To me it seems that Viliam_Bur is saying roughly the same thing in both examples.
You try to do something that’s very hard.
In the first case he gave suggestions about how to go about doing it.
In the second case he proposed that you do something more simple instead.
The thing is that you are a newcomer on LessWrong and don’t have much cloud in this community to get people to follow you to another website.
Given the way you write about the problem you also seem to be naive and don’t really know what you are doing.
I wrote the above before going through your posts and finding out that you are 15. Having ambitions at the age of 15 is good.
For the time being I think you will probably have more success by doing something within LessWrong than by starting your own instrumental rationality website outside of LessWrong.
I would also suggest to build relationships and do personal development projects together with other people. If you have build those relationships it will be easier to say to people that you know: “Hey, please write an article on X”.
It was two weeks ago, so I don’t remember my previous reasoning exactly, but your interpretation seems correct, or at least I agree with it now.
My previous reaction was probably based on: “Brendon is spending too much time thinking about the right wiki software, and before people start suggesting exotic solutions, I should quickly jump in and say that in my experience wikis other than MediaWiki are full of bugs.” That was the main idea; and the other idea was: “Getting data is the hard part; switching from one wiki to another wiki is trivial compared with that. Get the hard part started as soon as possible.”
And today, there is a bit of: “So, two weeks later and Brendon is still talking about the idea… and here is something he could have done instead.”—Sorry for being harsh here; I am actually happy that someone wants to do this. It’s just… anything that ever gets done, is started by someone doing it first and hoping that other people will join later. If you wait until you gather people, you will never start. People gather around projects already in motion.
Honestly, I am not sure if LW wiki is a good place for collecting self-improvement materials. Probably not, because they will not have enough evidence behind them, so it will just be: “X thinks this works, Y thinks it doesn’t (and here are the results of the LW opinion poll)”. But still… if you collect the data on the LW wiki and someone says loudly enough “this doesn’t belong here”, you just move the data elsewhere. That’s the easy problem. The difficult problem is you don’t have the data yet, and not even a realistic way to collect it.
So probably a coherent advice would be:
Start a discussion on LW to collect the data; now. In the discussion, create a meta thread with a poll about whether it is a good idea to post results on LW wiki. (Worst case: You will put the results on some other wiki, or on your own blog.)
(Or do something else. But do it. Worst case: you learn from your mistakes, and move to a better plan, but you are not wasting time.)
Thanks for suggesting concrete actions, I’ll go ahead and post it ASAP.
Questions before I start (thanks in advance)!
What’s better, recommending a resource to improve something or recommending a specific topic to improve with resource suggestions as reply’s?
Ex. Watch The Blueprint Decoded to learn PUA vs improve PUA and add resources as replies.
What do you mean by collecting data? Do you mean collecting the self-improvement resource suggestions themselves, or opinions/ratings/votes on the suggestions?
What if there are too many comments on the discussion for people to navigate through it? Should I have separate discussions on separate areas of life?
Ex. Health, Mind, Finance...
Just to verify, in the comments area of the first discussion asking for self-improvement recommendations, write a comment polling people where to put the data, right?
What’s better, recommending a resource to improve something or recommending a specific topic to improve with resource suggestions as reply’s?
Not really sure here, but I would probably focus on resources. At least they are more obviously structured (this is one resource, this is another resource) than topics (is this topic a part of that topic? are these two topics related?). Also easier to vote on—there can be two books on topic, one good and one bad. Voting on topics wouldn’t make sense; different people in different situations want to improve on different things. Even the resource-topic relationship is not clear; some resources say: “doing this improves your life in many aspects”.
by collecting data? Do you mean collecting the self-improvement resource suggestions themselves, or opinions/ratings/votes on the suggestions?
Collecting the resources which get positive votes. Maximizing the number of resources would be a lost purpose. We can’t read them all; the time is precious. We should only read the best ones (and the community vote is a heuristic to find them). But because different people want different things, it would be nice to have a little for everyone.
What if there are too many comments on the discussion for people to navigate through it?
