All of protostar's Comments + Replies

I don't think the point of the special thread is so much to teach people LW-specific things to enable them to participate, as to overcome shyness and intimidation and the like. That's a problem people have everywhere, and doesn't call for anything LW-specific (except in so far as the people here are unusual, which they might be). In some cases, a newcomer's shyness and intimidation might be because they feel they don't know or understand something, and they could ask about that -- but, again, similar things could happen anywhere and any LW-specific-ness would come out of the specific questions people ask. So there's a theorem that says that under certain circumstances an agent either (behaves exactly as if it) has a utility function and tries to maximize its expected value, or is vulnerable to certain kinds of undesirable outcome. So, e.g., if you're trying to build an AI that you trust with superhuman power then you might want it to have a utility function. But humans certainly don't behave exactly as if we have utility functions, at least not sensible ones. It's often easy to get someone to switch between preferring A over B and preferring B over A just by changing the words you use to describe A and B, for instance; and when trying to make difficult decisions, most people don't do anything much like an expected-utility calculation. And the vNM theorem, unsurprisingly, makes a bunch of technical assumptions that don't necessarily apply to real people in the real world -- and, further, to get from "if you don't do X you will run into trouble Y" to "you should do X" you need to know that the adverse consequences of doing X aren't worse than Y, which for resource-limited agents like us they might be. (Indeed, doing X might be simply impossible for us, or for whatever other agents we're considering; e.g., if you care about the welfare of people 100 years from now, evaluating your "utility function"'s expectation would require making detailed probabilistic predictio

Well, I was heavily socialised to walk away from conflict, but I think it was more than that. It seemed like the rational thing to do, getting into arguments being the emotional and atavistic thing. In retrospect, this seems like straw vulcanism.

Yeah, I know the feeling. Or when a comment or two below an article drag the whole discussion in a completely different direction. But as you say, it's "just like any other forum". How could this be prevented? Replying before reading other comments has a high risk of repeating what someone else said. Having the discipline to read the original comment again and try to see it with fresh eyes is difficult. There are topics that Eliezer described pretty well. Not saying that useful stuff cannot be added, but the lowest hanging fruit has been probably already picked. But there are also areas that Eliezer did not describe althogh he considered them important. Quoting from Go Forth and Create the Art!: Some of these things were addressed. There are about dozen articles on procrastination, and have the Less Wrong Study Hall. CFAR is working on the rationality curriculum, although I would like to see much more visible output. I think we are quite weak at developing the introductory literature, and public relations in general. I don't feel we have much to offer to a mildly interested outsider to make them more interested. A link to Sequences e-book and... what is the next step? Telling them to come here and procrastinate reading the debates we have here? I don't know myself what is the next step other than "invent your own project, possibly with cooperation of other people you found through LW". I feel that a fully mature rationalist community would offer the newbie rationalists some more guidance. So here is the opportunity for those who want to see the community grow: to find out what kind of guidance it would be, and to provide it. Are we going to find smart people and teach them math? Teach existing scientists how to understand and use p-values properly? Or organize Procrastinators Anonymous meetups? Make a website debunking frequent irrational claims? Support startups in exchange for a pledge to donate to MIRI? I'm pretty sure that's supposed to be a conversational