Are there solid examples of people getting utility from Lesswrong?
The Less Wrong community is responsible for me learning how to relate openly to my own emotions, meeting dozens of amazing friends, building a career that’s more fun and fulfilling than I had ever imagined, and learning how to overcome my chronic bouts of depression in a matter of days instead of years.
As opposed to utility they could get from other self-help resources?
Who knows? I’m an experiment with a sample size of one, and there’s no control group. In the actual world, other things didn’t actually work for me, and this did. But people who aren’t me sometimes get similar things from other sources. It’s possible that without Less Wrong, I might still have run across the right resources and the right community at the right moment, and something else could have been equally good. Or maybe not, and I’d still be purposeless and alone, not noticing my ennui and confusion because I’d forgotten what it was like to feel anything else.
The Less Wrong community is responsible for me learning how to relate openly to my own emotions, meeting dozens of amazing friends, building a career that’s more fun and fulfilling than I had ever imagined, and learning how to overcome my chronic bouts of depression in a matter of days instead of years.
Who knows? I’m an experiment with a sample size of one, and there’s no control group. In the actual world, other things didn’t actually work for me, and this did. But people who aren’t me sometimes get similar things from other sources. It’s possible that without Less Wrong, I might still have run across the right resources and the right community at the right moment, and something else could have been equally good. Or maybe not, and I’d still be purposeless and alone, not noticing my ennui and confusion because I’d forgotten what it was like to feel anything else.