I have taken the survey.
Evan_Gaensbauer
Karma: 1,845
Don’t Be Afraid of Asking Personally Important Questions of Less Wrong
The Berkeley Community & The Rest Of Us: A Response to Zvi & Benquo
[Question] Is Anyone Else Seeking to Help Community Members in Ukraine Who Make Refugee Claims?
I’ve gone back, sorted the comments by ‘new’, and upvoted everyone who commented they did the survey since I took it, and upvoted everyone who did it before me. This way I’ve upvoted everyone, and they got more karma. It took me three minutes. If you spend a substantial amount of spare time on Less Wrong, it might be worth it for others for you to do the same. The more people who do this, the more karma everyone gets. Also, it can act as an incentive for people to take the survey for karma even if they’re late to the game.
On the suggestion of Gunnar_Zarncke, this comment has been transformed into a Discussion post.
Has LessWrong Ever Backfired On You?
At the rationality meetup today, there was a great newcomer. He’s read up most of Eliezer’s Yudkowsky’s original Sequences up to 2010, and he’s also read a handful of posts promoted on the front page. As a landing pad for the rationalist community, to me, Less Wrong seems to be about updating beyond the abstract reasoning principles of philosophy past, toward realizing that through a combination of microeconomics, probability theory, decision theory, cognitive science, social psychology, and information theory, that humans can each hack their own minds, and notice how they use heuristics, to increase their success rate at which they form functional beliefs, and achieve their goals.
Then, I think about how if someone has only been following the rationalist community of Less Wrong for the last few years, and then they come to a meetup for the first time in 2014, everyone else who’s been around for a few years will be talking about things that don’t seem to fit with the above model of what the rationalist community is about. Putting myself back into a newcomer/outsider perspective, here are some memes that don’t seem to immediately, obviously follow from ‘cultivating rationality habits’:
Citing Moloch, an ancient demon, as a metaphorical source of all the problems humanity currently faces.
How a long series of essays yearning for the days of yore has led to intensely insular discussion of polarized contrarian social movements, This doesn’t square with how Less Wrong has historically avoided political debates because of how they often drift to ideological bickering, name-calling, and signaling allegiance to a coalition. Such debates aren’t usually conducive to everyone reaching more accurate conclusions together, but we’re having them anyway.
Some of us reversing our previous opinions on what’s fundamentally true, or false.
Less Wrong is also welcomes discussion of contrarian, and controversial, ideas, such as cryopreservation, and transhumanism. If this is the first thing somebody learns about Less Wrong through the grapevine, the first independent sources they may come across may be rather unflattering of the community as a whole, and disproportionately cynical about what most of us actually believe. Furthermore, controversy attracts media coverage like moths to a flame, which hasn’t gone to well for Less Wrong, and which falsely paints divergent opinions as our majority beliefs.
I’m not calling for Less Wrong to write a press coverage package, or protocol. However, I want to foster a local community at which I can discuss cognitive science, and the applications of microeconomics of everyday life, without new friends getting hung up on the weird beliefs they associate me with.
Additionally, in growing the local meetup, my friends, and I, in Vancouver, have gone to other meetups, and seeded the idea that it’s worth our friend’s time to check out Less Wrong. We’ve made waves to the point that a local student newspaper may want to publish an article about what Less Wrong is about, and profile some of my friends in particular. However, this has backfired to the point where I meet new people, or talk to old friends, and they’re associating me with creepy beliefs I don’t follow. It sucks that I feel I might have to do damage control for my personal standing in a close-knit community. So, I’m going to try writing another post detailing all the boring, useful ideas on Less Wrong nobody else notices, such as Luke’s posts about scientific self-help, or Scott’s great arguments in favor or niceness, community, and having better debates by interpreting your opponent’s arguments charitably, or the repositories of useful resources.
If you have links/resources about the most boring useful ideas on Less Wrong, or an introduction that highlights, e.g., all the discourse of Less Wrong which is merely the practical applications of scientific insight for everyday life, please share them below. I’ll try including them in whatever guide I generate.
Announcing LessWrong Digest
Increased Availability and Willingness for Deployment of Resources for Effective Altruism and Long-Termism
Ten Commandments for Aspiring Superforecasters
A heuristic I’ve previously encountered being thrown around about whether to donate to the MIRI, or the FHI, is to fund whichever one has more room for more funding, or whichever one is experiencing more of a funding crunch at a given time. As Less Wrong is a hub for an unusually large number of donors to each of these organizations, it might be nice if there was a (semi-)annual discussion on these matters with representatives from the various organizations. How feasible would this be?
[Question] Are there high-quality surveys available detailing the rates of polyamory among Americans age 18-45 in metropolitan areas in the United States?
[Question] How Can Rationalists Join Other Communities Interested in Truth-Seeking?
