Seems like it might be worthwhile to flesh out, perhaps develop as an app / plugin / whatever the kids are up to these days. May need to be rebranded....
Is there any consensus on ‘personality types’, e.g. is Myers-Briggs useful at all? That could be one way to divide the horoscopes up.
(You could also divide it based on blood type or something but give the same advice to everyone—if you’re obvious / sarcastic enough about it.)
I suspect it’d be pretty easy to set up a tumblr account, or several, for the actual distribution of randomized suggestions. Those come with rss feeds, so that should make just about everybody happy on that end. (I have no idea how tumblr interacts with smartphones, but I expect that they can handle rss feeds—correct me if I’m wrong, though.)
We’d also need a way to have more suggestions added, though, and have those moderated in some way. That gets a bit trickier, but may be able to be semi-automated—perhaps any LW post that gets more than a certain number of upvotes could be flaged to have someone check it out and condense it into a few sentences if it’s appropriate.
Rebranding is the big hurdle, though, and not something I’m useful at.
Hmm… there could be a LW post (similar to the “rationality quotes”) devoted to the purpose. Tumblr also has an “ask” field which could be used for sending in suggestions as well… though there’d have to be someone on wheat / chaff duty, and expecting a good deal of chaff.
As for rebranding...
It could be “__ Horoscopes” where the blank is filled with something communicating “secular” (though the concept isn’t quite right) or “arbitrary” (jokes could be made about the relative arbitrariness of regular horoscopes...) or even “actually useful” (which I kinda like). I thought I had another idea, but it’s gone poof, so I’ll let you know if I come up with anything brilliant.
P.S. Do tumblr rss feeds work properly for you? I’m subscribed to ~one but it spams me with updates when all that’s changing is the number of comments/reposts. Am I doin’ it wrong?
Tumblr also has an “ask” field which could be used for sending in suggestions as well… though there’d have to be someone on wheat / chaff duty, and expecting a good deal of chaff.
Having the system require ongoing maintenance in order to have any output at all is a weakness. Also, having hand-submitted ‘horoscopes’ posted in order, as tumblr’s submission function does by default, removes the randomness element and makes it much harder to include older concepts. It might work, but it wouldn’t be all that much better than just keeping an eye on the new posts here, I expect.
My idea is to have tumblr just serve as an output system, and have a separate program that procedurally generates horoscopes from a list of sentences and then use email publishing or something to post them. That way it only needs attention when new things are going to be added to the list, rather than every few days.
As for rebranding...
I like “Actually Useful Horoscopes”, if we’re keeping the term ‘horoscopes’ at all.
P.S. Do tumblr rss feeds work properly for you? I’m subscribed to ~one but it spams me with updates when all that’s changing is the number of comments/reposts. Am I doin’ it wrong?
Yeah, I’ve never had a problem with it… are you sure you’re using the right feed url? It’ll be something like http://example.tumblr.com/rss
All right, this finally spiked my “just fix the rss thing” action potential, so thanks for that.
I like “Actually Useful Horoscopes”, if we’re keeping the term ‘horoscopes’ at all.
My reasoning is that “horoscope” is mostly there to anchor the idea to something people “get” already. It could be something like “Rationality Bites”, I guess, (“Sensible Bites”? :) ) but there isn’t really a “space” carved out for that in most peoples’ brains. Maybe something like a secular equivalent to “inspirational thoughts” that do more than just inspire...? That’s another idea that fills a similar role...
Oooh, or “Fortune Cookies”! Add descriptors to taste—“The Fortune Cookies of Highly Effective People” ;)
My reasoning is that “horoscope” is mostly there to anchor the idea to something people “get” already.
Yep.
Also, I’m liking the ease with which one can say “my horoscope told me to...”, either to oneself or to others who’re aware of the project. ‘Bites’ doesn’t work too well with that, and neither does ‘fortune cookies’. I guess it’s minor enough that those could win out on the grounds that they don’t make one sound like a nutter.
(We’re using ‘Actually Useful Horoscopes’ for the dev phase, but it’s easy enough to change tumblr account names.)
I suspect that you could openly tell everyone that the groups are randomly assigned, if the grouping has some inertia to it—that is, if your being in the same group as someone today is a moderately strong predictor of your being in the same group as them again tomorrow.
