I do disagree with your assessment that LW has made very little progress. As Luke pointed out below, we frequently have new work being done, and references to work being done by other people. I suspect the source of this feeling is that nearly all of the progress lies within a very small field. This blog is a mix of human rationality (specifically, improving the way we think), and Artificial Intelligence.
If you are like me (and I have a slight suspicion that you do fit into this category), you don’t actually pay that much attention to the discussions of Artificial Intelligence. I really don’t particularly care that we’ve found a slightly better way to make computers perform Solomonoff Induction. It isn’t part of the fields I work in, and to actually understand it, I would have to study AI to a much greater depth than appears useful to me.
In lukeprog’s list, if I’m being as generous as I can about which of the two categories the topics fall in, I wind up with 8 posts on rationality and 8 on Artificial Intelligence. (I did count things like learning to program as rationality, even though they’re edge cases). I do think it’s worth noting that the amount of rationality material in the “intellectual productivity” section is less than 1⁄2.
So, if you aren’t really paying that much attention to the AI posts, that means that about half the posts in the last two weeks haven’t been of much value to you. Then we have to consider that not all of the “rationality” material is particularly interesting to you.
And so we wind up with a blog where the only people to whom a large fraction of the posts on this website are particularly relevant are people working in or with a strong interest in Artificial Intelligence. Which is a bit of a shame, since that’s probably nowhere near all of the rationalists in the world.
I do disagree with your assessment that LW has made very little progress. As Luke pointed out below, we frequently have new work being done, and references to work being done by other people. I suspect the source of this feeling is that nearly all of the progress lies within a very small field. This blog is a mix of human rationality (specifically, improving the way we think), and Artificial Intelligence.
If you are like me (and I have a slight suspicion that you do fit into this category), you don’t actually pay that much attention to the discussions of Artificial Intelligence. I really don’t particularly care that we’ve found a slightly better way to make computers perform Solomonoff Induction. It isn’t part of the fields I work in, and to actually understand it, I would have to study AI to a much greater depth than appears useful to me.
In lukeprog’s list, if I’m being as generous as I can about which of the two categories the topics fall in, I wind up with 8 posts on rationality and 8 on Artificial Intelligence. (I did count things like learning to program as rationality, even though they’re edge cases). I do think it’s worth noting that the amount of rationality material in the “intellectual productivity” section is less than 1⁄2.
So, if you aren’t really paying that much attention to the AI posts, that means that about half the posts in the last two weeks haven’t been of much value to you. Then we have to consider that not all of the “rationality” material is particularly interesting to you.
And so we wind up with a blog where the only people to whom a large fraction of the posts on this website are particularly relevant are people working in or with a strong interest in Artificial Intelligence. Which is a bit of a shame, since that’s probably nowhere near all of the rationalists in the world.