Context: Main is currently disabled; LessWrong 2.0
LessWrong is actively being redesigned. Until further notice, posts to Main have been disabled. Once the redesign is complete, LW may have multiple subs, none of which might be called ‘Main’, but one or more of which will be designated as where the nice Forest of Classic LW Stuff you’re hoping to find here. The only posts in Main recently are meetup posts and the survey, which were promoted there for visibility. Apparently, usage statistics show for the last several months Discussion has been getting much more attention than Main, so Discussion is where non-crap is. Of course, there is no more explicit division between crap and non-crap you’d expect the ‘Main’/‘Discussion’ divide to reflect. Try finding other ways to filter out crap, like reading the top posts from the previous week.
I’m drafting a post for Discussion about how users on LessWrong who feel disconnected from the rationalist community can get involved and make friends and stuff.
What I’ve got so far: Where everybody went away from LessWrong, and why How you can keep up with great content/news/developments in rationality on sites other than LessWrong *Get involved by going to meetups, and using the LW Study Hall
What I’m looking for:
A post I can link to about why the LW Study Hall is great.
Testimonials about how attending a meetup transformed social or intellectual life for you. I know this is the case in the Bay Area, and I know life became much richer for some friends e.g., I have in Vancouver or Seattle.
A repository of ideas for meetups, and other socializing, if somebody planning or starting a meetup can’t think of anything to do.
How to become friends and integrate socially with other rationalists/LWers. A rationalist from Toronto visited Vancouver, noticed we were all friends, and was asking us how we became all friends, rather than a circle of individuals who share intellectual interests, but not much else. The only suggestions we could think of were:
Be friends with a couple people from the meetup for years before, and hang out with everyone else for 2 years until it stops being awkward.
and
If you can get a ‘rationalist’ house with roommates from your LW meetup, you can force yourselves to rapidly become friends.
These are bad or impractical suggestions. If you have better ones to share, that’d be fantastic.
Please add suggestions for the numbered list. If relevant resources don’t exist, notify me, and I/we/somebody can make them. If you think I’m missing something else, please let me know.
[Question] What are the numbers in mind for the super-short AGI timelines so many long-termists are alarmed about?
In the past, I’ve been someone who has found it difficult and costly to talk about Leverage and the dynamics around it, or organizations that are or have been affiliated with effective altruism, though the times I’ve spoken up I’ve done more than others. I would have done it more but the costs were that some of my friends in effective altruism interacted with me less, seemed to take me less seriously in general and discouraged me from speaking up more often again with what sometimes amounted to nothing more than peer pressure.
That was a few years ago. For lots of reasons, it’s easier, less costly, less risky and easier to not feel fear for me now. I don’t know yet what I’ll say regarding any or all of this related to Leverage because I don’t have any sense of how I might be prompted or provoked to respond. Yet I expect I’ll have more to say and towards what I might share as relevant I don’t have any particular feelings about yet. I’m sensitive to how my statements might impact others but for myself personally I feel almost indifferent.
As someone who was inspired by your post from a year ago, and who was thinking of contributing to LessWrong as a public archipelago, here are some things that stopped me from contributing much. Maybe other people have these things in common with me and why they wanted to but failed to contribute in the last year.
1. There is less interest in the rationality community for the things I would be interested in writing about on LessWrong, or the rationality community is actively disinterested in things I am interested in writing about. This demotivates me to post on LW. I am in private group chats and closed Facebook groups largely populated by members of the rationalist diaspora. These discussions don’t take place on LessWrong, not only because there might be relatively few people who would participate in LessWrong, but because they’re discussions of subjects the rationality community is seen as hostile, indifferent, or disinterested in, such as many branches of philosophy. This discourages these discussions on the public archipelago. I expect there is a lot of people who don’t post on LessWrong because they share this kind of perception. It’s possible to find people with whom to have private discussions, but having them be on a public archipelago on LW, it if was possible to satisfy people, would make it easier and better from my viewpoint.
2. One particular worry I and others have is that, as in mainstream culture more and more things become politicized, more and more types of conversations on LW would be discouraged as ‘politically mindkilling.’ I personally wouldn’t know what to expect as what the norms are here, though I am not as worried as others because I don’t see it as much of a loss for there to be fewer half-baked speculations on political subjects online. A fear that the list of subjects discouraged as being too overtly ‘political’ could endlessly grow is discouraging.
3. The number of people who are interested in the subjects I am interested in on LessWrong is too small to motivate me to write more. I haven’t explored this as much, and I think I have been too lazy in not trying. Yet a decent quantity of feedback, of sufficiently engaging and deep quality, seems like to me what would motivate I know to participate more on LW. One possibility is getting people I find who are not currently part of the rationality community, or a typical LW user, to read my posts on LW, and build something new out of it. I think this is fine to talk about, and I really agree with the shift since LW2.0 to develop LW as its own thing, still working with but distinct and independent from MIRI and AI alignment, CFAR, and the rationality community. So cleaving new online spaces on LW, which maybe can be especially tailored due to how much control I have over my own posts as a user, is something I am still open to trying.
I did the survey! This is the second time I’ve completed an iteration of this survey, but this year was the first time I answered all the questions. I also did all the extra credit except for the digit ratio question.