Address the “meet-up announcement overload” problem on the promoted feed.
See:
Address the “meet-up announcement overload” problem on the promoted feed.
See:
2009: “Extreme Rationality: It’s Not That Great”
2010: “Self-Improvement or Shiny Distraction: Why Less Wrong is anti-Instrumental Rationality”
2013: “How about testing our ideas?”
2014: “Truth: It’s Not That Great”
2015: “Meta-Countersignaling Equilibria Drift: Can We Accelerate It?”
2016: “In Defense Of Putting Babies In Wood Chippers”
Wow. This is god damn amazing.
You’re starting to spoil us. I feel like reactions to a post like this should be like “Holy shit! Someone just sat down and summarized the 50+ most important research papers on an important FAI-related facet of human cognition! They probably had to read 250 papers they didn’t even cite in order to produce this! OMFG this is amazing1!!!”
Instead, we’re like. “Oh, lukeprog just wrote something.”
I for one, continue to be impressed by your astounding summaries of scientific data on these topics. And even though I’m on a surf vacation in Bali, the neurons in my brain that code for the value of your upcoming meta-ethics series are firing faster than my neurons that code for the value of most everything else in my real life. That’s pretty hard to do to me right now. Well done!
If anyone would like to help with fundraising for Singularity Institute (I know the OP expressed interest in the other thread), I can offer coordination and organizing support to help make your efforts more successful.
louie.helm AT singinst.org
I also have ideas for people who would like to help but don’t know where to start. Please contact me if you’re interested!
For instance, you should probably publicly join SIAI’s Facebook Cause Page and help us raise money there. We are stuck at $9,606.01… just a tad shy of $10,000 (Which would be a nice psychological milestone to pass!) This makes us roughly the #350th most popular philanthropic cause on Causes.com… and puts us behind other pressing global concerns like the “Art Creation Foundation For Children in Jacmel Haiti” and “Romania Animal Rescue”. Seriously!
And, Yes: Singularity Institute does have other funds that were not raised on this site… but so do these other causes! It wouldn’t hurt to look more respectable on public fundraising sites while simultaneously helping to raise money in a very efficient, publicly visible way. One project that might be helpful would be for someone to publicly track our assent up the fundraising rankings on Causes.com. It would be fun and motivating to follow the “horserace” the same way distributed computing teams track their ability to overtake other teams in CPU donations. I think it would focus attention properly on the fundraising issue, make it more of a “shared concern”, give us small, manageable goals, make things way more fun (lots of celebrations as we accomplish goals!), and help more people come up with lots of creative ways to raise money, recruit more members, or do whatever it takes to reach our goals.
It is delusional for most people to believe that they can contribute usefully to really hard problems.
It’s damaging to repeat this though, since most bright people who are 1 in 10,000+ think they are 1 in 10 due to Dunning-Krugger effects.
Except in trivial ways, like helping those who are capable of it with mundane tasks in order to free up more of their time and energy.
Mundane work is not trivial. For instance, I’ve watched lukeprog spend more of his days moving furniture at Singularity Institute in the past 6 months than anyone else in Berkeley… including dozens of volunteers and community members in the area all of whom could have have done it, none of whom considered trying. For most tasks, hours really are fungible. If otherwise smart people didn’t think mundane work was trivial, we’d get so much more done. Nothing is harder for me to get done at Singularity Institute than work that “anybody could do”.
As another example, I’ve had 200 volunteers offer to do work for Singularity Institute. Many have claimed they would do “anything” or “whatever helped the most”. SEO is clearly the most valuable work. Unfortunately, it’s something “so mundane”, that anybody could do it… therefore, 0 out of 200 volunteers are currently working on it. This is even after I’ve personally asked over 100 people to help with it.
YES YES YES! Do it! I predict it will be very well attended.
Seattle has the most LW readers of any city in the world without a meet-up!
