A Less Wrong Q&A with Eliezer (Step 1: The Proposition)

I don’t know if I’m the only one, but I’ve always been a bit frustrated by Eliezer’s BloggingHeadsTV episodes. I find myself wishing that Eliezer would get more speaking time and could address more directly some of the things we discuss at LW/​OB.

Some of you will surely think: “If you want more Eliezer, just read his blog posts and papers!”

Sensible advice, no doubt, but I think that there’s something special (because of how our brains evolved) about actually seeing and hearing a teacher, and I find it very helpful to see how he applies rationality techniques in “real time”. But I’m not just looking for a dry lecture, I want more Eliezer because I enjoy listening to him (gotta love that sense of humor), and I bet many of you do too.

Here is my suggestion:

If the Less Wrong community thinks it’s a good idea and if Eliezer agrees, I will create a “Step 2: Ask Your Questions” post in which the comments section will be used to gather questions for Eliezer. Each question should be submitted as an individual comment to allow more granularity in the ranking based on the voting system.

After at least 7 days, to give everybody enough time to submit their questions and vote, Eliezer will sit down in front of a camera and answers however many questions he fells like answering (at a time of his choosing, t-shirt or hot cocoa in a mug imprinted with Bayes’ theorem are optional), in descending order from most to least votes, skipping the ones he doesn’t want to answer. If Eliezer feels uncomfortable speaking alone for an extended period of time, he can get someone to read him the questions so that it feels more like an interview.

The video can then be uploaded to a hosting service like Youtube or Vimeo, and posted to Less Wrong.

In short, it would be a kind of Less Wrong podcast, something that many other sites do successfully.

Yay or nay?

Update: Eliezer says “I’ll do it.”

Update 2: The thread where questions were submitted can be found here.

Update 3: Eliezer’s video answers can be found here.