One of the things that we’ve noticed, doing user interviews of several solid posters from previous eras of Less Wrong, is that most of them didn’t write their first comment or post until they had been on the site for months, and had been spending that time lurking and reading the Sequences. (This was my introduction to the site, for example.)
This suggests to me that there is actually something really good that happens when you read the Sequences front to back. (Like Viliam points out, there’s an ebook and physical book versions are starting to come out, and also the redesign involves making the UI for reading through the Sequences much better.)
Reading the Sequences made me feel, on the gut level, things like: “reality already exists, and your clever words are not going to change it retroactively”. After reading the Sequences, most of the online debates, including many that previously seemed interesting and I was participating at them, now feel like watching retarded people doing the same elementary mistakes over and over again. Before this, I didn’t fully realise how much even the typical smart person is incapable of distinguishing between the map and the territory (i.e. their own thoughts and social consensus vs. the actual reality). Now it seems like people try to magically change reality by yelling at it loudly enough; and the smart ones keep doing the same thing as the stupid ones, only yelling more sophisicated words.
Somehow being explained why and how my brain loves those treats makes them less attractive.
It’s probably a shift in perspective, that winning online pigeon chess only feels good if you are not aware of the kind of game you were playing. Learning about the fact makes further pigeon chess games feel low-status.
Back when I had a username of my own I interacted in this way. A huge difference between then and now: Eliezer was not only posting new “Sequences” but actively discussing their content. And a few others were making sequence-like posts and continuing discussion similarly.
Now, the sequences are a fixed set of documents that still serve as interesting, eye-catching and thought provoking entry point. But what is absent is constructive and productive discussion around them. Sure, there have been attempts to reread and discuss, and occasionally someone will create a top-level post to try and discuss ideas from one or another of the Sequence posts—but these attract minimal and low quality discussion here.
From my outside perspective it seems like a key part is that the “content providers” also engage beyond the first post. I hope this resumes if LW 2.0 continues to have an essay+discussion format.
The link as given fails to load in Firefox 54.0 with the “Secure Connection Failed” error message (and, notably, Firefox doesn’t offer me an obvious way to make an exception for this site). The link does work if you replace the https:// with the plain http://
Update: I checked from another location and everything works properly. I’m now inclined to blame the firewall or, more precisely, some interaction between this particular site’s TLS and this particular firewall.
It works for me in Firefox 53.0.3, Firefox 54.0, and Chrome 58.0.3029.110.
(All 32-bit on Windows. I tested it both by clicking on the link, which goes through Less Wrong’s redirect.viglink.com thing, and by entering the [https] readthesequences link in the address bar.)
The only weird thing is that after I upgraded to Firefox 54, the “TLS handshake” step of loading the page took a long time—ten seconds or so—a couple times, but it’s not doing that now.
Vigilink is blocked in my browser, so there is no redirect.
At the moment both Firefox 54.0 and whatever the latest Chrome is give me a “reset connection error” for https but are perfectly happy to display the site via http.
I’m behind a firewall at the moment so it’s possible that it’s playing games, but I don’t know why it would treat https and http differently (https in general works perfectly fine behind this firewall).
Yeah, that site is pretty excellent. (The one thing about it that seems sort of ‘meh’ to me is putting the ‘next page’ button all the way under lists of links, which show up a bunch at the start; you have to do a lot of scrolling and a lot of clicking to hit the first non-preface Eliezer words. I think it’s pretty important, for newcomers especially, that one click puts them in front of the first post.
I think this might be confounded: the kind of people with sufficient patience or self-discipline or something (call it factor X) are the kind of people both to read the sequences in full and also to produce quality content. (this would cause a correlation between the 2 behaviors without the sequences necessarily causing improvement).
One of the things that we’ve noticed, doing user interviews of several solid posters from previous eras of Less Wrong, is that most of them didn’t write their first comment or post until they had been on the site for months, and had been spending that time lurking and reading the Sequences. (This was my introduction to the site, for example.)