I’d call it success. Really, I am more afraid of the opposite situation: too few people caring enough to comment; because then I wouldn’t know what to do. If there are too many comments, you could for example collect the resources and make a poll. Or just start another discussion a month later, where the first comment would contain the poll about the resources recommended in the previous discussion. Or anything else. The big problem is IMHO if people generally endorse the idea, but the discussion is followed by… silence.
Just to verify, in the comments area of the first discussion asking for self-improvement recommendations, write a comment polling people where to put the data, right?
Yeah. I am not sure about the options in the poll; perhaps: “put them in LW wiki”, “put them in LW article”, “create a new wiki” and “other (explain in a comment)”?
I’ll focus on resources rather than topics, and collect crowd opinion on resources.
I’d call it success. Really, I am more afraid of the opposite situation: too few people caring enough to comment; because then I wouldn’t know what to do. If there are too many comments, you could for example collect the resources and make a poll. Or just start another discussion a month later, where the first comment would contain the poll about the resources recommended in the previous discussion. Or anything else. The big problem is IMHO if people generally endorse the idea, but the discussion is followed by… silence.
Remember Instrumental rationality/self help resources, and more recently Proposal: periodic repost of the Best Learning resources? I think the success of those discussions means the idea is already a success. I saw that the post asking for resources became hard to navigate because all the different life categories listed generated too many recommendations. To avoid that, should I start discussions with different life categories every time? Other people have already tested the idea and it is popular, making an effective instrumental rationality resource collection program is the hard part.
How come you suggested a poll to overcome too any comments, and then reposting the discussion? I don’t think a poll would solve the too many comments problem because there are simply too many useful things to recommend improving. Many things would be useful. Look at all of lukeprog’s social skill resouces! Ask just for social skill resources, dump that in, then throw in another 20 recommendations and even more low impact suggestion and the discussion would be swamped. A poll with so many different resources will just exacerbate the problem.
The only solution I can think of is having many different discussions, each on a separate area of life or even separate categories in one area of life. Whether or not to space it out or just post ~7 discussions at once is the question.
Obviously you put more thoughts to it than I did. Yes, self-help can be a very wide category, a superset of all learning. I was thinking about something more narrow, like changing one’s habits or developing social skills.
So… uhm, I don’t know. Probably would try to split it to some categories, one per article, and put some time (a few days?) between them, if one category is enough to make a big discussion. Also, giving the specific category may help people remember some material that wouldn’t come to mind when thinking about “self-help” in general.
I’d say try the first topic, and you’ll see how it goes. Good luck!
It’s just… anything that ever gets done, is started by someone doing it first and hoping that other people will join later. If you wait until you gather people, you will never start.
Actually no. A lot of communities get started by a person who already gathered enough people to provide an initial seed to get the community rolling.
At least that was the general idea of how things work at a community building barcamp I attended.
But we do I believe this task is hard?
Look at other projects at general purpose personal development community building:
lifehack.org didn’t succeed in creating an active forum despite two attempts to do so. I wasn’t directly involved here but someone asked me for recommendation about how to make the second attempt successful a while back.
The productivity stackexchange has relatively low traffic despite being started with people who committed to the project and now existing for quite some time.
On area51 there were two personal development proposals. One written by me titled “Lifehack” and the “Productivity” one.
The official quantified self forum where I’m one on the moderators did never got much steam.
The interesting question would be whether in a parallel universe, where these people started by asking people to create a community, they have better results.
Maybe some ideas are unlikely to succeed even if one chooses a good strategy. (Like, a good strategy could increase the probability of success from 1% to 20%, but there is still a big chance to fail.)
I don’t think that gathering support before starting a community project is the only thing that important.
For a lot of websites split testing reveals that small changes of the website can have a substantial effect on the success of a website.
On Amazon a 100ms delay in the speed in which websites display causes them 1% of their sales. I think it’s pretty clear that execution of ideas on the web matters a great deal.
I don’t think that questions like the of the rules of the community are straightforward. Does Brendon Wong want to lead it as a benevolent dictator?
