LessWrong as place for scientifically literate advice
Disclaimer and abstract: English is not my native language, so please notify me if you see grammatical or stylistic mistakes. This posting is mainly an account of my thoughts. It is highly informal and contains almost no advice but asks for it. I am relatively new to LessWrong and rationality but hope that I can contribute something useful. Here I suggest to give and gather advice to and from readers of LessWrong, sketch possible topics and list a few examples of such advice existing. Also, I present a provisional solution to gather this advice and a more sustainable solution. Sadly, I can not offer advice on the topics mentioned below as I am merely an interested amateur.
Benefiting from rationality
LessWrong is full of smart people who ‘believe’ in rationality. But you have to benefit from something to make it worth believing it, you have to make beliefs pay rent. This applies especially to rationality. But rationality benefits us heavily through the scientific method and thus the giant body of work scientists have produced throughout the centuries. Too much was written to be reviewed by a single individual so it seems rational to sum up the results with notes on confidence and consequences. It would be scientifically literate advice as opposed to anecdotical help. Such an effort, especially if it is made systematically would help draw attention to LessWrong and rationality.
Beginnings
Some scattered efforts are already made here on LessWrong on producing such advice as hinted at in the above paragraph. Look for example at lukeprog’s articles on happiness. How they draw heavily from scientific articles and give concrete, simple to understand advices is how an article for rational advice should look like. In “Selfish Reasons to Have More Kids” Bryan Caplan also draws heavily from scientific literature to prove that given today’s parent’s efforts, the majority of children’s life outcomes are determined by environmental or genetic factors. He then concludes that today’s adults perceive the cost of children as higher than it is and thus should have more kids.
Possible Topics
The topics people need advice on are mostly the same throughout the ages: Happiness, love, health money. But seeing as it is a recurring theme on LessWrong, advice can be given on cryonics, akrasia and social behavior in broader sense. Many more topics are possible of course and the above list is an outline for willing authors.
A provisional solution
LessWrong, obviously, has a discussion section and a tree based commenting system. This can, at least temporarily, be used for the purposes named in this posting. If you can provide advice, please head your comment with “[Advice]”. If you have a request or an idea for advice, please head your comment “[Request]”. If you just want to comment on this article, just comment as usual. I think the voting system should automatically seperate useful from useless advice and requests. For clearer view, start for each topic a new comment, so that health advice on diet does not unnecessarily get mixed up with advice on exercise.
Of course it is useful too to link to existing advice.
A more sustainable solution
As I seem to notice, there is demand for such advice. It should be possible to create a sub-category of “discussion” to post exactly that advice and have it nicely seperated from the other discussions.
“happines” has two S’s in it. (Second paragraph)
That should be “who”. The word “which” is used for inanimate objects, “who” is people (And I guess animals? I’m not really sure of the rule there. Maybe it has to do with whether or not the object has a gender. I don’t think you’d describe a bacteria with the word “who”, nor would you describe a dog with the word “which”.)
Thank you. Is the style ok?
The style was fine—the spelling/grammar mistakes were the only things I noticed. Excusable, given it’s not your native language. I would move the disclaimer about it being a non-native language to the top though, in future posts you make, as it removes my inclination to dismiss what you’re saying as something someone didn’t put the time in to edit. I had such an inclination until I read the end.
Sounds plausible. Ultimately I want to be proficient enough to forego such notice but in the meantime I will have to follow your advice. It would make the article nicer in that the disclaimer would not be split in two parts.
The style is remarkably good for someone who isn’t a native speaker. One spelling mistake I did catch:
The word should be spelled “beliefs”, not “believes”. “Believes” is the third person present tense, as in “Eliezer Yudkowsky believes that people should be more rational.”
I would be unable to tell that you weren’t a native speaker upon cursory reading, if you didn’t mention it.
To provide an example of what I described under the heading “A provisional solution”, I link to one of lukeprog’s articles, “Scientific Self-Help: The State of Our Knowledge”. I do not take credit for any of his work.
[Advice] lukeprog shows in this article how to obtain valuable self-help advice and provides three simple examples with notes on happiness, study methods and productivity. Link: http://lesswrong.com/lw/3nn/scientific_selfhelp_the_state_of_our_knowledge/
Or the recently concluded spaced repetition prize, if I may promote my own discussion of the learning technique spaced repetition.
Of course. The main point of this post is to collect advice already made in the comments. Your work is exactly what I was looking for.