Posting now enabled on Less Wrong
Posting is now enabled on Less Wrong, with a minimum karma required of 20 - that is, you must have gotten at least 20 upvotes on your comments in order to publish a post. Or an adminstrator such as myself or Robin (by default you should bother me) can temporarily bless you with posting ability—in the long run this shouldn’t happen much.
For those of you who haven’t yet subscribed to / gotten in the habit of checking Less Wrong:
Test Your Rationality by Robin Hanson. It’s easy to find reasons to believe yourself more rational than others, but most people do this; what real ways can be found to test your rationality?
Unteachable Excellence and Teaching the Unteachable by Eliezer Yudkowsky. The rare superstars are rare because their skills are currently hard to transfer. A large number of Nobel laureates are students of other Nobel laureates. How do you teach skills you can’t put into words?
The Costs of Rationality by Robin Hanson. Rationality can be useful for many things, but humans aren’t really designed for it, and a true effort to believe truly can get in the way of many aspects of ordinary life. Are you willing to pay the real costs of ratonality?
No, Really, I’ve Deceived Myself and Belief in Self-Deception by Eliezer Yudkowsky. A woman I met who didn’t seem to believe in God at all, while honestly believing that she had deceived herself successfully—which may bring most of the same placebo benefits.
The ethic of hand-washing and commuity epistemic practice by Steve Rayhawk and Anna Salamon. Diseases become more virulent in the presence of poor hygiene, since they can jump hosts more easily. Are there analogous effects for ideas? What is the equivalent of washing our hands?
The five most recent LW posts now appear in OB’s sidebar (and vice versa), but aside from this you shouldn’t expect further regular summaries of LW on OB.
The link to “Teaching the Unteachable” is broken.
How are you and Robin going to decide whether a post is more appropriate for Less Wrong or Overcoming Bias?
I’m not entirely sure of why we need two separate sites, either. Couldn’t everything just be posted on LW?
Why is there no RSS feed on Less Wrong? I do all of my important reading through RSS as I suspect many do.
There’s an RSS feed, appearing in both my Firefox bar and below the “Top Contributors” sidebar. I’ll forward your comment to the designers and tell them to make the RSS feed more prominent. Also linked to from my name.
Ah, thank you, I did not see it. I missed it because it is not called “RSS”, which is what I search for on a page if the visible link does not jump out at me. May I therefore suggest that in addition to making it more prominent (it really should be at the top of the page) your designer also add the name RSS to it instead of only “subscribe to this page”? Perhaps “subscribe to this RSS feed”?