Wrong is probably the easiest and quickest way to avert the perception of a regression from what LW1 makes available. Having a "proper" user history with monthly listings, etc. is a nice-to-have of course, but it does not strike me as critical.
...error message "User not found" appears...
This is expected behavior if the recovery email address was not set in the user data LW2 imported from LW1 back in September, or whatever - LW2 simply doesn't know about that email address at the moment! The LW2 devs have promised a "final import" of LW1 data, which should fix this sort of issue (again, assuming that you have set your email here; if you haven't done this yet, you should do it right now, and follow the instructions in the automated email LW1 sends you to verify that you cont...
You should set your recovery email here on LW1 (if you haven't done so already), so that it has a chance of being part of the previously-announced "final import" of LW1 data; assuming that this occurs successfully, you'll then be able to "reset your password" on LW2 (or, more conveniently for you, on GreaterWrong) using that email address and log in there. Just my 2¢ here, since I'm not a LW2 developer.
(It would sure be nice if we had more participation from the devs here, since after all we're thinking about a major migration and there...
I'm not sure that I understand your question. It is obviously an annoyance, and something that high-karma LW1 users may specifically want to be aware of, since they're far more likely to be affected by it. There are users on the site with far more impressive commenting histories and/or karma scores than mine, and I think the assessment of whether this bug is a 'blocking' issue should be left to these users.
There is an annoying bug/limitation on the new site, in that users who have posted more than 1000 comments (including yours truly, but this is affecting other prolific commenters to a far greater extent of course) cannot access their full commenting history, albeit they can here on lesswrong.com. (Tested on greaterwrong.com, but I assume that the same limit would apply on lesserwrong.) The comments do exist on the site, attached to discussions (albeit a similar issue may exist, affecting discussions with more than 1000 comments or so). This is annoying because I do want my commenting history to be easily accessible in full, and the same is likely true of many other users.
Thanks for adding this, then! Personally, I'm just waiting to create an account/log in there until the 'final' LW-importation goes through. (Users who were late setting the e-mails to their accounts here did not have these imported to LW2 initially, which can lead to all sorts of problems. But a new importation from LW's updated user list can fix this - or maybe it can't, but then there's no loss in just creating a new user!)
It would be nice to have more than just a single page of 'new' content, since as is, it can even be hard to check out all recent pos...
There is an alternative interface to the new site at Greater Wrong. It has a few problems (namely, it's hard to access archived content; all you get is a day to day listing of posts) but compared to Lesser Wrong it's at least usable. LW2 should support it officially in addition to the Lesser Wrong website, and perhaps even add features like logging in and posting content through it.
The "first release" of LessWrong is, well, this site. What's happening with LW 2.0 is actually called "introducing regressions", and I don't think the startup folks would endorse that. The combination of a full rewrite-from-scratch and a stringent deadline - the switchover was originally supposed to happen around this time, as far as I understand, albeit it has likely been postponed by now - is considered especially unwise.
Hopefully the LesserWrong folks can come up with something that's genuinely usable - there are quite a few things I do like about the new site. But the challenges are just as real.
I think I know what you mean - the site has recently become just barely usable on the simplest of its pages. But as soon as you do something that happens to poke the "JavaScript VM" the wrong way (crazy things like, idk, looking at recent postings by date, viewing a user's recent contributions to the site, or even just opening a popular post w/ lots of comments!), it just grinds to a halt. It's maddening.
I think you're right in a way, but it's definitely a problem. LW 1.0 is easily usable on a mobile internet device (a tablet or even a phone!). LW 0.2 (sorry, I meant "2.0"!) is horribly sluggish even on a fairly reasonable desktop. How can we honestly expect such a site to ever become popular among the "cool kids" of today? (And come to think of it, plenty of "cool kids" read, say, Scott's blog, and that's a lot closer to LW 1.0 than to the newer version of the site - it certainly performs reasonably!)
an acknowledgement that it's a fundamentally combative activity, and accepted as a necessity for goodness
This is why they should be called the "Trolling Regiment" or "Legion of Trolls". (And yes, this is a serious proposal!) Yes, they're supposed to be trolling for goodness, but we all know that, right? And of course every troll pursues their own personal version of "goodness" as they see it!
The biggest "issue" with LesserWrong right now is not whatever "features" are missing; it's that performance on that website sucks, to the point of making it quite simply unusable. It feels like LW 0.2, not LW 2.0 - it's even a lot worse than Arbital, which is hardly a high-performing website itself! The way I see it, everything else is secondary - unless this situation is improved well before the vote, I can only assume that lots of people will be voting against the merge, since LW-as-we-know-it would be dead either way, and the "...
The interesting thing when it comes to compliments specifically is that both 'honest assessment' and 'status negotiation' are part of the interaction. You can even use this ambiguity in a ploy to gain status by "qualifying", i.e. when you do compliment someone, make sure that it does reflect some good quality of them, and keep it very low-tone. Very few people will feel insulted bh such a move, but by understating you get a free boost in status. I suppose that many sorts of everyday flattery work pretty much the other way around, in that you're giving up some perceived status to persuade someone about what qualities might make them impressive, and how you could help them be even more iimpressive!