This suggests to me that there is actually something really good that happens when you read the Sequences front to back. (Like Viliam points out, there’s an ebook and physical book versions are starting to come out, and also the redesign involves making the UI for reading through the Sequences much better.)
Reading the Sequences made me feel, on the gut level, things like: “reality already exists, and your clever words are not going to change it retroactively”. After reading the Sequences, most of the online debates, including many that previously seemed interesting and I was participating at them, now feel like watching retarded people doing the same elementary mistakes over and over again. Before this, I didn’t fully realise how much even the typical smart person is incapable of distinguishing between the map and the territory (i.e. their own thoughts and social consensus vs. the actual reality). Now it seems like people try to magically change reality by yelling at it loudly enough; and the smart ones keep doing the same thing as the stupid ones, only yelling more sophisicated words.
Babbler reality has a strong pull because it doles out tasty treats.
Somehow being explained why and how my brain loves those treats makes them less attractive.
It’s probably a shift in perspective, that winning online pigeon chess only feels good if you are not aware of the kind of game you were playing. Learning about the fact makes further pigeon chess games feel low-status.
Back when I had a username of my own I interacted in this way.
A huge difference between then and now: Eliezer was not only posting new “Sequences” but actively discussing their content. And a few others were making sequence-like posts and continuing discussion similarly.
Now, the sequences are a fixed set of documents that still serve as interesting, eye-catching and thought provoking entry point. But what is absent is constructive and productive discussion around them. Sure, there have been attempts to reread and discuss, and occasionally someone will create a top-level post to try and discuss ideas from one or another of the Sequence posts—but these attract minimal and low quality discussion here.
From my outside perspective it seems like a key part is that the “content providers” also engage beyond the first post.
I hope this resumes if LW 2.0 continues to have an essay+discussion format.
Take a look at this site :)
The link as given fails to load in Firefox 54.0 with the “Secure Connection Failed” error message (and, notably, Firefox doesn’t offer me an obvious way to make an exception for this site). The link does work if you replace the https:// with the plain http://
Update: I checked from another location and everything works properly. I’m now inclined to blame the firewall or, more precisely, some interaction between this particular site’s TLS and this particular firewall.
False alarm, switch off the sprinklers :-)
Hmm, interesting. I can’t reproduce this issue (Chrome 58.0.3029.110 / Firefox 54.0 / Opera 45.0.2552.888 / Safari 10.0.1 on Mac; Chrome 59.0.3071.86 / Firefox 47.0 on Linux).
Is anyone else getting this?
It works for me in Firefox 53.0.3, Firefox 54.0, and Chrome 58.0.3029.110.
(All 32-bit on Windows. I tested it both by clicking on the link, which goes through Less Wrong’s redirect.viglink.com thing, and by entering the [https] readthesequences link in the address bar.)
The only weird thing is that after I upgraded to Firefox 54, the “TLS handshake” step of loading the page took a long time—ten seconds or so—a couple times, but it’s not doing that now.
Vigilink is blocked in my browser, so there is no redirect.
At the moment both Firefox 54.0 and whatever the latest Chrome is give me a “reset connection error” for https but are perfectly happy to display the site via http.
I’m behind a firewall at the moment so it’s possible that it’s playing games, but I don’t know why it would treat https and http differently (https in general works perfectly fine behind this firewall).
Yeah, that site is pretty excellent. (The one thing about it that seems sort of ‘meh’ to me is putting the ‘next page’ button all the way under lists of links, which show up a bunch at the start; you have to do a lot of scrolling and a lot of clicking to hit the first non-preface Eliezer words. I think it’s pretty important, for newcomers especially, that one click puts them in front of the first post.
Thanks!
(FYI: You can also click “Contents”, at the top right, which takes you to the table of contents.)
I think this might be confounded: the kind of people with sufficient patience or self-discipline or something (call it factor X) are the kind of people both to read the sequences in full and also to produce quality content. (this would cause a correlation between the 2 behaviors without the sequences necessarily causing improvement).