The thing is, Main is like that as well. I went back some three pages on Main to check, and there were a few rationality-related articles, some periodic posts (the survey, rationality quotes), a whole lot more posts relating to organizations of interest for the people on LessWrong who form its central real-life social circle, including reports on recent activity and calls for donations or for paid participation in events.
Besides, effective altruist organizations have recently been included in the Rationality Blogs list in the sidebar. (And there was this comment of Eliezer’s on a post which, if I remember correctly, called for help in some matter. He said he’s not going to devote time—five minutes, an hour, I don’t remember the interval he gave—to someone who had donated less than $5000 to charity. To get some people out of their American bubble, as a comparison, that’s more than my current yearly income… likely much more. Needless to say, I found it rather unpalatable.)
And there’s the higher bar for posting in Main… Unless you write something at least obviously good enough to break even in terms of karma, you get, technically a punishment of a few tens of negative karma points for having dared to post there. (I think at least that that’s how the karma multiplier works.) And people are going to respond more positively to common in-group-y topics. So if anything non-affiliated topics are more likely to be found in Discussion.
Eh. Difference between theory and practice, I guess. I too wish there was more actual rationality stuff coming out; the archive is big, but it’s hard to engage with people on those topics now and there’s always more to cover. I don’t mind the side topics so much as you seem to, but I would like to see more of the core topic.
As for the charity thing, that’s EY’s right if he so chooses to exercise it, but if income where you live is so low that $5000 is more than your annual income, or even if it’s just temporarily more than that because you’re a student or something (I made about that much per year on summer jobs my first two years of university), then I really doubt he would hold you to that if you were to approach him.
On the other hand, EY isn’t anywhere near a top contributor to LW at this point in time; I barely see him comment anywhere on the site anymore. That’s probably part of the reason for the dearth of good rationality posts, but it also means that his opinions will have less impact on the site as a whole, at least for a while.
The thing is, Main is like that as well. I went back some three pages on Main to check, and there were a few rationality-related articles, some periodic posts (the survey, rationality quotes), a whole lot more posts relating to organizations of interest for the people on LessWrong who form its central real-life social circle, including reports on recent activity and calls for donations or for paid participation in events.
Besides, effective altruist organizations have recently been included in the Rationality Blogs list in the sidebar. (And there was this comment of Eliezer’s on a post which, if I remember correctly, called for help in some matter. He said he’s not going to devote time—five minutes, an hour, I don’t remember the interval he gave—to someone who had donated less than $5000 to charity. To get some people out of their American bubble, as a comparison, that’s more than my current yearly income… likely much more. Needless to say, I found it rather unpalatable.)
And there’s the higher bar for posting in Main… Unless you write something at least obviously good enough to break even in terms of karma, you get, technically a punishment of a few tens of negative karma points for having dared to post there. (I think at least that that’s how the karma multiplier works.) And people are going to respond more positively to common in-group-y topics. So if anything non-affiliated topics are more likely to be found in Discussion.
Eh. Difference between theory and practice, I guess. I too wish there was more actual rationality stuff coming out; the archive is big, but it’s hard to engage with people on those topics now and there’s always more to cover. I don’t mind the side topics so much as you seem to, but I would like to see more of the core topic.
As for the charity thing, that’s EY’s right if he so chooses to exercise it, but if income where you live is so low that $5000 is more than your annual income, or even if it’s just temporarily more than that because you’re a student or something (I made about that much per year on summer jobs my first two years of university), then I really doubt he would hold you to that if you were to approach him.
On the other hand, EY isn’t anywhere near a top contributor to LW at this point in time; I barely see him comment anywhere on the site anymore. That’s probably part of the reason for the dearth of good rationality posts, but it also means that his opinions will have less impact on the site as a whole, at least for a while.