By going through his posts I didn’t found anything written about personal development expect the fact that he mentioned that he learned speed reading. Learning speed reading is certainly a good sign because that takes deliberate practice but doesn’t demostrate that he has the necessary experience to lead such a project.
Especially when it comes to excluding people for perusing personal development from a spiritual angle and excluding people who are just there to add links to commerical projects.
Doing something under the header of LessWrong has the advantage of not having to discuss the issue of control of the website.
To me it seems that Viliam_Bur is saying roughly the same thing in both examples. You try to do something that’s very hard.
In the first case he gave suggestions about how to go about doing it.
In the second case he proposed that you do something more simple instead.
The thing is that you are a newcomer on LessWrong and don’t have much cloud in this community to get people to follow you to another website. Given the way you write about the problem you also seem to be naive and don’t really know what you are doing.
I wrote the above before going through your posts and finding out that you are 15. Having ambitions at the age of 15 is good. For the time being I think you will probably have more success by doing something within LessWrong than by starting your own instrumental rationality website outside of LessWrong.
I would also suggest to build relationships and do personal development projects together with other people. If you have build those relationships it will be easier to say to people that you know: “Hey, please write an article on X”.
It was two weeks ago, so I don’t remember my previous reasoning exactly, but your interpretation seems correct, or at least I agree with it now.
My previous reaction was probably based on: “Brendon is spending too much time thinking about the right wiki software, and before people start suggesting exotic solutions, I should quickly jump in and say that in my experience wikis other than MediaWiki are full of bugs.” That was the main idea; and the other idea was: “Getting data is the hard part; switching from one wiki to another wiki is trivial compared with that. Get the hard part started as soon as possible.”
And today, there is a bit of: “So, two weeks later and Brendon is still talking about the idea… and here is something he could have done instead.”—Sorry for being harsh here; I am actually happy that someone wants to do this. It’s just… anything that ever gets done, is started by someone doing it first and hoping that other people will join later. If you wait until you gather people, you will never start. People gather around projects already in motion.
Honestly, I am not sure if LW wiki is a good place for collecting self-improvement materials. Probably not, because they will not have enough evidence behind them, so it will just be: “X thinks this works, Y thinks it doesn’t (and here are the results of the LW opinion poll)”. But still… if you collect the data on the LW wiki and someone says loudly enough “this doesn’t belong here”, you just move the data elsewhere. That’s the easy problem. The difficult problem is you don’t have the data yet, and not even a realistic way to collect it.
So probably a coherent advice would be:
Start a discussion on LW to collect the data; now. In the discussion, create a meta thread with a poll about whether it is a good idea to post results on LW wiki. (Worst case: You will put the results on some other wiki, or on your own blog.)
(Or do something else. But do it. Worst case: you learn from your mistakes, and move to a better plan, but you are not wasting time.)
Thanks for suggesting concrete actions, I’ll go ahead and post it ASAP.
Questions before I start (thanks in advance)!
What’s better, recommending a resource to improve something or recommending a specific topic to improve with resource suggestions as reply’s? Ex. Watch The Blueprint Decoded to learn PUA vs improve PUA and add resources as replies.
What do you mean by collecting data? Do you mean collecting the self-improvement resource suggestions themselves, or opinions/ratings/votes on the suggestions?
What if there are too many comments on the discussion for people to navigate through it? Should I have separate discussions on separate areas of life? Ex. Health, Mind, Finance...
Just to verify, in the comments area of the first discussion asking for self-improvement recommendations, write a comment polling people where to put the data, right?
Not really sure here, but I would probably focus on resources. At least they are more obviously structured (this is one resource, this is another resource) than topics (is this topic a part of that topic? are these two topics related?). Also easier to vote on—there can be two books on topic, one good and one bad. Voting on topics wouldn’t make sense; different people in different situations want to improve on different things. Even the resource-topic relationship is not clear; some resources say: “doing this improves your life in many aspects”.
