Thanks for the response. After reading it, it’s now even more clear to what extent collaborative explanations is just not a thing that can easily work.
alexei
Karma: 450
Arbital postmortem
Ms. Blue, meet Mr. Green
Crypto autopsy reply
We did some work on the community design. That’s what Eric Bruylant did part time (slack channel, writing guidelines, etc..). He worked with the Wikipedia community (and other forums) in the past, so he certainly had the right experience. But overall I agree with your sentiment.
… but if they did, they were not assertive enough in applying it.
… experience / domain knowledge are somewhat underrated in the community compared to generic rationality skills
Yes to both.
And yes, I’d love to see LW 2.0 execute my plan and become a social network. (They already did the first few steps; just instead of math, they did rationality.)
FWIW, I ran into the same issue with Arbital, and very quickly decided to change it to $$. Otherwise, any time you’re writing a post about money, it’s super inconvinient.
I’m curious if these papers / blogs would have been written at some point anyway, or if they happened because of the call to action? And to what extend was the prize money a motivator?
You’re about to flip one now.
Now *that’s* how you end a post & a sequence! Well done.
I sympathize. It’s a giant and weird project the likes of which the world has not seen in a while. If I wrote down how to implement just what we built so far so that someone could read it an unambiguously translate it into the current product, I think the document would be around 200 pages. And what we implemented was may be ~15% of Eliezer’s full vision that he was describing in his document.
By the way, we followed Eliezer’s direct vision for only 1.5 years. Then we took matters into our own hands and the design went elsewhere.
Turns out it’s hard to get the broad details right too. It’s basicly hard on every level.
If it’s not according to Eliezer’s specification, then it doesn’t have Eliezer’s “magic touch”. I think if you’d ask Eliezer, he would tell you that the feature you built (or the whole product) won’t work as well or at all.
No.
If I heard correctly that AF forum is moving to LW 2.0, you’ll have to solve the math blogging problem. ;) And with the current features you’re already 50% there. (Assuming they are working well, which right now it doesn’t quite look like that.)
Also asking “how do you feel about that?” helps, although might come off a bit psycho-analytical if asked repeatedly and directly.
I’d predict that most people teach mindfulness horribly wrong. I’d also predict that the way it’s usually taught does not resonate with most people, and they end up not doing the thing. (This was true for me the first few times I encountered it.) (Also, I know people who’ve done meditation for years and they’re not much further along than when they started because they’re still not doing the thing.) I’d also predict that they didn’t do it for long enough. (Conservatively, I’d say you need 6 months to see some results, but it depends how many minutes a day you meditate.) And, yes, it’s hard to measure internal clarity.
One experiment that might pick up on it though: when my brother was in college, he participated in an experiment ran by some PhD student. The experiment was: they’d flash letters very rapidly on the screen, changing about every 20 ms or so (don’t remember the exact number, but it was very fast, where you couldn’t keep up consciously). You were supposed to count how many As and Bs appeared. Their hypothesis was that when you’d see one of those letters, your mind would become occupied with counting that letter and your vision would become temporarily turned off, so you’d miss if there was another A or B right after. I think they did end up finding that effect. But what’s interesting is that my brother scored 3 standard deviations higher than the mean. (At that time I think he has been meditating for at least a year.) This is something that I’d predict other people who practiced insight meditation to perform well at.
It was around $4 when I wrote the FB post literally two days ago. :D
Of course it needs a good admin supporting it
Yup, that’s a nonstarter for most casual bloggers.
Fun fact: originally Eliezer called the project Zanaduu (a play on Xanadu-doomed).
I’ll bet that parts of Arbital will show up across various products (and I’ve already seen some), but I would be very very surprised if we get something that has the entire package in the next 5 years.
Which version of product are you talking about specifically?
Also, part of the reasoning was that if we had a functioning product, we could try many things with it. (In practice, we only got to try a few.)
This is kind of like Eliezer’s 12th virtue of rationality (the void) taking a human shape.
Two features I miss the most are greenlinks (hover over a link to see summary) and claims (vote with probability / agreement).
But I think this question should be answered by LW community needs.
Well, trying to build a system that will dynamically link pages together to form a sequence based on requisites would be hard. But I think basically all other features are very modular.