I’ve been thinking about finally starting a Study Group thread, primarily with a focus on Jaynes and Pearl both of which I’m studying at the moment. It would probably make sense to expand it to other books including non-math books—though the set of active books should remain small.
Two things have been holding me back—for one, the IMO excessively blog-like nature of LW with the result that once a conversation has rolled off the front page it often tends to die off, and for another a fear of not having enough time and energy to devote to actually facilitating discussion.
Facilitation of some sort seems required: as I understand it a book club or study group entails asking a few participants to make a firm commitment to go through a chapter or a section at a time and report back, help each other out and so on.
Well those are actually exactly the two books I had in mind (though I think we should probably just start with one of them).
the IMO excessively blog-like nature of LW with the result that once a conversation has rolled off the front page it often tends to die off
Agreed. Two options
A new top level post for every chapter (or perhaps every two chapters, whatever division is convenient). This was a little annoying when it was one person covering every chapter in Dennett’s Consciousness explained but if a decent number of people were participating the book club (and if each new post was put up by the facilitator, explaining hard to understand concepts) they’d probably justify themselves.
We start a dedicated wordpress or blogspot blog and give the facilitators posting powers.
I wouldn’t at all mind posting to start discussion on some sections but I’m not the best person to be explaining the math if it gets confusing—if that was part of your expectation of facilitation.
I was thinking a reading group for Jaynes would be have a better chance of success than Pearl—the issues are more general, the math looks easier and the entire thing is online. But it sounds like you’ve looked at them more than I have, what are your thoughts? I guess what really matters is what people are interested in.
For those interested the Jaynes book can be found here and much of Pearl’s book can be found here.
Is there any existing off-the-shelf web software for setting up book-club-type discussions?
I don’t want to make too much of the infrastructure issue, as what really makes a book club work is the commitment of its members and facilitators, but it would be convenient if there was a ready-made infrastructure available, like there is for blogging and mailing lists.
Maybe the LW blog+wiki software running on a separate domain (lesswrongbooks.com?) would be enough. Blog for current discussions, wiki for summaries of past discussions.
There’s a risk that any amount of thinking about infrastructure could kill off what energy there is, and since there appears to be some energy at present, I would rather favor having the discussion about the book club in the book club thread. :)
IOW we can kick off the initiative locally and let it find a new venue if and when that becomes necessary. There also seems to be some sort of provisional consensus that it’s not quite time yet to fragment the LW readership : the LW subreddit doesn’t seem to have panned out.
It seems to me that Jaynes is definitely topical for LW, I wouldn’t worry about discussions among people studying it becoming annoying to the rest of the community. There are many, many gems pertaining to rationality in each of the chapters I’ve read so far.
This looks like it could work. A wordpress blog would probably be fine as well. Of course these options don’t let people get karma for participating which would be a nice motivator to have. A subreddit would be nice...
Would the discussions really undermine the regular business of Less Wrong?
People like making numbers go higher. It’s a strange impulse, I’m not sure why we have it. Maybe assigning everyone numbers hijacks our dominance hierarchy instincts and we feel better about ourselves the higher our number is. For me, it isn’t the total that I like having so much as the feedback for individual comments. I get frustrated on other blogs when I make a comment that is informative and clever but doesn’t get a response. I feel like I’m talking to myself. Here even if no one responds I can at least learn if someone appreciated it. If a lot of people appreciated it I feel a brief sense of accomplishment.
I’ve been thinking about finally starting a Study Group thread, primarily with a focus on Jaynes and Pearl both of which I’m studying at the moment. It would probably make sense to expand it to other books including non-math books—though the set of active books should remain small.
Two things have been holding me back—for one, the IMO excessively blog-like nature of LW with the result that once a conversation has rolled off the front page it often tends to die off, and for another a fear of not having enough time and energy to devote to actually facilitating discussion.
Facilitation of some sort seems required: as I understand it a book club or study group entails asking a few participants to make a firm commitment to go through a chapter or a section at a time and report back, help each other out and so on.
Well those are actually exactly the two books I had in mind (though I think we should probably just start with one of them).
Agreed. Two options
A new top level post for every chapter (or perhaps every two chapters, whatever division is convenient). This was a little annoying when it was one person covering every chapter in Dennett’s Consciousness explained but if a decent number of people were participating the book club (and if each new post was put up by the facilitator, explaining hard to understand concepts) they’d probably justify themselves.
We start a dedicated wordpress or blogspot blog and give the facilitators posting powers.
I wouldn’t at all mind posting to start discussion on some sections but I’m not the best person to be explaining the math if it gets confusing—if that was part of your expectation of facilitation.
I was thinking a reading group for Jaynes would be have a better chance of success than Pearl—the issues are more general, the math looks easier and the entire thing is online. But it sounds like you’ve looked at them more than I have, what are your thoughts? I guess what really matters is what people are interested in.
For those interested the Jaynes book can be found here and much of Pearl’s book can be found here.
Is there any existing off-the-shelf web software for setting up book-club-type discussions?
I don’t want to make too much of the infrastructure issue, as what really makes a book club work is the commitment of its members and facilitators, but it would be convenient if there was a ready-made infrastructure available, like there is for blogging and mailing lists.
Maybe the LW blog+wiki software running on a separate domain (lesswrongbooks.com?) would be enough. Blog for current discussions, wiki for summaries of past discussions.
There’s a risk that any amount of thinking about infrastructure could kill off what energy there is, and since there appears to be some energy at present, I would rather favor having the discussion about the book club in the book club thread. :)
IOW we can kick off the initiative locally and let it find a new venue if and when that becomes necessary. There also seems to be some sort of provisional consensus that it’s not quite time yet to fragment the LW readership : the LW subreddit doesn’t seem to have panned out.
It seems to me that Jaynes is definitely topical for LW, I wouldn’t worry about discussions among people studying it becoming annoying to the rest of the community. There are many, many gems pertaining to rationality in each of the chapters I’ve read so far.
This looks like it could work. A wordpress blog would probably be fine as well. Of course these options don’t let people get karma for participating which would be a nice motivator to have. A subreddit would be nice...
Would the discussions really undermine the regular business of Less Wrong?
Do people really care that much about karma? I mean, once one had enough karma to post top-level posts, does it matter that much?
People like making numbers go higher. It’s a strange impulse, I’m not sure why we have it. Maybe assigning everyone numbers hijacks our dominance hierarchy instincts and we feel better about ourselves the higher our number is. For me, it isn’t the total that I like having so much as the feedback for individual comments. I get frustrated on other blogs when I make a comment that is informative and clever but doesn’t get a response. I feel like I’m talking to myself. Here even if no one responds I can at least learn if someone appreciated it. If a lot of people appreciated it I feel a brief sense of accomplishment.
Two thoughts which have probably been beaten to death elsewhere:
1) A karma system is a good way to provide cues to which posts are worth reading and which aren’t.
2) Karma points are a big shiny status indicator, and LWers are no more immune to status drives than anyone else is.