The Rationalistsphere and the Less Wrong wiki

Hi everyone!

For people not acquainted with me, I’m Deku-shrub, often known online for my cybercrime research, as well as fairly heavy involvement in the global transhumanist movement with projects like the UK Transhumanist Party and the H+Pedia wiki.

For almost 2 years year now on and off I have been trying to grok what Less Wrong is about, but I’ve shirked reading all the sequences end to end, instead focused on the most popular ideas transmitted by Internet cultural osmosis. I’m an amateur sociologist and understanding Less Wrong falls within my wider project of understanding the different trends within the contemporary and historical transhumanist movement.

I’m very keen to pin down today’s shape of the rationalistsphere and its critics, and the best place I have found do this is on the wiki. Utilising Cunningham’s Law at times, I’ve been building some key navigational and primer articles on the wiki. However with the very lowest hanging fruit now addressed I ask—what next for the wiki?

Distillation of Less Wrong

There was a historical attempt to summerise all major Less Wrong posts, an interesting but incomplete project. It was also approach without a usefully normalised approach. Ideally, every article would have its own page which could be heavily tagged up with metadata such a themes, importance, length, quality, author and such. Is this the goal of the wiki?

Outreach and communications

Another major project is to fully index the Diaspora across Twitter, Blogs, Tumblr, Reddit, Facebook etc and improve the flow of information between the relevant sub communities.

You’ll probably want to join one of the chat platforms if you’re interested in getting involved. Hell, there are even a few memes and probably more to collect.

Rationalist research

I’ll admit I’m ignorant of the goal of Arbital, but I do love me a wiki for research. Cross referencing and citing ideas, merging, splitting, identifying and fully capturing truly interesting and useful ideas from fanciful and fleeting ones is how I’ve become an expert in a number fields, just by being the first to assemble All The Things.

Certain ideas like the Paper clip maximizer have some popularity beyond just Less Wrong, but Murder Gandhi doesn’t—yet. Polishing these ideas with existing and external references (and maybe blogging about them?) is a great way for the community discussion of yore to make its way into the publications of lazy journalists for dissemination. Hell, RationalWiki has been doing it for years now, they’re not the only game in town.

If you have any ideas in these areas, or others just a technical, let me know either here, on the Less Wrong Slack group, or on my talk page and maybe we can make Wikis Great Again? ;)