Less Wrong is a large community of very smart people with a wide spectrum of expertise, and I think relatively little of that value has been tapped.
Like my post The Best Textbooks on Every Subject, this is meant to be a community-driven post. The first goal is to identify topics the Less Wrong community would like to read more about. The second goal is to encourage Less Wrongers to write on those topics. (Respecting, of course, the implicit and fuzzy guidelines for what should be posted to Less Wrong.)
One problem is that those with expertise on a subject don't necessarily feel competent to write a front-page post on it. If that's the case, please comment here explaining that you might be able to write one of the requested posts, but you'd like a writing collaborator. We'll try to find you one.
Rules
You may either:
- Post the title of the post you want someone to write for Less Wrong. If the title itself isn't enough to specify the content, include a few sentences of explanation. "How to Learn a Language Quickly" probably needs no elaboration, but "Normative Theory and Coherent Extrapolated Volition" certainly does. Do not post two proposed post titles in the same comment, because that will confuse voting. Please put the title in bold.
or... - Vote for a post title that has already been suggested, indicating that you would like to read that post, too. Vote with karma ('Vote Up' or 'Vote Down' on the comment that contains the proposed post title).
I will regularly update the list of suggested Less Wrong posts, ranking them in descending order of votes (like this).
The List So Far (updated 02/11/11)
- (35) Conversation Strategies for Spreading Rationality Without Annoying People
- (32) Smart Drugs: Which Ones to Use for What, and Why
- (30) A Survey of Upgrade Paths for the Human Brain
- (29) Trusting Your Doctor: When and how to be skeptical about medical advice and medical consensus
- (25) Rational Homeschool Education
- (25) Field Manual: What to Do If You're Stranded in a Level 1 (Base Human Equivalent) Brain in a pre-Singularity Civilization
- (20) Entrepreneurship
- (20) Detecting And Bridging Inferential Distance For Teachers
- (19) Detecting And Bridging Inferential Distance For Learners
- (18) Teaching Utilizable Rationality Skills by Exemplifying the Application of Rationality
- (13) Open Thread: Offers of Help, Requests for Help
- (13) Open Thread: Math
- (12) How to Learn a Language Quickly
- (12) True Answers for Every Philosophical Question
- (10) The "Reductionism" Sequence in One Lesson
- (10) The "Map and Territory" Sequence in One Lesson
- (10) The "Mysterious Answers to Mysterious Questions" Sequence in One Lesson
- (10) Lecture Notes on Personal Rationality
- (10) The "Joy in the Merely Real" Sequence in One Lesson
A survey of systems theory approaches and applications
I've been meaning to look into various general theories about systems and processes, but the field seems pretty obscure and ill-defined. Category theory seems to have been popping up in relation to this since the 70s, but I don't know if this stuff has been successfully applied to modelling any real-world phenomena. The late Robin Milner was working on some sort of process formalism stuff, but what I tried to read of that was extremely formalism-heavy and very light on the motivation. Baez's Rosetta paper tries to unify physical processes and computations with a category theoretical formalism.
One basic theme seems to be looking for a formalism that deals with processes instead of static objects. Process philosophy sounds like it should be relevant.
It seems obvious that better tools for understanding complex processes would be nice, but given that systems theory has been a thing since at least the mid-20th century and seems to remain pretty obscure and confusing despite people having struggled with plenty of complex systems in between, it looks like it might not be a terribly handy or powerful tool.
Note to self: John Baez seems to be at this again.