There’s a Less Wrong IRC on Freenode (#lesswrong)
casebash
There’s definitely space for this kind of conversation on the Slack Chat (http://lesswrong.com/r/discussion/lw/mpq/lesswrong_real_time_chat/). If there was enough demand, then we could create a specific channel for it. I’m sure Elliot would be willing to provide people with a second anonymous account if they desired that.
Great to see some collaboration occurring between these institutes.
Firstly, well done on all your hard work! I’m very excited to see how this will work out.
Secondly, I know that this might be best after the vote, but don’t forget to take advantage of community support.
I’m sure that if you set up a Kickstarter or similar, that people would donate to it, now that you’ve proven your ability to deliver.
I also believe that, given how many programmers we have here, many people will want to make contributions to the codebase. My understanding was that this wasn’t really happening before: a) Because the old code base was extremely difficult to get up and running/messy b) Because it wasn’t clear who to talk to if you wanted to know if your changes were likely to be approved if you made them.
It looks like a) has been solved, if you also improve b), then I expect a bunch of people will want to contribute.
The Australian Less Wrong meetup runs Google hangouts. I find these valuable because I don’t have the time to attend Less Wrong hangouts in person. I would recommend that other groups consider running these too.
There is also a Less Wrong group on IRC.
I’m still confused about what Gear-ness is. I know it is pointing to something, but it isn’t clear whether it is pointing to a single thing, or a combination of things. (I’ve actually been to a CFAR workshop, but I didn’t really get it there either).
Is gear-ness:
a) The extent to which a model allows you to predict a singular outcome given a particular situation? (Ideal situation—fully deterministic like Newtonian physics)
b) The extent to which your model includes each specific step in the causation? (I put my foot on the accelerator → car goes faster. What are the missing steps? Maybe → Engine allows more fuel in → Compressions have greater explosive force → Axels spin faster → Wheels spin faster ->. This could be broken down even further)
c) The extent to which you understand how the model was abstracted out from reality? (ie. You may understand the causation chain and have a formula for describing the situation, but still be unable to produce the proof)
d) The extent to which your understanding of each sub-step has gears-ness?
Well, it’s very subjective. I tried to optimise heavily for originality, ideas that I’ve seen on Slatestarcodex, but haven’t seen anywhere else. On the other hand, I’ve also included comprehensive rebuttals like Why I hate your freedom, Consequentialism FAQ and Who by very slow decay. Here it isn’t so much the ideas that are unique, but how comprehensively he tackles these issues and with how much charity.
The reason why the list is so long is that I’ve tried to be inclusive. My aim is to try ensure that it includes all the “must read” articles, even if this results in the list being very long.
I probably don’t have time to be involved in this, but just commenting to note my approval for this project and appreciation for anyone who choses to contribute. One major advantage of this project is that any amount of effort here will provide value—it isn’t like a spaceship that isn’t useful half built.
I’ve been spending quite a bit of time on Less Wrong chat. I think that LW chat has demonstrated that when there are different channels, it really opens up the conversational space. One thing that I’ve found to be very surprising is that: a) Less Wrong chat has surprisingly little discussion of politics b) Less Wrong chat has lots of discussion about parenting.
My favoured system would be for Less Wrong to gain different subs, with the ability to follow or unfollow them and have content appear on a mainscreen that summarises the subs that you choose to follow.
Social skills—this skills are incredibly important for actually getting anything done in the real world. The biggest issue I see with discussing this topic is that it will inevitably lead to discussion of PUA. This will force us to either censor the conversation or to have people put off from Less Wrong by this. In particular, it could cause less women to contribute to this site.
“Refine upvotes/downvotes to make it easier to provide commentary on a post, e.g. “agree with the conclusion but disagree with the argument”, or “accurate points, but ad-hominem tone”.”—this seems complex and better done via a comment
I think that this is an excellent idea. /r/lesswrong didn’t really take off. I suppose there is /r/slatestarcodex, but it is useful to have this as well
I know I posted before that I didn’t think I got that much out of the sequences. But now I’m studying philosophy and a lot of questions that I used to think were very challenging now are questions that I can answer. In particular, I manage to dissolve a lot of philosophical paradoxes or arguments much quicker than I used to be able to. This gives me more time to devote to my other subjects.
