I think it'd be a good idea to keep a list of the ways we'd like to see LessWrong improve, sorted by popularity. Ie. email alerts for new responses.
So if you have an idea for how LessWrong could be better, post it in the comments. As people up/downvote, we'll get a sense for what the consensus opinions are.
I think there's a pretty good amount to be gained by improving LessWrong.
- I think there's a lot of low-hanging fruit (like email alerts for new responses).
- Conversations here are actually useful and productive. Facilitating conversation should thus lead to more of these useful and productive conversations (as opposed to leading to more of an unproductive type of conversation). (Sorry, I didn't word this well; hopefully you guys know what I mean.)
- Perhaps something big would come out of this list (like meet-ups). Perhaps rationality hack-a-thons (whatever that means)?
I'm not a good enough coder now, but once I am, I think I'd like to do what I can to make LessWrong better. I'm starting a coding bootcamp (Fullstack Academy) on Monday. By the end of it, I should at least be competent.
Note: I say "ways to improve" instead of "features" because "ways to improve" is more general.
Mixing factual questions with what you want to be true is a bad idea. Whether or not getting rid of the FDA will result in no clinical trials is a factual question. On LW the common word to describe that kind of reasoning is 'mind-killed'.
The common moral framework on LW is that people are utilitarians or consequentialists. Most of us don't believe in God given "natural law" but think that laws are entirely man-made. We can discuss which laws are good and which aren't, just because some Christians considered certain laws naturally produced by God doesn't imply that they are binding in the 21th century.
The thing is that I would like to eat more tuna. Mercury content in tuna is unfortunately high enough that the European food safety authority advises against daily tuna consumption. Under the Obama administration the EPA calculate the cost of the decreased IQ of children in the US and found that it's cost effective to put barriers on the ability of the free market to produce mercury emission. If you sit down and calculate childrens IQ is just worth more.
I like that the EPA stops the free market from producing mercury pollution. Fortunately some day on the future that means I can regularly eat tuna.
No, Big Pharma likes to have the standard at the level where they are. They don't always lobby for the standards for clinical trials to be less but sometimes even lobby against lowering of standards.
The basic idea of dealing with issues of the tragedy of the commons is to come to a common agreement and then enforce that agreement by punishing people who violate it.
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