Well, this is discouraging to someone who had the opposite reaction to ingres’ recent survey analysis. I heard, “Try to solve the object-level problem and create content that meets the desiderata that are implicit in the survey results.”
I was going to start writing about feelings-as-information theory; Kaj Sotala introduced moods as information in Avoid misinterpreting your emotions, lukeprog mentions it briefly in When Intuitions Are Useful (which Wei Dai thought might be relevant to metaphilosophy), and gwern mentions related work on processing fluency here. There are simple but interesting twists on classic, already-simple heuristics and biases experiments that everyone here’s familiar with, debiasing implications, stuff about aesthetics, stuff on how we switch between Type 1 and Type 2 processing, which is relevant to the stuff lukeprog was getting into with Project guide: How IQ predicts metacognition and philosophical success, and what Kaj Sotala was getting into with his summaries of Stanovich’s What Intelligence Tests Miss.
I was just about to write another post about how thinking of too many alternative outcomes to historical events can actually make hindsight bias worse, with explanations of the experimental evidence, like my most recent post. I don’t know how to do more for the audience than do things like warn them about how debiasing hindsight can backfire.
And there’s other stuff I could think to write about after all of that.
There are quite a number of people coordinating to fulfill the goal of revitalizing LW, and I wonder if something like this couldn’t have waited. I mean, everyone just told everyone exactly what everyone’s doing wrong.
I’m sorry for discouraging you. I think writing the posts you described is a great idea. I hope that if you write them, people who’ve read this will be more inclined to upvote them if they like them, given increased awareness of the incentives problem I described.
Another option is to pursue multiple angles of attack in parallel. My angle requires a programmer or two to volunteer their time (may as well contact Scott now if you’re interested!); your angle requires people who have ideas to write them up. My guess is that these requirements don’t funge against each other very much. Plus, even if the community ultimately decides to go elsewhere, I’m sure your ideas will be welcomed in that new place if you just post whatever you were going to post to LW there, and that will be a valuable kickstart.
I also agree that having people repeatedly say “LW is dying” can easily become a self-fulling prophecy. Even if LW is no longer a check-once-a-day kind of place, it can still be a perfectly fine check-once-a-week kind of place. I probably should have been more careful in my phrasing.
Well, this is discouraging to someone who had the opposite reaction to ingres’ recent survey analysis. I heard, “Try to solve the object-level problem and create content that meets the desiderata that are implicit in the survey results.”
I was going to start writing about feelings-as-information theory; Kaj Sotala introduced moods as information in Avoid misinterpreting your emotions, lukeprog mentions it briefly in When Intuitions Are Useful (which Wei Dai thought might be relevant to metaphilosophy), and gwern mentions related work on processing fluency here. There are simple but interesting twists on classic, already-simple heuristics and biases experiments that everyone here’s familiar with, debiasing implications, stuff about aesthetics, stuff on how we switch between Type 1 and Type 2 processing, which is relevant to the stuff lukeprog was getting into with Project guide: How IQ predicts metacognition and philosophical success, and what Kaj Sotala was getting into with his summaries of Stanovich’s What Intelligence Tests Miss.
I was just about to write another post about how thinking of too many alternative outcomes to historical events can actually make hindsight bias worse, with explanations of the experimental evidence, like my most recent post. I don’t know how to do more for the audience than do things like warn them about how debiasing hindsight can backfire.
And there’s other stuff I could think to write about after all of that.
There are quite a number of people coordinating to fulfill the goal of revitalizing LW, and I wonder if something like this couldn’t have waited. I mean, everyone just told everyone exactly what everyone’s doing wrong.
I’m sorry for discouraging you. I think writing the posts you described is a great idea. I hope that if you write them, people who’ve read this will be more inclined to upvote them if they like them, given increased awareness of the incentives problem I described.
Another option is to pursue multiple angles of attack in parallel. My angle requires a programmer or two to volunteer their time (may as well contact Scott now if you’re interested!); your angle requires people who have ideas to write them up. My guess is that these requirements don’t funge against each other very much. Plus, even if the community ultimately decides to go elsewhere, I’m sure your ideas will be welcomed in that new place if you just post whatever you were going to post to LW there, and that will be a valuable kickstart.
I also agree that having people repeatedly say “LW is dying” can easily become a self-fulling prophecy. Even if LW is no longer a check-once-a-day kind of place, it can still be a perfectly fine check-once-a-week kind of place. I probably should have been more careful in my phrasing.
IAWYC.