Where are other places to meet rationality-minded people?
This thread can be seen as a continuation of a previous thread (http://lesswrong.com/r/discussion/lw/33u/theoretical_target_audience_size_of_less_wrong/). I felt the need to make a new thread since this post is long and also since it is more targeted. This may help us further achieve our goals as well. EDIT: http://www.google.com/search?q=related%3Alesswrong.com is actually one of the best places to find people in the LW demographic.
Now, I’ll say this—I much prefer LessWrong to other hangouts for those who are focused on rationality. But of course, posts here must be of fairly high quality (for good reasons), and some rationality-minded people may want to continue talking with other rationality-minded people in less formal settings (such as chatroom or forum settings). So that’s a good reason to think about other communities too (and in addition, it can attract new visitors to our community). These communities do not necessarily have to have a focus on rationality—rather—they should just have a population of rationality-focused individuals who are not afraid to speak out.
Now, part of the strategy that we often have to use is to find the rationality-focused people in a sea of people who don’t care much about rationality. So I’ve been always thought a lot about the demographics of each community I’ve joined. Most people in local gifted programs, for example, don’t seem to be very interested in rationality (although it seems that interest in rationality does seem to increase with age).There are some real-life venues for meeting similar people, but it’s often a lot harder since almost all rationality groups are online (and it’s far easier to attract attention to low-popularity topics online). College, for example, seems to be a difficult place to locate rationality-minded individuals, unless the college has an online discussion with a significant portion of the population participating. Sometimes, facebook groups have been an excellent substitute for college, as long as the facebook groups have an audience of a large portion of the college population. Normally, this only works for smaller populations since Facebook’s interface is not good for handling large groups (I’ve seen the Caltech freshman facebook groups, which I’ve really liked, but unfortunately, I go to a state university rather than Caltech).
There are numerous online venues for finding people: IRC, forums, and various other Internet communities (comment sections on blogospheres, IRC, chatrooms, reddit, Facebook, Meetup, Google Reader/Buzz (shared items), Google Groups/Yahoo Groups/Usenet, and other social networking websites), and mailing lists. Some of them are better than others for finding rationality-minded people (in particular, people who use certain services are generally more “intelligent/educated”+NT than people who use other services [see facebook vs. myspace, reddit vs digg, and gmail vs yahoo mail/hotmail]).
The venues that are easiest to find are obviously the ones that are not in the deep web. This is mostly just inclusive of the blogosphere, some forums, reddit, and a small fraction of items on Google groups. Things in facebook are also easy to find, since there’s only one facebook (as opposed to numerous IRC channels/groups on google/mailing lists) and you can use facebook’s internal search engine to find groups (which many people do). But there haven’t been many deep discussions on facebook (whose format isn’t very good for deep discussions) - and it’s now harder to have these discussions than before since Facebook has recently made it difficult to find groups other people are in (as it is now making pages more prominent than groups). My impression is that the aggregated blogosphere has the largest populations of rationality-minded readers (and of quality discussions), but current blog interfaces make it difficult to view people’s profiles or to follow people’s posts (both features which I think are necessary for faciliating social bonding). And I always wonder—where else do these blog commenters hang out?
With forums, we can find a nice list of them at http://www.big-boards.com (which is far from comprehensive, but better than nothing)
Some forums may ostensibly seem good for discussions, but end up not being good for them. Asperger’s Syndrome forums, for example, may have some rationality-minded people. But most people will “tl;dr” (or ignore) thoughtful posts (and I know this as a fact for the two most popular Asperger’s Syndrome forums—both which don’t seem to have particularly intelligent readers). Physics Forums also seemed attractive, but unfortunately people there don’t seem to care much about rationality (and the debates are full of emotions rather than rationality). Some atheist forums also might have high populations of rational people (but richarddawkins.net forums died, and I don’t know much about infidels.org). One of the main problems, anyways, is that it’s a lot easier to complain about a post than to make a “good post” comment (which might be interpreted as a “+1 post count” post). There are then some forums that have very high populations of very intelligent+NT people (College Confidential and phdcomics forums [which have crashed for several weeks by now] come to mind in particular), but most “rationality” posts suited for places like this still end up completely ignored. Philosophy forums might have some rationality-minded people, but I don’t know the place very well. The same applies to programming forums (it seems that many programmers are NT, but engineering majors, including computer science ones, tend towards ST styles of thinking)
I’ve been very surprised by the quality of some discussions that are in the deep web, but they are very difficult to locate (especially since most discussion forums are essentially dead). The calorie restriction mailing list, for example, has surprisingly good discussions (even better than many of the discussions I’ve seen on Imminst), and people there are more receptive to my emails than the people on Imminst (Imminst just doesn’t seem to be that great of a place to discuss rationality topics—although others may disagree with me and I can be convinced).