Visits to LW the past year / Meetup
London 56,788 Yes
New York 41,422 Yes
San Francisco 29,036 Yes
Melbourne 24,199 Yes
Seattle 19,475 No
Chicago 17,235 Yes
Sydney 16,806 No
Helsinki 16,371 No
Los Angeles 14,083 Yes
Cambridge 13,622 Yes
Philadelphia 11,727 Yes
San Jose 11,702 Yes
11000+ Visitors
Moscow
Austin
10000+ Visitors
Washington
9000+ Visitors
Atlanta
Brisbane
Dublin
Houston
8000+ Visitors
Berkeley
Portland
7000+ Visitors
Pittsburgh
Toronto
Paris
Denver
Sunnyvale
Cambridge
Redmond
6000+ Visitors
Auckland
Singapore
Madison
Cupertino
Boston
Perth
Brooklyn
Minneapolis
Ann Arbor
Oxford
Adelaide
5000+ Visitors
Canberra
Vancouver
Berlin
San Diego
Mountain View
Bellevue
Vancouver
Dallas
Durham
4000+ Visitors
Bangalore
Stanford
Edinburgh
Budapest
Columbus
Riga
Manchester
La Jolla
Warsaw
Sacramento
Raleigh
Prague
Bristol
St. Louis
Boulder
Ljubljana
State College
EDIT: Added 13-50, these are total yearly visitors, not hits
All these cities had at least 500 unique visitors the last month. I would be confident starting a meetup anywhere with over 5000 visitors / year… all of which have at least half the readership of cities that already support meetups now. Other cities that look promising but are just on the borderline are Oslo, Hong Kong, and Princeton.
newbies to the site in particular, they’re not going to see all the awesomeness of this site if they simply look at the frontpage and think it’s a community just for meetups.
Even without meetups, the promoted feed is still a pretty terrible way to browse the site for a newbie. It would be like if Wikipedia’s main page was the recently created pages. LW needs a homepage. I’ve asked for a volunteer to help create one and promised to implement it if it’s designed. I’m not a designer but I’m offering to help with the implementation… but no one has even tried.
There’s karma for complaining, but none for fixing problems. I think when Yvain, the LW admins, and I helped create the entire discussion sub-reddit, we got 3 karma apiece in comments related to it. You’ve already gotten more karma just for complaining about meet-up announcements for the 10th time without offering to help.
I preferred the original version that appeared on your private website.
Once you sanitized it for LW by making it more abstract and pedantic, it lost many of the most biting, hilarious asides, that made it a fun and entertaining to read.
I’m concerned with the overuse of the term “applause light” here.
An applause light is not as simple as “any statement that pleases an in-group”. The way I read it, a charge of applause lights requires all of the following to hold:
1) There are no supporting details to provide the statement with any substance.
2) The statement is a semantic stopsign.
3) The statement exists purely to curry favor with an in-group.
4) No policy recommendations follow from that statement.
I don’t see a bunch of applause lights when I read this post. I see a post overflowing with supporting details, policy recommendations, and the opposite of semantic stopsigns—Luke actually bent over backwards and went to the trouble of linking to as many useful posts on the topic as he could find. By doing so, he’s giving the curious reader a number of pointers to what others have said about the subject he’s discussing—so that they can go learn more if they’re actually curious.
Really, what more could he have done? How was he supposed to discuss the massive utility he’s gained from rationality without mentioning rationality? To make his post shorter, Luke had to use several terms that most people around here feel good about. Yay for Luke! He saved me from having to read a longer, less information-dense post by writing it this way. I understand the sanity benefits of guarding yourself against blatant applause lights, but at the same time, it would be rather perverse of me to automatically feel unhappy in response to Luke mentioning something that makes me happy.
It’s not an affective death spiral for me to feel happy when someone tells me an inspiring life-success story that involves terms that I happen to have a positive affect for. It’s having a reaction that fits the facts. I’m happy Luke is having a good life. It’s relevant for him to tell me about it here on Less Wrong because rationality played a big part in his success. And I’m even more overjoyed and grateful to Luke that he’s leaving a trail of sign-posts behind him, pointing the way forward as he levels up in rationality. Now is the time for him to be documenting this… while it’s still fresh… so that one day when he forgets how he got to where he is, there will still be an overly detailed record to point people to.
I’m putting the finishing touches on a future Less Wrong post about the overwhelming desirability of casually working in Australia for 1-2 years vs “whatever you were planning on doing instead”. It’s designed for intelligent people who want to earn more money, have more free time, and have a better life than they would realistically be able to get in the US or any other 1st world nation without a six-figure, part-time career… something which doesn’t exist. My world saving article was actually just a prelim for this.
“Anything you can do, I can do meta” -Rudolf Carnap
(More disturbingly, you can be a good researcher of QM stuff, read LW, disagree with Eliezer about MWI, have a good chance of being wrong, and not be crippled by that in the least! Huh? Wasn’t it supposed to be all-important to have the right betting odds?)