I also think that some of the rationality discussion has helped to improve some of my decisions, but it is very hard to pin point which.
I think that learning some basic programming is a skill that can be useful in a variety of occupations. My brother works in procurement, but he has programmed some basic macros that have allowed him to complete his tasks much more efficiently and this helped him gain a promotion.
One of the best courses I ever took was art history. Art is everywhere, in restaurants, in hotel lobbies and scattered around the city. Having an opportunity to discuss various works within a classroom setting was very valuable for improving my ability to analyse art, which furthers my appreciation and allows me to start interesting conversations. I want to try to also take a class in film studies to see if it deepens my appreciation of film.
Statistics are extremely useful and are used everywhere. From the sciences, to business and to sport (see moneyball) it is worth having at least an introduction so that you can at least attempt to understand the evidence behind a theory. Many subjects like business, psychology or the life sciences will force you to take a statistics course anyway.
First year psychology is one of the most interesting and useful courses I’ve covered too. Psychology covers everything from improving your memory, maintaining motivation, convincing people and understanding happiness.
I haven’t taken a course on micro-economics, but I’ve read articles online. I agree with Joel Spotsky - (http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/CollegeAdvice.html), that economics is heavily frontloaded with useful ideas that allow you to understand not only how the business world works, but how to make better decisions in general (arbitrage, Pareto-optimality, time-discounting, specialisation, supply and demand).
Philosophy is valuable because it teaches you to question everything, even your most basic assumptions. Again, this is worth taking in college because of the discussions that you’ll (hopefully) have in class. My uni has a course on practical philosophy that I’m planning to do next year.
Don’t forget about extra curricula’s. You can try to become an exec on a club to gain leadership experience. You can try to find a new hobby. I’ll note debating as a particularly interesting activity. Debating calls on knowledge from all different areas—from international relations, economics, law, psychology and philosophy. It improves your ability to think on the fly and to articulate your thoughts. Further, there is a tight feedback loop, adjudicators are usually willing to provide feedback.
The trolley problem is a hypothetical situation designed to explore the clash between following deontological principles and allowing a great deal of harm to occur. So, in setting up this problem, we should be trying to limit these extraneous factors as much as possible. So we’ll say that you are the person in charge with absolute authority over what call to make. We will say that none of this is your fault or anyone’s fault—these people just mysteriously appeared on the tracks as a result of quantum fluctuations.
Is there convincing evidence either way on Speed Reading? Some people swear by it, others claim that it doesn’t actually provide an improvement over skimming.
I work for an educational maths company and we are working on implementing a fine-grained Knowledge Graph as are a number of our competitors.
I can’t see a government successfully implementing all of this by itself. Fortunately, intelligent online tutoring software has really taken off because of Khan Academy. Charter schools will be the first to structure their lessons to take advantage of the flexibility this software provides in terms of having students working at their own rates. Eventually, I imagine that educational departments will notice that this works and restructure themselves around this model too, but this will be a slow process.
I agree that people should not be able to upvote or downvote an article without having clicked through to it.
I also find the comments hard to parse because the separation is less explicit than on either Reddit or here.
You used the word umbrella and if I was going with a slightly less catchy, but more accurate summary, I would write, “Akrasia is an umbrella term”. I think the word is still useful, but only if you remember this. The first step in solving an Akrasia problem is to notice that a problem falls within the Akrasia umbrella, the second step is to then figure out where it falls within that umbrella.
I know that there have been several attempts at reviving Less Wrong in the past, but these haven’t succeeded because a site needs content to succeed and generating high quality content is both extremely hard and extremely time intensive.
I agree with Alexandros that Eliezer’s ghost is holding this site back—you need to talk to Eliezer and ask if he would be willing to transfer control of this site to CFAR. What we need at the moment is clear leadership, a vision and resources to rebuild the site.
If you produced a compelling vision of what Less Wrong should become, I believe that there would be people would be willing to chip in to make this happen.
EDIT: The fact that this got promoted to main seems to indicate that there is a higher probability of this working than previous attempts at starting this discussion.