I suspect that the real skill is knowing when the mating^H^H^H^H^H^H signaling dance is worth the effort. Among your fellow geniuses at the IAS? That's a clear 'yes' even if emulating monkey-level neural circuitry does require some effort. In politically-relevant settings as mentioned in the OP? That's another 'yes'. However there are many, many environments where being the top monkey gives you nothing except more mediocrity!
I agree. I also like your username!
I for one didn't find issue with the "mood" of OP's post. Of course, the content is not exactly news either - we all are familiar with the 'X is not about Y' pattern! But it's nice to see a well-written reminder of this every once in a while.
...More generally, say we want to prove a theorem that looks something like "If A, then B has property C." You start at A and, appealing to the definition of C, show that B has it. There's probably some cleverness involved in doing so, but you start at the obvious place (A), end in the obvious place (B satisfies the definition of C), and don't rely on any crazy, seemingly-unrelated insights. Let's call this sort of proof mundane.
There is a virtue in mundane proofs: a smart reader can usually generate them after they read the theorem but before they
Compared to any "anti-akrasia technique" ever proposed on LW or adjacent self-help blogs, joining a class works ridiculously well. You don't need constant willpower: just show up on time and you'll be carried along.
Hahahaha, this is so funny. You've never attended a seriously challenging class your entire life, I take it? There are a lot of topics/subjects that there's no feasible way to learn successfully, other than banging your head against them over and over until they finally sink in. This is painful in a quite literal way, and doing it ...
Please do not link to NSFW tentacle-porn without warning!
Bitcoin is a settlement network, used for periodic netting of positions. The fact that settlement is primarily used for direct payment now is chiefly due to the fact it is easy to do
I'm not sure that there's any real distinction between "direct payment" and "settlement". For that matter, while BTC may in fact be strictly preferable to physical/paper-based settlement in resource use (though even then I'm not sure that the difference is that great!), that's rather small consolation given the extent to which electronic settlement is use...
So Bitcoin is a couple of orders of magnitude short of overtaking banking.
Of course, BTC is also many orders of magnitude short of banking in the volume of trusted transactions it enables - this is hardly an apples-to-apples comparison! A single BTC transaction is actually rather economically costly, and this will only become more fully apparent to BTC users over time, as the current block-creation subsidy keeps dwindling further.
Now don't get me wrong, BTC and other crypto-currencies are still interesting as a heroic effort to establish decentralized ...
The main idea is that the world is built on logic and harmony which can be understood by an individual human mind. It was born from religious mysticism (Descartes, Leibniz)
Erm, Pythagoras was around a lot earlier than the likes of Descartes or Leibniz. Even the competing ideas that "the world is built on chance" or else that "all understanding is social" (or, to put it another way, "man is the measure of all things") are of comparable antiquity and not really more 'sophisticated' in any relevant way - except perhaps in an overly literal sense, being more conducive to "sophistry"!
I think you need verifiable pre-commitment, not just communication - in a free-market economy, enforced property rights basically function as such a pre-commitment mechanism. Where pre-commitment (including property right enforcement) is imperfect, only a constrained optimum can be reached, since any counterparty has to assume ex-ante that the agent will exploit the lack of precommitment. Imperfect information disclosure has similar effects, however in that case one has to "assume the worst" about what information the agent has; the deal must be altered accordingly, and this generally comes at a cost in efficiency.
the programs that people tend to use for satisfying them become less physical and more social in nature: society in effect reserves its highest rewards for those most practiced in social, rather than physical, cognition. The essay implies that he regards this as being, in at least some sense, contingent: in principle, society could be set up so that physical cognition played a greater role in the satisfaction of higher Maslow-needs
It seems hard to envision a society wherein belonging and esteem could be satisfied via physical cognition, at least until w...
For some reason, it's not overly surprising to me that both Isaac Newton and Richard Feynman would directly endorse physical cognition - what with them being natural philosophers/physicists. It's less clear however that such "physical cognition" is directly relevant to e.g. music composition, except inasmuch as both physics and music composition are linked to self-actualization - as opposed to 'mere' love, belonging and self-esteem, which (if pursued in excess, due to a lack of "self-actualizing" pursuits) might "lead[] to increased unethical behavior" or "produce anti-social narcissism" according to the essay you link to.
Hi, it currently appears to me that the LW2 functionality around 'recovery email' addresses is subtly broken, and if I am correct, this will impact LW1 users who did not set a recovery email until after the first database import to LesserWrong, as well as any users wishing to change their associated 'recovery' email in the future. Please see this subthread (or GreaterWrong link) for details about the issue. I'm not confident that opening a formal "issue" ticket on GitHub would be appropriate here, because all I have is circumstantial evidence, an... (read more)