Saying that “Having incorrect views isn’t that crippling, look at Scott Aaronson!” is a bit like saying “Having muscular dystrophy isn’t that crippling, look at Stephen Hawking!” It’s hard to learn much by generalizing from the most brilliant, hardest working, most diplomatically-humble man in the world with a particular disability. I know they’re both still human, but it’s much harder to measure how much incorrect views hurt the most brilliant minds. Who would you measure them against to show how much they’re under-performing their potential?
Incidentally, knowing Scott Aaronson, and watching that Blogging Heads video in particular was how I found out about SIAI and Less Wrong in the first place.
Thanks MinibearRex.
I’ve added ads on Google AdWords that will start coming up for this in a couple days when the new ads get approved so that anyone searching for something even vaguely like “How to think better” or “How to figure out what’s true” will get pointed at Less Wrong. Not as good as owning the top 3 spots in the organic results, but some folks click on ads, especially when it’s in the top spot. And we do need to make landing on the path towards rationality less of a stroke of luck and more a matter of certainty for those who are looking.
Americans can only report their health derivative (dx/dt) :)
But I’m not sure where that is best covered.
Yeah, universities don’t reliably teach a lot of things that I’d want people to learn to be Friendliness researchers. Heuristics and Biases is about the closest most universities get to the kind of course you recommend… and most barely have a course on even that.
I’d obviously be recommending lots of Philosophy and Psychology courses as well if most of those courses weren’t so horribly wrong. I looked through the course handbooks and scoured them for courses I could recommend in this area that wouldn’t steer people too wrong. As Luke has mentioned (partially from being part of this search with me), you can still profitably take a minority of philosophy courses at CMU without destroying your mind, a few at MIT, and maybe two or three at Oxford. And there are no respectable, mainstream textbooks to recommend yet.
Believe me, Luke and I are sad beyond words every day of our lives that we have to continue recommending people read a blog to learn philosophy and a ton of other things that colleges don’t know how to teach yet. We don’t particularly enjoy looking crazy to everyone outside of the LW bubble.
I vote for Luke.
Short explanation:
This is not me being misleading in how I present data. I’m presenting what happens by default in both options, not one optimized and one non-optimized option. What you discovered here is that, the plan to save money in the outback is robust and succeeds by default, while the plan to save money in the US is fragile and fails by default.
The longer explanation:
The Australian outback option isn’t optimized. It’s an off-the-shelf option that is heavily subsidized and in a bizarrely awesome economic climate… something I don’t think many people here knew existed.
I think it’s fair to compare a typical US job to a typical outback job because this is what you get when you don’t put much effort into optimizing your budget in both cases.
The difference is that the outback is already incredible without you having to do anything.
It’s actually pretty unfair to compare an outback working budget to the best-case US scenario where you spend tons of time in the US managing your money well to get the cheapest rent, best car prices, lowest food costs, and execute convoluted tax dodging strategies that most people couldn’t figure out. It’s a very tricky plan that requires lots of things to all go right, lots of time, lots of effort, lots of will-power, lots of knowledge, and lots of discipline.
On the other hand, my option only requires you to get whatever job you want in a remote area of Australia and get all your costs of living heavily subsidized and all your major cost centers nearly erased with no willpower, no planning, and no discipline required.
What you uncovered is not my “misleading” people, but the difference in robustness between the two plans. The Australian outback plan lets you save money by default with almost nowhere to go wrong while the plan that lets you save money in the US is a life-engulfing minefield of time-consuming bargin-hunting, self-denial, and tax evasion.
These costs match my own cost of living when I was working full-time in the US as a highly-paid software engineer. So you could look at both columns as Louie2006 vs Louie2010 if you want to make it an apples-to-apples comparison.
Also, it’s an established fact that people spend a constant fraction of their income on housing no matter how much income they have in the US. Look at the reference for my cost data. Groups with wildly different incomes all the way from $25k/yr to $80k/yr all spend between 32-37% of their income on housing. So until I see research showing me otherwise, I stand by my use of fractional income costs of living for housing, transportation, and food budgets.
This is already being done on Less Wrong!
Back in August 2010, I helped install an even more universal solution in the form of VigLink to experiment and see if it would work well for us. These are our recent earnings so far… I think all from Amazon:
Aug 10: $0 Sep 10: $0 Oct 10: $1 Nov 10: $1 Dec 10: $12 Jan 11: $37
Also, I think we actually make more by paying VigLink’s fees since they get paid the top-end volume bonuses by Amazon and then pass that great rate on to us (less their fees). It’s really close though. I’ll worry more about optimizing it when we’re getting more commissions.
Provide a solution for polling in posts and comments. Something more elegant than using multiple comments + a karma sink.