Note: The following depicts my personal perception and feelings.
What bothers me is that Less Wrong isn’t trying to reach the level of Timothy Gowers’ Polymath Project but at the same time acts like being on that level by showing no incentive to welcome lesser rationalists or more uneducated people who want to learn the basics.
One of the few people here who sometimes tries to actually tackle hard problems appears to be cousin_it. I haven’t been able to follow much of his posts but all of them have been very exciting and actually introduced me to novel ideas and concepts.
Currently, most of Less Wrong is just boring. Many of the recent posts are superb, clearly written and show that the author put a lot of work into them. Such posts are important and necessary. But I wouldn’t call them exciting or novel.
I understand that Less Wrong does not want to intimidate most of its possible audience by getting too technical. But why not combine both worlds by creating accompanying non-technical articles that explain the issue in question and at the same time teach people the maths?
I know that some people here are working on decision theoretic problems and other technical issues related to rationality. Why don’t you talk about it here on Less Wrong? You could introduce each article with a non-technical description or write an accompanying article that teaches the basics that are necessary to understand what you are trying to solve.
Nice, I actually planned to post this as a dependence for a post with a small list of technical improvements to ADT (such as “To avoid confusion, immediately perform any action that implies absurdity.”), but didn’t get around to writing it up.
Note: The following depicts my personal perception and feelings.
What bothers me is that Less Wrong isn’t trying to reach the level of Timothy Gowers’ Polymath Project but at the same time acts like being on that level by showing no incentive to welcome lesser rationalists or more uneducated people who want to learn the basics.
One of the few people here who sometimes tries to actually tackle hard problems appears to be cousin_it. I haven’t been able to follow much of his posts but all of them have been very exciting and actually introduced me to novel ideas and concepts.
Currently, most of Less Wrong is just boring. Many of the recent posts are superb, clearly written and show that the author put a lot of work into them. Such posts are important and necessary. But I wouldn’t call them exciting or novel.
I understand that Less Wrong does not want to intimidate most of its possible audience by getting too technical. But why not combine both worlds by creating accompanying non-technical articles that explain the issue in question and at the same time teach people the maths?
I know that some people here are working on decision theoretic problems and other technical issues related to rationality. Why don’t you talk about it here on Less Wrong? You could introduce each article with a non-technical description or write an accompanying article that teaches the basics that are necessary to understand what you are trying to solve.
After seeing how highly your comment got upvoted, I just wrote an extremely hardcore post :-)
Nice, I actually planned to post this as a dependence for a post with a small list of technical improvements to ADT (such as “To avoid confusion, immediately perform any action that implies absurdity.”), but didn’t get around to writing it up.
I just upvoted that post based on it having the phrase “Example decision theory problem” in the title. Now I’m going to actually read it. ;)
I shall name this Karma Surfing. (not that I’m putting it down)
I’d never heard of the Polymath Project. Thanks for the linky.
Likewise. That kind of project is inspirational! Especially the part where it actually worked.