in my own experience and what I could get from the people that frequent Lesswrong and TVTropes, a high IQ commonly results in [...] a miserable social life, and a boatpload of akrasia [...] Perhaps there’s a selection bias and only the incompetent brains have the time to hang out here[?]
There is massive selection bias going on here.
I don’t think it has as much to do with free time as with target audience, though. LW attracts a few different clusters of people, but the ones you’re seeing in this context are those who feel their thinking is flawed in some way, and who believe they have a decent chance of fixing it with a cognitive science toolset and vocabulary. The site’s native idiom and interaction style—basically a founder effect—imposes a few more filters, underrepresenting some problems and overrepresenting others. Akrasia and social problems are precisely the issues I’d expect to see a lot of, given those constraints.
TV Tropes… well, that might have more to do with free time. Almost everyone likes media, but if you want to make many original contributions, you need unusual knowledge of media and an analytical attitude towards it. Moreover, the media best represented there tend to be the most time-consuming ones—TV, anime, doorstopper fantasy novels. I don’t think I need to go into too much detail regarding the people most likely to share those requirements.
Offtopic post, but a discussion I wish to pursue nonetheless:
Regarding TVT: it used to be so. Nowadays school study media and the “literary canon” are beginning to find their way in… and all those tropes with silly names, built from mass media, are proving their usefulness as tools of analysis. Of course, getting a movie adaptation or a TV miniseries is one of the best ways to draw troper attention to a work, but classics always end up getting those with some regularity. So let’s just say that the user base has widened. Oh, and many classics are as doorstoppery as modern fantasy sagas, especially stuff from the XIXth century, when novels where published as long-running serials in magazines and authors were paid by the word. When people call Eliezer Yudkowsky a terrible writer because of MoR’s lack of tightness or his using it as a vehicle for ideas and lectures, I feel half-tempted to point at the likes of Victor Hugo or Alexandre Dumas or Dickens or Benito Pérez Galdós, just to name a few… surely if those are the traits of terrible writing, it means that those books have room for improvement, if only by way of abridging them?
Regarding LW: The filters the site imposes on its demographics (language and mode of interaction) worry me: what’s the point of translating MoR to Spanish or French, if afterwards hispanophones and francophones don’t get to read their sequences and have a site to be a community in? I’m trying to seed a rationalist community at my school, and the language barrier is proving to be troublesome; I often find myself not even knowing how a bias would be called in Spanish.
what’s the point of translating MoR to Spanish or French, if afterwards hispanophones and francophones don’t get to read their sequences and have a site to be a community in?
There have been a fewSequencestranslationprojects discussed, proposed, or started, in various languages, plus a few more for MoR. Of these, only one (diegocaleiro’s, in Portugese) seems aimed at a persistent community hub. I might have missed some, though.
With regard to the specific issue of bias names, if you don’t have access to cognitive science faculty, I think a good place to start might be finding a translation of Daniel Kahneman’s Thinking, Fast and Slow; Kahneman is a major source for the Sequences, his book’s been widely translated, and there should be a lot of overlap. After that, you might want to try digging into XiXiDu’s resource list. Though there are a few original LW coinages floating around, and I’m afraid you’re on your own with those.
There is massive selection bias going on here.
I don’t think it has as much to do with free time as with target audience, though. LW attracts a few different clusters of people, but the ones you’re seeing in this context are those who feel their thinking is flawed in some way, and who believe they have a decent chance of fixing it with a cognitive science toolset and vocabulary. The site’s native idiom and interaction style—basically a founder effect—imposes a few more filters, underrepresenting some problems and overrepresenting others. Akrasia and social problems are precisely the issues I’d expect to see a lot of, given those constraints.
TV Tropes… well, that might have more to do with free time. Almost everyone likes media, but if you want to make many original contributions, you need unusual knowledge of media and an analytical attitude towards it. Moreover, the media best represented there tend to be the most time-consuming ones—TV, anime, doorstopper fantasy novels. I don’t think I need to go into too much detail regarding the people most likely to share those requirements.
Offtopic post, but a discussion I wish to pursue nonetheless:
Regarding TVT: it used to be so. Nowadays school study media and the “literary canon” are beginning to find their way in… and all those tropes with silly names, built from mass media, are proving their usefulness as tools of analysis. Of course, getting a movie adaptation or a TV miniseries is one of the best ways to draw troper attention to a work, but classics always end up getting those with some regularity. So let’s just say that the user base has widened. Oh, and many classics are as doorstoppery as modern fantasy sagas, especially stuff from the XIXth century, when novels where published as long-running serials in magazines and authors were paid by the word. When people call Eliezer Yudkowsky a terrible writer because of MoR’s lack of tightness or his using it as a vehicle for ideas and lectures, I feel half-tempted to point at the likes of Victor Hugo or Alexandre Dumas or Dickens or Benito Pérez Galdós, just to name a few… surely if those are the traits of terrible writing, it means that those books have room for improvement, if only by way of abridging them?
Regarding LW: The filters the site imposes on its demographics (language and mode of interaction) worry me: what’s the point of translating MoR to Spanish or French, if afterwards hispanophones and francophones don’t get to read their sequences and have a site to be a community in? I’m trying to seed a rationalist community at my school, and the language barrier is proving to be troublesome; I often find myself not even knowing how a bias would be called in Spanish.
There have been a few Sequences translation projects discussed, proposed, or started, in various languages, plus a few more for MoR. Of these, only one (diegocaleiro’s, in Portugese) seems aimed at a persistent community hub. I might have missed some, though.
With regard to the specific issue of bias names, if you don’t have access to cognitive science faculty, I think a good place to start might be finding a translation of Daniel Kahneman’s Thinking, Fast and Slow; Kahneman is a major source for the Sequences, his book’s been widely translated, and there should be a lot of overlap. After that, you might want to try digging into XiXiDu’s resource list. Though there are a few original LW coinages floating around, and I’m afraid you’re on your own with those.