From inside, almost everything I can do is “easy”. Otherwise I wouldn’t be able to do it, right? The trick is noticing that many things that are “easy” for me are actually quite difficult for other people. And even there, who do you compare yourself to? If you are constantly surrounded by experts, the things that are considered “easy” by your entire bubble can still be a mystery for 99.9% of population.
people with potential didn’t have enough time to read LW to become rationalists? Or rationalists don’t have time for LW?
Both of that. There are probably some people out there, who would be a great fit for LW, but instead they are busy doing research or making money or changing the world somehow. Also, some people who have formerly spent a lot of time on LW are now doing something more efficient with their time.
Isn’t posting your thoughts in net is usually a very cost benefit action where thousands of people can read post written once?
Yeah, but 99.9% of those people won’t remember what you wrote the next day, so the actual impact can be very small. Also, instead on LW you could post on your own blog, or maybe write a book, those are also ways to approach many people. Some of those may be more efficient.
It’s good that we have the LW books for busy people; selection of the best articles instead of having read all of that.
And I admit I have much more free time than the most of people.
That is a great starting position (much better than having no free time—then it is very difficult to think about your life or try to improve it, if there is no time to do that). But if you use that free time to figure out what you want to do and actually start doing it, then… probably in a year, you will have less free time. Not necessarily in a bad way; you can be busy doing things that you totally love. But you won’t have so much time to read LW anymore.
This is a paradox of self-improvement groups (and LW kinda belongs to that category). If you actually keep improving, at some moment you will probably leave the group, because some other action will be more useful for you than staying at the group. That’s the entire point—the group is supposed to make you more efficient at the life outside the group. If it fails to achieve that, then the group is not really good at its stated goal.
(There was some errors, message hadn’t sent before now)
Becoming stronger feels like things became lighter. But a lot of things I trying to do are not “just easy”? Also I thought about it more like finding things which you found too hard and gave up. And I am not sure how to just pinpoint easy things, it’s like finding details of how you are moving.
(Though I probably should expect that for a lot of people it’s actually hard to from the first try read/remember even single time new long words like “cefoperazone” and “ceftazidime” and that wasn’t just a trope)
99.9%??? Are you serious? I thought I have a bad memory, but I don’t think I will forget more than 70% of what I read THE NEXT DAY. Like, I can remember which tweets and shortforms I’ve read in the last few days, just trying to remember what I read, not because I found myself in relevant situation.
And that is for random post which I didn’t considered important to me like “what to do with AI for a layman?”. I remember much better posts which I did considered important, like the one LW about effectively explaining things in the way of “it’s like airbnb, but for boats”.
I think about it in the way of “which time I can spare if I will find something really important”, it’s not like now I am going and saying “oh, again I have no idea what to do with my time”. It’s just that I am not compelled to work, don’t have kids etc.
I don’t think about it quite that way. Isn’t the sense in sharing ideas? You have have ideas, some are more important, and share them is easier than invent and different people find different ideas. So you have a benefit from sharing with each other. So if it was like that I’d expected more like 30K of people showing with great ideas on lesswrong once a week each.
From inside, almost everything I can do is “easy”. Otherwise I wouldn’t be able to do it, right? The trick is noticing that many things that are “easy” for me are actually quite difficult for other people. And even there, who do you compare yourself to? If you are constantly surrounded by experts, the things that are considered “easy” by your entire bubble can still be a mystery for 99.9% of population.
Both of that. There are probably some people out there, who would be a great fit for LW, but instead they are busy doing research or making money or changing the world somehow. Also, some people who have formerly spent a lot of time on LW are now doing something more efficient with their time.
Yeah, but 99.9% of those people won’t remember what you wrote the next day, so the actual impact can be very small. Also, instead on LW you could post on your own blog, or maybe write a book, those are also ways to approach many people. Some of those may be more efficient.
It’s good that we have the LW books for busy people; selection of the best articles instead of having read all of that.
That is a great starting position (much better than having no free time—then it is very difficult to think about your life or try to improve it, if there is no time to do that). But if you use that free time to figure out what you want to do and actually start doing it, then… probably in a year, you will have less free time. Not necessarily in a bad way; you can be busy doing things that you totally love. But you won’t have so much time to read LW anymore.
This is a paradox of self-improvement groups (and LW kinda belongs to that category). If you actually keep improving, at some moment you will probably leave the group, because some other action will be more useful for you than staying at the group. That’s the entire point—the group is supposed to make you more efficient at the life outside the group. If it fails to achieve that, then the group is not really good at its stated goal.
(There was some errors, message hadn’t sent before now)
Becoming stronger feels like things became lighter. But a lot of things I trying to do are not “just easy”? Also I thought about it more like finding things which you found too hard and gave up. And I am not sure how to just pinpoint easy things, it’s like finding details of how you are moving.
(Though I probably should expect that for a lot of people it’s actually hard to from the first try read/remember even single time new long words like “cefoperazone” and “ceftazidime” and that wasn’t just a trope)
99.9%??? Are you serious? I thought I have a bad memory, but I don’t think I will forget more than 70% of what I read THE NEXT DAY. Like, I can remember which tweets and shortforms I’ve read in the last few days, just trying to remember what I read, not because I found myself in relevant situation.
And that is for random post which I didn’t considered important to me like “what to do with AI for a layman?”. I remember much better posts which I did considered important, like the one LW about effectively explaining things in the way of “it’s like airbnb, but for boats”.
I think about it in the way of “which time I can spare if I will find something really important”, it’s not like now I am going and saying “oh, again I have no idea what to do with my time”. It’s just that I am not compelled to work, don’t have kids etc.
I don’t think about it quite that way. Isn’t the sense in sharing ideas? You have have ideas, some are more important, and share them is easier than invent and different people find different ideas. So you have a benefit from sharing with each other. So if it was like that I’d expected more like 30K of people showing with great ideas on lesswrong once a week each.