It’s possible that some foreign language sites may also have high populations of rationality-minded people. There may be a time when Google Translate may finally make people produce mutually intelligible conversations. If this happens, we may be able to increase our space of potentially rational individuals (especially from countries like Japan, Germany, and France, and countries with high %s of German speakers, like the Czech Republic). Many European countries seem to have more “rational” belief systems than the U.S., and this may apply to East Asian countries as well. Many Scandinavians+Dutch+Estonians do understand English, though, and even preferentially associate with English-speaking communities (perhaps since they have small populations)
I know that I haven’t found all possible online venues for meeting rationality minded people. My criteria may be different from the criteria of most readers here, as I only feel comfortable discussing personal/daily issues with other late-teenagers (so groups like meetup don’t really work for me). In any case, it may be wise to discuss options for rationality-minded teenagers, since it is from teenagers where we can expect to make the biggest increases in the rationality-minded audience (especially from this generation, which seems to have more more rational religious+social attitudes than previous generations).
Since the vast majority of available groups are unspecialized, this is where we will have to do much of our searching. I’ve noticed that unspecialized groups with very high average intelligence are probably the best groups to find such individuals. Unfortunately, I hang out in many of these groups, and few people in them seem to be curious enough to develop a deep desire to talk to others about rationality-minded topics. I would like to encourage a discussion of the venues that readers here have liked the most (with respect to finding other rationality-minded individuals), especially with a focus on discussion venues on the deep web (which many people here may not be aware of).
As suggested by another poster, there’s a LessWrong IRC chatroom: http://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Less_Wrong_IRC_Chatroom
The Straight Dope forums are good, and sometimes a better place than LW for settling fact-based questions.
Econ and philosophy blogs tend to be relatively good. Or look among advocates of any unpopular but true (or at least sane) idea. Mostly it’s a desert though.
Dunno about that—Steve Sailer and Half Sigma (that InquilineKea mentioned, and that I also occasionally read) don’t seem to attract high-quality commenters.
I think a more important factor in comment quality is willingness to use the ban-hammer—Razib Khan goes to almost comical extremes when threatening to not publish uninformed comments, which means comments on Gene Expression tend to be quite good.
LessWrong achieves a similar effect with the Karma system.
Good points there.
I basically follow a network of blogs very closely—the network contains Gene Expression, FuturePundit/ParaPundit, Bryan Caplan (at econlog), Information Processing, Overcoming Bias, and this site. These blogs, in turn, are also connected to sites like Steve Sailer, Half Sigma, and Secular Right (although I try to avoid association with those blogs—I do highly respect Razib’s posts on Secular Right, but I’m not so sure about some of the others), some transhumanist blogs like Accelerating Future, some idiosyncratic ones (like TGGP’s), and some more mainstream blogs like Marginal Revolution (which is probably too mainstream for my taste).
I think that Bryan Caplan and FuturePundit are some of the best advocates of unpopular but sane ideas (their ideas and motivations are so outside the mainstream [and American political discourse] that they don’t attract the “us vs them” levels of passion that frequently stifle honest discussion on other sites that take more mainstream clusters of views along some political spectrum). You could also count Steve Sailer’s ideas as sane, but his ideas tend to attract a different sort of audience that I probably wouldn’t want to associate with. Gene Expression might share some of Steve Sailer’s ideas, but at least it tends to be more discreet about it, since it may lose part of its audience if it says anything political.
I second the part about econ blogs. That’s how I first found Overcoming Bias and EY’s posts. Many of these are still excellent.
Karl Smith of Modeled Behavior also tends to advocate unpopular, but sane ideas. Marginal Revolution to some extent as well.
I’m curious about what you count as unpopular but sane ideas.
You should link to the Less Wrong IRC chatroom http://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Less_Wrong_IRC_Chatroom
Up until very recently I was a regular at Penny Arcade forums.
There are a few things you will not like: they don’t like lots of text, they aren’t very good at rational discussion (avoid the “serious” discussion threads, you won’t learn anything) and they’re not mostly NT.
But. It’s a good crowd. The best posters are genuinely intelligent and nice. There’s a very good community norm in favor of being a responsible, constructive, funny, non-trollish person. And there’s a help/advice subforum—if you ever have personal problems or practical questions, people give very sane advice.
Related: there’s a proposal for a StackExchange site for skepticism:
http://area51.stackexchange.com/proposals/6993/skepticism
“Proposed Q&A site for skeptics and rationalists interested in finding the evidence or lack thereof behind everything.”
Currently in “seeking people to commit to participation” (say you’ll stick around for three months and ask/answer ten questions). I just signed up. 47 committed so far, at 200 it’ll launch.
I have not looked into the communities, but as http://www.skepticexchange.org/ (area51 link: http://area51.stackexchange.com/proposals/12612/skeptic-exchange) has about three times as many committed stackexchange users, one should prefer that place, instead of unnecessarily splitting it.
They appear to have different focuses. In any case, I’ve signed up for both.
You could try and help this along.
I occasionally hang out on the Debate Unlimited forums, which maintains a decent quality of debate by having a relatively small size, posters of various backgrounds (australians, americans, british, french, german …) and political inclinations (socialists, libertarians, conservatives and liberals—though I thik we lost our only vocal anarchist), and a trigger-happy moderator who bans users who are too stupid or annoying (the kind that gets downvoted to oblivion here).