Address the “meet-up announcement overload” problem on the promoted feed.
See:
Louie
Karma: 2,191
What I’ve learned from Less Wrong
How to Save the World
96 Bad Links in the Sequences [fixed]
Course recommendations for Friendliness researchers
Optimal Employment
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”
LessWrong podcasts
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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!
LessWrong search traffic doubles
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.
- Less Wrong NYC: Case Study of a Successful Rationalist Chapter by (17 Mar 2011 20:12 UTC; 186 points)
- 's comment on Welcome to Less Wrong! (2012) by (27 Dec 2011 5:05 UTC; 34 points)
- Hong Kong LW meetup by (2 Mar 2011 9:53 UTC; 31 points)
- 's comment on SIAI—An Examination by (6 May 2011 5:08 UTC; 15 points)
- 's comment on Welcome to Less Wrong! (8th thread, July 2015) by (15 Feb 2016 2:06 UTC; 11 points)
- Helsinki LW Meetup—Sat March 5th by (21 Feb 2011 22:10 UTC; 10 points)
- Sydney Less Wrong Meetup (cancelled due to lack of interest) by (3 Mar 2011 6:21 UTC; 10 points)
- Meetup : First Bristol meetup by (17 May 2013 16:52 UTC; 7 points)
- 's comment on Starting a LW meet-up is easy. by (4 Feb 2011 9:06 UTC; 2 points)
- 's comment on Meetup : First Meetup in Hamburg, Germany by (24 Jan 2014 15:14 UTC; 1 point)
- 's comment on Bangalore Meetup: 28th May by (2 Jun 2011 8:36 UTC; 0 points)
- 's comment on Starting a LW meet-up is easy. by (29 Apr 2013 21:19 UTC; 0 points)
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.
Provide a solution for polling in posts and comments. Something more elegant than using multiple comments + a karma sink.