During a discussion today about the bizarre "can't get crap done" phenomenon that afflicts large fractions of our community, the suggestion came up that most people can't do anything where there is a perceived choice that includes the null option / "do nothing" as an option. Of which Michael Vassar made the following observation:
In a monkey tribe, there's no verbal communication - they can't discuss where to go using language. So if you get up and start going anywhere, you must be the leader.
And if you're not the leader, it is not good for your reproductive fitness to act like one. In modern times the penalties for standing up are much lower, but our instincts haven't updated.
Interesting to reconsider the events of "To lead, you must stand up" in this light. It makes more sense if you read it as "None of those people had instincts saying it was a good idea to declare themselves the leader of the monkey tribe, in order to solve this particular coordination problem where 'do nothing' felt like a viable option" instead of "nobody had the initiative".
What about people who have LW accounts and also accounts at places like GitHub (like me, for example)? It makes sense then that people would do talking at talking-sites and production at production-sites.
The "can't get crap done" malaise might just be that LWers tend to think that they're not getting enough crap done. Talking about that feeling at LW is appropriate, whereas talking about it at GitHub would (perhaps rightly) just earn some responses of "Well, starting coding already then!", since it's not the function of those sites to deal with akrasia but to organize efforts that have already dodged that trap.
In a cool liquid there will always be some fast particles, just fewer of them. Or to put it more seriously I am talking statistically, I expect a distribution.
Do you compartmentalize the two sites? That is if you saw something that needed doing or would be useful for the lesswrong community would you code it up and try and get other people to help? For example a productivity monitoring tool?
If everyone who does do stuff, but not lesswrong style stuff, then lesswrong as a community will be hard pressed to achieve its goals of making people less wrong.
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