How do I heart react an entire post?

I have been interpreting it as "weird!" when Ray says it.

Self review.

I still like this post. I think it's a good metaphor with a strong visual component, one that makes pretty intuitive sense. It also highlights a problem that happens at kind of the worst frequency; issues that happen all the time people get bothered enough to fix, issues that never happen may legitimately aren't worrying about that much, but the ladder basically hits an organization once each generation. (However long a "generation" is for that org- student groups go faster than church leadership.)

Upon review, I think it pairs well with Melting Gold. The ladder isn't just for organizations; any contribution you're making to the world, that you have to put ongoing effort into maintaining, is worth spending at least five minutes thinking about what the ladder is like for someone new starting out.

I think this is worth putting in the Best Of collection, largely on the grounds that at least one post every year should be talking about why your on-ramps are important otherwise people forget to maintain the on-ramps. I wouldn't want two such posts, but one seems correct.

Yeah, it's pretty much the same idea with StS's Daily Run or copying someone's Minecraft seed. I hadn't realized you could do that with a board game.

A recent (well, a few weeks ago) discussion with Collisteru taught me a useful piece of game design that feels really useful for one of my lines of thinking on Chaos Investing. 

In Duplicate Bridge, a deck of cards is shuffled, then the order of the cards is written down (or the hands are recorded or something equivalent) then the deck is played by players who don't know the order. (That is, Referee Adam wrote down the order, and Players Bob Carla Debbie and Evan are sitting down to play.) The players can then compare their score to the scores of other players, who had the exact same deck/hands.

I've been saying "try to beat your personal best score" but that's kind of fuzzy in a game with a fair amount of randomness, and to keep the endgame from becoming rote I actually want to add a little more randomness. This kind of comparison sounds like a useful bit of design.

In case folks missed it, the Unofficial LessWrong Community Census is underway. I'd appreciate if you'd click through, perhaps take a survey, and help my quest for truth- specifically, truth about what the demographics of the website userbase looks like, what rationality skills people have, whether Zvi or Gwern would win in a fight, and many other questions! Possibly too many questions, but don't worry, there's a question about whether there's too many questions. Sadly there's not a question about whether there's too many questions about whether there's too many questions (yet, growth mindset) so those of you looking to maximize your recursion points will have to find other surveys. 

If you're wondering what happens to the data, I use it for results posts like this one.

My two cents, I'm happy with the amount of reacts I usually see and would probably enjoy about 20% more.

Thank you for chipping in your two cents!

Three arguments in favour here:

First off, as prediction markets become more and more of a reality and start to permeate the rest of the world, we should expect to see some bugs people will need shake out or work around. Well, here's a list of problems that might come up with prediction markets.

Second, it's entertaining fiction that centres a topic we care about. That's pretty rare! I'm in favour of applauding and curating such efforts. Sure, it's a bit goofy and the emotional drama isn't that deep, but it still made me smile and chuckle a bunch. Also, this is a pretty approachable bit of writing! I want a prequel to it that goes a step lower and easier in describing how a prediction market functions, but I do actually think tossing someone who can enjoy a random sci-fi novel at this would be a fine way to introduce them to the downsides of prediction markets; maybe the whole topic actually. Anyone have better fic discussions of the topic?

Third, if more people read this, more people might make fanwork of it. I for one want fanart of economic tsundere demon kings.

I currently think the rationalist norms of assuming good faith, doing a lot of interpretive labor, and passive selection for honest and high functioning people are all good. We are as a culture pretty darn good at sifting useful meaning out of subtle mishandling of statistics, or noticing when a conflict is driven by people mistakenly talking past each other. I also think these norms create a bit of a monoculture weakness against people willing to just say false things.

I do actually think it's valuable to have a Best Of entry that reminds readers that yeah, some people will just say false things. And uh, from observation a lot of rationalists are kinda bad at the basics of lying, and so someone willing to say the false thing with confidence can sneak by a surprising number of vibe checks.

I don't know how well Ymeskhout is handling confidentiality here, but he offers a clearer story than I usually can. From my observation, yes, there exist people in or adjacent to the rationalist community that will tell whoppers like this, but with more mental cycles modeling you to make it harder to nail down that they definitely fibbed.

I vote this should be in the Best Of collection. We do need the antibodies this provides.

I have meetup-tinted glasses, I'll admit. That being said, I think reviewing your year is good for achieving more of your goals, this is a solid structure for encouraging people to do a thing that's good for their goals, and the writeup is therefore pretty good to have in the world. When I imagine a small community of people trying to make better decisions, I think they run this or something kind of like this once a year or so. This is an easy-to-run writeup of how to do something that groups around the world do.

I'll vote this should be in the Best Of LessWrong Review. It's not groundbreaking, sure, but c'mon- it works even if your "meetup" is one person in size, just yourself. That's a rationality technique right there.

I'd love to see followup work on which variations people feel helps them, and better yet a bit of data on whether (as fits my intuitions) people who do this achieve more of their goals than people who don't. That's outside the scope of the one post though. Wish I'd thought to ask about this on the unofficial LW census, that's totally the kind of input I'd like to check for.