Today, one of the chief pieces of advice I give to aspiring young rationalists is “Do not attempt long chains of reasoning or complicated plans.”
Advice more or less completely ignored by everyone, including EY himself.
An alternative interpretation is that we should break up long chains of reasoning into individually analyzed lemmas and break up complicated plans into subgoals.
It would be overwhelmingly excellent if people did that.
Hell, even LW has counter-memes against entering politics.
Avoiding discussing politics directly is not the same as not personally entering politics.
True, I should have said “engaging in” or similar.
If math is what will save us from making interesting new mistakes, we clearly aren’t doing enough of it.
What about requiring all new users to solve some different numbers of Euler problems to comment, vote, post top level, have cool neon color names, etc.? Alternatively or conjunctively, breaking up the site into “fuzzy self help” and “1337 Bayes mathhacker” sections might help.
I don’t have any data on these sorts of incentive programs yet.
I disagree that breaking up the site into multiple walled gardens would be helpful, under the principle that there are few enough of us as it is without fragmenting ourselves further.
It would be overwhelmingly excellent if people did that.
True, I should have said “engaging in” or similar.
I don’t have any data on these sorts of incentive programs yet.
I disagree that breaking up the site into multiple walled gardens would be helpful, under the principle that there are few enough of us as it is without fragmenting ourselves further.