adamzerner
Blog posts as epistemic trust builders
In any case, whether or not it would work in normal times, it seems like not a priority right now given the state of the world :P
Yeah, I definitely agree with that.
Perhaps, but I’ve found that without a Schelling event like the annual SSC Meetups Everywhere (sadly and obviously canceled this year, maybe I should do something to replace it...), people almost never take that step of reaching out. The map is just so passive, although maybe the real problem is as you implied: that we don’t have critical mass.
Hm, maybe it just needs a kickstart. Like if someone from LW sends out a cold email: “Hey, there are 5 other LessWrongers around you. Interested in starting a meetup?”* From there, if you can get that meetup to happen and the people meet each other in person maybe they’ll keep in touch.
Something like that happened for me with Indie Hackers. They reached out to me with that message, I started a meetup and it was sustained for over a year until covid.
*I noticed last night that you can subscribe to this on the community map, but it’s opt in and difficult to find, and I suspect those two things explain why it hasn’t worked.
Thank you :)
Original: Hm, in my mind that stuff could largely be done remotely, but I’m probably underestimating the importance of in person interaction.New: This does make sense. After seeing Raemon’s comment and sleeping on it I woke up feeling like this could be a big deal. Mostly because of the fact that rationalist organizations do a lot of good for the world. Secondly because although it may be possible to “do networking stuff” remotely, in practice that just doesn’t really happen.
I’ve always suspected that connecting rationalists with other rationalists who are already nearby would be a relatively low hanging fruit. Eg. by pushing the community map harder.
Is there a large benefit to being in a rationalist hub versus living in a rationalist house? Personally I’m pretty sure my answer to that question would be “no”, but I’m curious how others feel.
I’ve lived in Vegas for the past four years or so and have a lot of thoughts about it as a place to live. I wrote some of themup on the Mr. Money Mustache forum and can elaborate if anyone is interested.
My main thought is that for 3-4 months out of the year it’s hot enough where you really can’t be outside (100+ degrees during the day with a brutal sun), and that to me is a pretty big issue. I expect that too many people would be put off by it for it to work as rationalist hub.
I also tried starting a LessWrong meetup here and never had anyone show up.
Similar point: it seems to me that having multiple hubs makes sense.
Losing the forest for the trees with grid drawings
Awesome!
I didn’t realize that you can copy-paste images. Whoops! In this comment I initially got a link for the image because I didn’t know you could copy-paste.
Embedding screenshots would be really cool as a future feature IMO.
There’s a small bug I’ve noticed. Steps to reproduce:
Type.
Delete everything you’ve typed. The placeholder text will appear.
Type again. The new text will overlap with the placeholder text for a few seconds.
Here’s what it looks like when the text overlaps the placeholder text:
In the past I think I recall it taking longer than a few seconds for the overlap to go away.
Relevant excerpt from Chapter 86 of HPMOR:
Harry was wondering if he could even get a Bayesian calculation out of this. Of course, the point of a subjective Bayesian calculation wasn’t that, after you made up a bunch of numbers, multiplying them out would give you an exactly right answer. The real point was that the process of making up numbers would force you to tally all the relevant facts and weigh all the relative probabilities. Like realizing, as soon as you actually thought about the probability of the Dark Mark not-fading if You-Know-Who was dead, that the probability wasn’t low enough for the observation to count as strong evidence. One version of the process was to tally hypotheses and list out evidence, make up all the numbers, do the calculation, and then throw out the final answer and go with your brain’s gut feeling after you’d forced it to really weigh everything. The trouble was that the items of evidence weren’t conditionally independent, and there were multiple interacting background facts of interest...
I’ve been wanting to write a post about low hanging fruits for awhile. I get the sense that there are a lot of them and that pursuing them is often the best use of ones time.
Any thoughts on how Trump’s admission to lying about covid to prevent panic changes things?
That’s good to know. I’ll keep it in mind.
I have the same beliefs and have had similar experiences with doctors. A simple search for literature reviews of my condition (achilles tendinitis) showed that things they were doing like prescribing anti-inflammatories weren’t effective. I suspect that they learned things once in medical school and don’t take the time to stay up to date. And also that there is an element of social reinforcement if their doctor friends are all doing the same thing.
It makes me think back to what Romeo said about reasoning ability being “good but narrow”. That it can easily just completely overlook certain dimensions. That idea has been swimming around in my head and I am feeling more and more confident that it is hugely important.
What are the benefits you have in mind of making other connections? Intellectual? Hedonic? Networking?
Intellectual: To me, online discussion does a pretty good job providing diversity of opinion and conversation.
Hedonic: I’m under the impression that the 80⁄20 principle usually applies heavily, in the sense of the first 2 people you spend the most time with providing a huge chunk of the value, the next 5 providing a good amount, then there’s drop off, etc. If that’s true, then the marginal rationalist interactions would be filling in the tail end and not providing too much value.
Networking: This does make sense. After seeing Raemon’s comment and sleeping on it I woke up feeling like this could be a big deal. Mostly because of the fact that rationalist organizations do a lot of good for the world. Secondly because although it may be possible to “do networking stuff” remotely, in practice that just doesn’t really happen.