Yeah, you’d want to be open about it, probably even emphasize it. We could even give personality descriptions based on these explicitly random groups, providing a bonus rationality lesson! (“Hey, that does sound like me!”)
Seems like it might be worthwhile to flesh out, perhaps develop as an app / plugin / whatever the kids are up to these days. May need to be rebranded....
Is there any consensus on ‘personality types’, e.g. is Myers-Briggs useful at all? That could be one way to divide the horoscopes up.
(You could also divide it based on blood type or something but give the same advice to everyone—if you’re obvious / sarcastic enough about it.)
I suspect it’d be pretty easy to set up a tumblr account, or several, for the actual distribution of randomized suggestions. Those come with rss feeds, so that should make just about everybody happy on that end. (I have no idea how tumblr interacts with smartphones, but I expect that they can handle rss feeds—correct me if I’m wrong, though.)
We’d also need a way to have more suggestions added, though, and have those moderated in some way. That gets a bit trickier, but may be able to be semi-automated—perhaps any LW post that gets more than a certain number of upvotes could be flaged to have someone check it out and condense it into a few sentences if it’s appropriate.
Rebranding is the big hurdle, though, and not something I’m useful at.
Hmm… there could be a LW post (similar to the “rationality quotes”) devoted to the purpose. Tumblr also has an “ask” field which could be used for sending in suggestions as well… though there’d have to be someone on wheat / chaff duty, and expecting a good deal of chaff.
As for rebranding...
It could be “__ Horoscopes” where the blank is filled with something communicating “secular” (though the concept isn’t quite right) or “arbitrary” (jokes could be made about the relative arbitrariness of regular horoscopes...) or even “actually useful” (which I kinda like). I thought I had another idea, but it’s gone poof, so I’ll let you know if I come up with anything brilliant.
P.S. Do tumblr rss feeds work properly for you? I’m subscribed to ~one but it spams me with updates when all that’s changing is the number of comments/reposts. Am I doin’ it wrong?
Having the system require ongoing maintenance in order to have any output at all is a weakness. Also, having hand-submitted ‘horoscopes’ posted in order, as tumblr’s submission function does by default, removes the randomness element and makes it much harder to include older concepts. It might work, but it wouldn’t be all that much better than just keeping an eye on the new posts here, I expect.
My idea is to have tumblr just serve as an output system, and have a separate program that procedurally generates horoscopes from a list of sentences and then use email publishing or something to post them. That way it only needs attention when new things are going to be added to the list, rather than every few days.
I like “Actually Useful Horoscopes”, if we’re keeping the term ‘horoscopes’ at all.
Yeah, I’ve never had a problem with it… are you sure you’re using the right feed url? It’ll be something like http://example.tumblr.com/rss
All right, this finally spiked my “just fix the rss thing” action potential, so thanks for that.
My reasoning is that “horoscope” is mostly there to anchor the idea to something people “get” already. It could be something like “Rationality Bites”, I guess, (“Sensible Bites”? :) ) but there isn’t really a “space” carved out for that in most peoples’ brains. Maybe something like a secular equivalent to “inspirational thoughts” that do more than just inspire...? That’s another idea that fills a similar role...
Oooh, or “Fortune Cookies”! Add descriptors to taste—“The Fortune Cookies of Highly Effective People” ;)
Yep.
Also, I’m liking the ease with which one can say “my horoscope told me to...”, either to oneself or to others who’re aware of the project. ‘Bites’ doesn’t work too well with that, and neither does ‘fortune cookies’. I guess it’s minor enough that those could win out on the grounds that they don’t make one sound like a nutter.
(We’re using ‘Actually Useful Horoscopes’ for the dev phase, but it’s easy enough to change tumblr account names.)
I suspect that you could openly tell everyone that the groups are randomly assigned, if the grouping has some inertia to it—that is, if your being in the same group as someone today is a moderately strong predictor of your being in the same group as them again tomorrow.
Yeah, you’d want to be open about it, probably even emphasize it. We could even give personality descriptions based on these explicitly random groups, providing a bonus rationality lesson! (“Hey, that does sound like me!”)
The hard part, of course, is getting people to disbelieve once they notice that it seems to work.
Hah, yeah, we don’t want to start an accidental cult or anything. Maybe, as you suggest, switching their groups randomly on occasion would help? :)