I think this discussion is somewhat confused by the elision of the difference between 'autodidact' and 'lone wolf'. 'Autodidact', in internet circles, is generally used to mean 'anyone who learns things primarily outside a formalized educational environment'; it's possible to be an autodidact while still being heavily engaged with communities and taking learning things as a social endeavor and so on, and in fact Eliezer was active in communities related to LW's subject matter for a long time before he started LW. By the same token, one of the main things I...
...When you ask someone if they would like a debate platform and describe all the features and content it'll have, they go: "Hell yeah I'd love that!" And it took me a while to realize that what they are imagining is someone else writing all the content and doing all the heavy lifting. Then they would come along, read some of it, and may be leave a comment or two. And basically everyone is like that: they want it, but they are not willing to put in the work. And I don't blame them, because I'm not willing to put in the work (of writing) either. The
Would be interested if I lived in a place amenable to this. Seconding dropspindle's recommendation of Appalachia, since that's where I'm already planning to move if I can get a remote job.
It may be worth looking to see whether there are any large, relatively inexpensive houses near major cities that could be converted. There are a lot of McMansion developments in the suburbs north of DC that have never looked particularly inhabited.
Similarly, when a third party describes SSC, they cannot credibly accuse Scott of what someone else wrote in the comments; the dividing line between Scott and his comentariat is obvious.
They can accuse Scott of being the sort of fascist who would have a [cherry-picking two or three comments that aren't completely in approval of the latest Salon thinkpiece] far-right extremist commentariat. And they do.
I don't feel like I can just share Less Wrong articles to many places because Less Wrong lacks respectability in wider society and is only respectable with those who are part of the LW ghetto's culture.
That's mostly a CSS problem. The respectability of a linked LW article would, I think, be dramatically increased if the place looked more professional. Are there any web designers in the audience?
Walled gardens are probably necessary for honest discussion.
If everything is open and tied to a meatspace identity, contributors have to constantly mind what they can and can't say and how what they're saying could be misinterpreted, either by an outsider who isn't familiar with local jargon or by a genuinely hostile element (and we've certainly had many of those) bent on casting LW or that contributor in the worst possible light.
If everything is open but not tied to an identity, there's no status payoff for being right that's useful in the real world -- o...
Let's consider the number x = ...999; in other words, now we have infinitely many 9s to the left of the decimal point.
My gut response (I can't reasonably claim to know math above basic algebra) is:
Infinite sequences of numbers to the right of the decimal point are in some circumstances an artifact of the base. In base 3, 1/3 is 0.1 and 1/10 is 0.00220022..., but 1/10 "isn't" an infinitely repeating decimal and 1/3 "is" -- in base 10, which is what we're used to. So, heuristically, we should expect that some infinitely repeating rep
Language could be more or less frozen wherever it stands at the time.
No it wouldn't -- language is for signaling, not only communication. There would probably be a common language for business and travel, but languages would continue to develop normally, since people would still want to use language to determine how they present themselves.
If you never publicly state your beliefs, how are you supposed to refine them?
But if you do publicly state your beliefs, the Rebecca Watsons can eat you, and if you don't, the Rebecca Watsons can coordinate against you.
How do you solve that?
"I believe that it's always important to exchange views with people, no matter what their perspectives are. I think that we have a lot of problems in our society and we need to be finding ways to talk to people, we need to find ways to talk to people where not everything is completely transparent. ... I think often...
Right, and he addresses this in the article:
...This lack of motivation is connected to another important psychology – the willingness to fail conventionally. Most people in politics are, whether they know it or not, much more comfortable with failing conventionally than risking the social stigma of behaving unconventionally. They did not mind losing so much as being embarrassed, as standing out from the crowd. (The same phenomenon explains why the vast majority of active fund management destroys wealth and nobody learns from this fact repeated every year.)
People have been building communities with canons since the compilation of the Torah.
