That clears it, thanks. The sentence "I'd rather spend time with friends than strangers." just confused me a little because I wasn't sure if you were comparing time spent with friends vs. strangers.
edit. Now I understood it. You were talking about the whole timespan from the start of the friendship until the last moment. I thought at first that you were talking about a single session spent with an individual
I don't understand the last one. Is the thing that is measured here the quality of individuals you spend time with, or the quality of time you spend with individuals, or the amount of time? In any case, you should elaborate.
It tells a lot about the way our brains are built that you have to consciously remind yourself of this in the course of the argument and it doesn't really come naturally.
Do you think LW has succeeded because EY attempted to make it a well-kept garden?
You seem to dislike the QM sequence on LW. Besides those links (they're quite short), is there anything else that you'd recommend to read instead of the QM sequence that would be as easy to understand for a layman and would offer significant insight on MWI position? In short, is there anything that would offer the same utility that the QM sequence offers, but in a better manner?
You can access the mockery videos by Robert Gross once again.
Okay, honestly. I think they're pretty bad and lame.
But this recap of maybe the most funniest thing I've read on LessWrong is quite good. But the ending kinda ruins it, I don't think lukeprog is woman-objectifying misogyny rationalizing whatever, I just thought it was adorable.
I think the most interesting was the discussion about 4chan
You know, Eliezer made that same comparison in his awful and often-referenced “Well-Kept Gardens Die By Pacifism”. It seems to me that 4chan is a wildly successful community, and I can only dream of what a 4chan whose initial core community was made up of aspiring rationalists instead of anime perverts would be like.
The well-kept garden thing obviously hasn't succeeded as planned, so should we be aspiring for some kind of 4chan for rationalists?
I think a big issue is that any of the big contributors of the past, lukeprog, EY, Yvain, gwern, Kaj_Sotala etc. aren't writing articles here anymore and there is no other similarly good and popular writer that would do the same today. There is no purpose coming here, except for the Open Threads. Posting and making comments itself is not very fun because you always have to watch out what you say.
Anything that requires many people to change their habits probably won't going to happen. Changing norms is difficult for the same reason, so idea D is possible, but a bit hard.
I think a combination of
a more co-operative and cheerful style of discussion
and
allowing and encouraging submissions of rationalism, artificial intelligence, transhumanism etc related articles from elsewhere, possibly as a separate category.
and generally allowing a more free discussion about related "fun" issues
could work, but I don't know how would you go about implementing the first one. Like I said, changing norms and habits is a bit difficult and making announcement to the effect of "Be more co-operative and cheerful" is probably going to work as well as announcing "Be nice and don't bully!" in schools. Just relaxing moderation wouldn't be enough. Because honestly, I haven't even noticed any moderation here, there's just the feeling of it.
There's the possibility of starting from scratch and making the subreddit /r/lesswrong more active. Then changing habits and community norms wouldn't be such a big problem. LW related subreddits like /r/rational and /r/HPMOR are already pretty active so expanding this "LW cluster" on reddit would only be natural progression. But I feel like even if that happened, it wouldn't be a satisfying solution for many.
In your post I saw several signs that suggest you don't really want to die. You postponed it out of consideration for your relative (i.e. you still care about things in this world). Every day you wake up less sure of doing it than you were the previous night. You still find the idea repulsive on a gut level. By what I'm about to say I mean absolutely no disrespect, and I don't intend in any way to minimize what you're feeling, but as someone who has been terribly depressed before, I can assure you that people who are resolved to suicide find the idea comforting, not unnerving. From your words it's clear you want the pain to end, but not to end it all.
I think I kinda got obsessed with this part of your post and started thinking really much about it (sorry for ignoring all the other advice in your posts). Mainly because I realized that I even suck at being suicidal - I'm not good at even that, haha. I guess I shouldn't care about things in this world if I'm suicidal. With that in mind I decided to advance it by a week, so umm... today. I have a big amount cognitive dissonance, I still suck at this "really wanting to die" business, but maybe I'll push through.
Time spent with fiction when it's about some coherent body, be it a video game, book, tv series etc. Usually, the more time you spend with that coherent fictional body, the more immersed you become which means you can enjoy it more.