Collecting the resources which get positive votes. Maximizing the number of resources would be a lost purpose. We can’t read them all; the time is precious. We should only read the best ones (and the community vote is a heuristic to find them). But because different people want different things, it would be nice to have a little for everyone.
I’d call it success. Really, I am more afraid of the opposite situation: too few people caring enough to comment; because then I wouldn’t know what to do. If there are too many comments, you could for example collect the resources and make a poll. Or just start another discussion a month later, where the first comment would contain the poll about the resources recommended in the previous discussion. Or anything else. The big problem is IMHO if people generally endorse the idea, but the discussion is followed by… silence.
Yeah. I am not sure about the options in the poll; perhaps: “put them in LW wiki”, “put them in LW article”, “create a new wiki” and “other (explain in a comment)”?
Thanks for the clarification.
I’ll focus on resources rather than topics, and collect crowd opinion on resources.
Remember Instrumental rationality/self help resources, and more recently Proposal: periodic repost of the Best Learning resources? I think the success of those discussions means the idea is already a success. I saw that the post asking for resources became hard to navigate because all the different life categories listed generated too many recommendations. To avoid that, should I start discussions with different life categories every time? Other people have already tested the idea and it is popular, making an effective instrumental rationality resource collection program is the hard part.
How come you suggested a poll to overcome too any comments, and then reposting the discussion? I don’t think a poll would solve the too many comments problem because there are simply too many useful things to recommend improving. Many things would be useful. Look at all of lukeprog’s social skill resouces! Ask just for social skill resources, dump that in, then throw in another 20 recommendations and even more low impact suggestion and the discussion would be swamped. A poll with so many different resources will just exacerbate the problem.
The only solution I can think of is having many different discussions, each on a separate area of life or even separate categories in one area of life. Whether or not to space it out or just post ~7 discussions at once is the question.
Obviously you put more thoughts to it than I did. Yes, self-help can be a very wide category, a superset of all learning. I was thinking about something more narrow, like changing one’s habits or developing social skills.
So… uhm, I don’t know. Probably would try to split it to some categories, one per article, and put some time (a few days?) between them, if one category is enough to make a big discussion. Also, giving the specific category may help people remember some material that wouldn’t come to mind when thinking about “self-help” in general.
I’d say try the first topic, and you’ll see how it goes. Good luck!
Actually no. A lot of communities get started by a person who already gathered enough people to provide an initial seed to get the community rolling. At least that was the general idea of how things work at a community building barcamp I attended.
But we do I believe this task is hard? Look at other projects at general purpose personal development community building:
lifehack.org didn’t succeed in creating an active forum despite two attempts to do so. I wasn’t directly involved here but someone asked me for recommendation about how to make the second attempt successful a while back.
The productivity stackexchange has relatively low traffic despite being started with people who committed to the project and now existing for quite some time. On area51 there were two personal development proposals. One written by me titled “Lifehack” and the “Productivity” one.
The official quantified self forum where I’m one on the moderators did never got much steam.
The interesting question would be whether in a parallel universe, where these people started by asking people to create a community, they have better results.
Maybe some ideas are unlikely to succeed even if one chooses a good strategy. (Like, a good strategy could increase the probability of success from 1% to 20%, but there is still a big chance to fail.)
I don’t think that gathering support before starting a community project is the only thing that important.
For a lot of websites split testing reveals that small changes of the website can have a substantial effect on the success of a website.
On Amazon a 100ms delay in the speed in which websites display causes them 1% of their sales. I think it’s pretty clear that execution of ideas on the web matters a great deal.
I don’t think that questions like the of the rules of the community are straightforward. Does Brendon Wong want to lead it as a benevolent dictator?
By going through his posts I didn’t found anything written about personal development expect the fact that he mentioned that he learned speed reading. Learning speed reading is certainly a good sign because that takes deliberate practice but doesn’t demostrate that he has the necessary experience to lead such a project. Especially when it comes to excluding people for perusing personal development from a spiritual angle and excluding people who are just there to add links to commerical projects.
Doing something under the header of LessWrong has the advantage of not having to discuss the issue of control of the website.