I suggest this be posted to Main. I go long stretches without checking discussion, and just happened to find the survey here, but I subscribe to the Main RSS feed.
I have taken the survey
I was trying not to kick the bees nest too hard, but I agree with you, doing bad things does tend to make people think bad things about you.
Perhaps that connotation is because of the group in question? I dislike playing word games, the words we use should be interchangeable if they refer to the exact same thing. It's kind of like how we went from Negroes to Black to African Americans in an attempt to combat racism, but the racism was the problem, not bad words, and it only gets confusing when you word police. I was talking to some social justice types before the term was used in a derogatory way online and they described themselves that way, and the first place I saw it online was as a self-description of those groups. Words get loaded with bad affect because people have negative thoughts about the thing being referred to. I think any decision to use a new word that predates changing the thing to which we are referring is premature.
Regarding the McAfee economics book, the link appears to have changed. I believe this link directs to the appropriate text
http://www.fhi.ox.ac.uk/intergalactic-spreading.pdf
You didn't actually do the math on that. According to this paper by the Future of Humanity Institute (Nick Bostrom's group), if life evolved to the point of interstellar travel 3 billion years ago and could travel at 50% of c, then you would expect it to travel not just to this galaxy, but the nearest million. If you go back five billion years and assume travel speeds of 99% of c, it could reach a billion galaxies. 75% of stars in the Milky Way that could support life are older than our Sun. It really is an enigma.
Posts 8 and 9 were really beneficial to me. The illusion of transparency is something that has caused me great distress in the past, and it was really nice to have an explanation for why that was. I always valued my intelligence, and I used to think that when people didn't agree with things that seemed obvious to me it was a sign that they were stupid. I had come across this idea as "people have different experiences", and when I saw things through that lens it helped me to be kinder and less arrogant. These posts really crystallized that idea and made me go "oh, that's why that is".
Not a full article. Discussion-starter. Half-digested ideas perhaps if they had been fully digested this would have been better received? I think I saw what you were getting at, and I liked it for working them out collaboratively, if you are interested. Will edit article with your feedback.
Learning environments
Examples: Less Wrong, martial arts gyms, Toastmasters
I'm not sure how much LW belongs in this category, which leads me to think that that's a major weakness of the site
Focused on improving a skill or virtue or ability
"we are all here to learn" attitude
Little if any status competition with that skill or ability, because it is understood your level is largely based on how long
I choreograph my morning routines to a specific playlist. I know what I'm supposed to be doing during each specific song, and I get things done on time without distractions. I started in highschool when I would occasionally miss the bus and I never missed the bus after I started.
It seems to me that the rationality movement is doing a sub-optimal job at proliferating. I have seen on multiple occasions posts which suggest that LessWrong is in decline. I think that this has a lot to do with organization, and by organization I mean the effectiveness with which a group of people obtains its goals. I believe that rationality has a more populist message, and I would like to see it refined and spread. I have a collection of my thoughts https://drive.google.com/folderview?id=0B9BZfCmYSqm-TTlfRW1hMVJ5VnM&usp=sharing, with the more concise and up to date summary of my suggestions https://docs.google.com/document/d/1I-T-jiuhHr951FUHZ6q-KUW4oK-GHCjF9bVGr2dwR1M/edit?usp=sharing. I have not developed these ideas to the point where I am strongly attached to them.... (read 184 more words →)
I think it depends on the size of the world model. Imagine an agent with a branch due to uncertainty between two world models. It can construct these models in parallel but doesn't know which one is true. Every observation it makes has two interpretations. A single observation which conclusively determines which branch world model was correct I think could produce an arbitrarily large but resource bounded update.