LW, running on the same Reddit fork it's on today, used to be a functional community with a canon. Then... well, then what? Interesting content moved offsite, probably because 1) people get less nervous about posting to Tumblr or Twitter than posting an article to LW 2) LW has content restrictions that elsewhere doesn't. So people stopped paying attention to the site, so the community fragmented, the barrier to entry was lowered, and now the public face of rationalists is...
This is seeking a technological solution to a social problem.
The proposed technological solution is interesting, complicated, and unlikely to ever be implemented. It's not hard to see why the sorts of people who read LW want to talk about interesting and complicated things, especially interesting and complicated things that don't require much boring stuff like research -- but I highly doubt that anyone is going to sit down and do the work of implementing it or anything like it, and in the event that anyone ever does, it'll likely take so long that many of...
Religion requires epistemic blindspots, but does religion require epistemic blindspots? That is, is requiring epistemic blindspots a property of religion itself, or is religion one among many subclasses of the type of thing that requires epistemic blindspots? In the former case, raising the sanity waterline to specifically eliminate religion would raise the sanity waterline; in the latter case, it might lower it.
What do you think would happen to the sanity waterline if all the Seventh-Day Adventists in America became atheists and joined an antifa group? ...
That's true. One has to be on the lookout for pathological social trends masquerading as widespread rationality. For example, the current US attitude that you have to go to college is looking less and less rational by the day. That said, in some other country with 10% high school graduation rates and zero universities, I would consider any increase in those numbers to be a sanity improvement.
This sounds like an exploration/exploitation problem. If every society heads for the known maximum of sanity, it'll be much more difficult to find higher maxima tha...
(+) Enrollment rates in primary/secondary/tertiary education
How are you defining 'education' here? Does homeschooling count? What about trade schools? Apprenticeships?
If a society had a college education rate of, say, 98%, would it have a higher or lower sanity waterline than a society with a college education rate of 30% where most of the other 70% went into employer-funded job training, apprenticeships, etc.?
And education depresses fertility. Until widespread genetic engineering or FAI, the values of populations whose fertility rate is above (replac...
Online communities do not have a strong comparative advantage in compiling and presenting facts that are well understood. That's the sort of thing academics and journalists are already paid to do.
But academics write for other academics, and journalists don't and can't. (They've tried. They can't. Remember Vox?)
AFAIK, there isn't a good outlet for compilations of facts intended for and easily accessible by a general audience, reviews of books that weren't just written, etc. Since LW isn't run for profit and is run as outreach for, among other things, CFA...
1) I'm fairly intelligent, completely unskilled (aside from writing, which I have some experience in, but not the sort that I could realistically put on a resume, especially where I live), and I don't like programming. What skills should I develop for a rewarding career?
2) On a related note, the best hypothetical sales pitch for EA would be that it can provide enough career help (presumably via some combination of statistically-informed directional advice and networking, mostly the latter) to more than make up for the 10% pledge. I don't know how or whethe...
I have a very low bar for 'interesting discussion', since the alternative for what to do with my spare time when there's nothing going on IRL is playing video games that I don't particularly like. But it's been months since I've seen anything that meets it.
It seems like internet people think insight demands originality. This isn't true. If you look at popular long-form 'insight' writers, even Yudkowsky (especially Yudkowsky), most of what they do is find earlier books and file the serial numbers off. It could be a lot easier for us to generate interesting discussion if we read more books and wrote about them, like this.
...I think if you want to unify the community, what needs to be done is the creation of a hn-style aggregator, with a clear, accepted, willing, opinionated, involved BDFL, input from the prominent writers in the community (scott, robin, eliezer, nick bostrom, others), and for the current lesswrong.com to be archived in favour of that new aggregator. But even if it's something else, it will not succeed without the three basic ingredients: clear ownership, dedicated leadership, and as broad support as possible to a simple, well-articulated vision. Lesswrong tr
I'd be surprised if Yudkowsky has read Sartre. But it's a natural thing to do. Harry Potter is (unfortunately) the closest thing we have to a national epic we have these days... well, an Anglosphere epic, but you get the idea.
If this is the sort of thing you're interested in, you might want to read Benedict Anderson's book Imagined Communities.