The sense I’ve gotten from people who want to have discussions on LW about particular topics is that they don’t want to go to, e.g. a dentistry forum, because the level of discourse there is much lower than on LW. I can’t say that I have ever posted on a dentistry forum, but I suspect that if I start talking about resources being fungible and discussing the value of information in dollars, the first response I’d get is someone asking what the hell I’m talking about.
It seems like there are a couple of different models we can go with. We can either have less wrong be a forum for learning rationality, and then have people practice rationality somewhere else, or we can do both here. The second option sounds better to me. At Austin LW meetups, we spend far more time in our discussions applying rationality than we do talking about rationality itself. People talk about personal projects, puzzles, questions that they’ve been thinking about, things that they’re reading about, things they’re working on, etc. When we actually discuss something in pure rationality, it tends to be because we are having trouble using rationality. I do like this arrangement. Yes, there needs to be places to discuss and learn pure rationality, but at least in the Austin group, all of us have a grip on the basics (the fact that one of our members has what is essentially a master’s degree in the field helps a lot). But it does seem like it would be useful to have, somewhere, a place to practice rationality online.
The sense I’ve gotten from people who want to have discussions on LW about particular topics is that they don’t want to go to, e.g. a dentistry forum, because the level of discourse there is much lower than on LW. I can’t say that I have ever posted on a dentistry forum, but I suspect that if I start talking about resources being fungible and discussing the value of information in dollars, the first response I’d get is someone asking what the hell I’m talking about.
It seems like there are a couple of different models we can go with. We can either have less wrong be a forum for learning rationality, and then have people practice rationality somewhere else, or we can do both here. The second option sounds better to me. At Austin LW meetups, we spend far more time in our discussions applying rationality than we do talking about rationality itself. People talk about personal projects, puzzles, questions that they’ve been thinking about, things that they’re reading about, things they’re working on, etc. When we actually discuss something in pure rationality, it tends to be because we are having trouble using rationality. I do like this arrangement. Yes, there needs to be places to discuss and learn pure rationality, but at least in the Austin group, all of us have a grip on the basics (the fact that one of our members has what is essentially a master’s degree in the field helps a lot). But it does seem like it would be useful to have, somewhere, a place to practice rationality online.
And LW seems like a pretty reasonable choice.