Edit: apparently people here can’t detect sarcasm, so I’m changing the header.
So, I took this thread as an excuse for going thought my lists of interesting websites accumulated over the years, and make a selection of things I think will specifically interest LWers. There are still a lot of links, because I sift through large swats of information. This is a valuable recourse, don’t dismiss it just because it’s badly organized.
I’ve also tried adding some descriptions because people were complaining about that.
I recommend checking out every one of these, and spreading it out over a few weeks.
http://www.mspaintadventures.com/ (one of the most epic stories of our time, with great characters and concepts. It’s long and starts slow, so just be patient.)
http://thejuicemedia.com/ (Warning! Mindkiller!)(Although the political alignment probably is similar to much of LW, that’s not the reason to watch these. That reason is it being a fantastic example of how art and humour can communicate serous things better than solemnity can.)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JeJ6-gN0eB4 (If you ae rational enoguht to overcome your prejudices to wathing this, you will discover it’s amazingly good art and even has antidepresant properties.)
Request that you split these up by topic. For example, I see at least half a dozen webcomics that I recognise in there mixed in with artwork, essays, Nick Bostrom and links whose URLs give me no hint at all as to what they’re about.
I deliberately didn’t try to classify them because the majority are either unclassifiable, or the only information communicated by the classification would be stereotypes that doesn’t apply to the particular work. “what I like” explicitly selects for things where classifications are useless, that break boundaries between classifications and the best off many worlds.
ok, to make the reasons behind my request more concrete—I am very bad at reading just half an archive, watching just one TED talk, or stopping halfway through a story or video. As such, I prefer my memetic hazards to be as clearly labelled as possible.
I very much like Dresden Codak as a comic, it fills the hole in my heart left by A Lesson is Learned but the Damage is Irreversible, and I really like that sort of comic book science fantasy but it’s a classic example of what the XKCD writer dismissed as “shouting science in the same way you’d shout Alakazam!”, I’m not sure I’d pitch it for it’s treatment of the singularity.
I was wondering how long it would take for this to hit LW, and in what context. Also, one of the few grayed-out links in your post (i.e., in my browser history).
Because it’s really really good art, great characters, great story, etc.?
Because it’s in the nowadays very rare category of things that have a real plot but dosn’t build it on sex/violence/grimdark?
Because it has antidepressant properties and teaches lessons that are often valuable to a rationalist?
Because it’s very different from everything else you’ve seen, and keeps subverting your expectations?
Because you find pleasure in subverting meatspace expectations, and with this you can comfortably do it in a way that’s still acceptable from other contexts?
Thanks for the link to Homestuck. It managed to amaze me more than HP:MOR. It’s unbelievably awesome, as in, I cannot quite believe that something so awesome can exist on the internet.
I can’t second the recommendation of Homestuck enough! It does start slow, I stopped reading it the first time because I thought it was some kid’s random shenanigans with a weird inventory system… Was I ever wrong!
Is there a point at which one can clearly say that if they don’t like it by that point they probably aren’t going to like it at all? I got pretty far into it—a good bit past the explanation of troll relationships—and it just never seemed to pick up for me.
Hmm. I don’t know… It might be a lost cause (on the other hand, if you do end up liking it it’ll have been worth sinking some more hours into.) I liked it by then, though.
What happened at the end of Hivebent that I might remember? It’s been a few months since I gave up on it, and that name isn’t ringing a bell, but names rarely do for me.
That’s about where I was when I left off, I think. I don’t remember John growing up (unless you meant the bit with the time-transporter thing and the babies) but I do remember a part that focused on the trolls and went into some depth about their society and biology and stuff.
Not worth getting back to, then, I’m going to say.
Ok, why was this downvoted? There is no way you’ve actually checked out a significant number of them yet. Is someone actually down-voting just because I posted MANY links without caring about the quality of the stuff they link to?
Is someone actually down-voting just because I posted MANY links without caring about the quality of the stuff they link to?
No shit, Sherlock!
My rule for posting links, anywhere on the web, not just here, is this: the reader must be told enough to know whether they are interested in following the link, without following the link. And please, keep it relevant to LessWrong.
I suspect you read the OP as meaning (down-voting (just because I posted MANY links (without caring about the quality...))), whereas I suspect the OP meant ((down-voting (just because I posted MANY links) (without caring about the quality...)).
That said, I completely agree with your main point.
Umm, then you either never post links to anything or you have a really bad case of Double Illusion of Transparency. You can try to provide evidence for if people are more or less likely to like the link, but only in very rare cases will the probability stray even outside 10%-90% probability for most people.
It’s clear to me that a link with a description that lets me make even a 50%-accurate judgment, let alone a 90%-accurate judgment, of whether I’ll like it is far more useful than a link with no description at all.
No, obviously not, I spend a fair amount of cognitive resources every day trying to sort through online content and am partial to norms conductive to that purpose indeed.
I just interpret “knowing without following the link” as “at least 99% sure it’ll be worth it”.
No downvotes from me, but I can imagine that someone might think that people posting long lists of basically random stuff from their browsing history they themselves found interesting without any kind of commentary on what they are about, whether there’s an unifying theme to the list or why LW readers in particular might be interested in the links is not something they would like to see more of here.
I haven’t downvoted, but I assume it is because it is overwhelming to the reader. I would second erratio’s suggestion to post them separately, and add that this could happen over several months (assuming this thread idea takes off).
Even with the descriptions, that’s a pretty random list of things. I haven’t even clicked any of them—there’s some good stuff in the ones I recognize, but also a lot of stuff that doesn’t seem to have anything to do with LW at all (Hyperbole and a half? Really? Allie’s funny, sure, but if she has any rationalist tendencies I haven’t noticed ’em, and her kind of humor isn’t even the same general type as what seems to be popular here), so my overall impression is that you haven’t done a very good job of filtering things, and the rest of the stuff probably isn’t worth spending my time exploring.
Huh? Hyperbole and a half has a bunch of anecdotes that illustrate interesting human behaviour, that’s totally relevant to LW.
There is the possibility that people who have an actual social life already knew that things I’ve learnt from there since so long they don’t notice it’s knowledge, that’s probably the source of confusion.
Can you list some things you have learned from Hyperbole and a Half? Allie’s a fantastic storyteller but I don’t find her especially didactically inclined.
how’s not being obviously rational an argument against it? Linking rationalists to somehting they might have just rejected as irrelevant otherwise and pointing out how to learn from it seems more valuable than just pointing at somewhere so obvious they’d have found it themselves eventually no matter what.
Edit: apparently people here can’t detect sarcasm, so I’m changing the header.
So, I took this thread as an excuse for going thought my lists of interesting websites accumulated over the years, and make a selection of things I think will specifically interest LWers. There are still a lot of links, because I sift through large swats of information. This is a valuable recourse, don’t dismiss it just because it’s badly organized.
I’ve also tried adding some descriptions because people were complaining about that.
I recommend checking out every one of these, and spreading it out over a few weeks.
http://www.accesstoinsight.org/lib/authors/thanissaro/breathmed.html (meditation is a useful habit, this is a very concrete tutorial on how to do it.)
http://www.epicsplosion.com/epicsploitation/38 (A silly thing, please contribute to make it better!)
http://www.mspaintadventures.com/ (one of the most epic stories of our time, with great characters and concepts. It’s long and starts slow, so just be patient.)
http://www.ted.com/ (ideas worth spreading)
http://dresdencodak.com/ (Awesome art, and deals more directly with the singularity than any other webcomic i know of)
http://vihart.com/ (distilled nerdyness)
http://www.fanfiction.net/s/5782108/1/Harry_Potter_and_the_Methods_of_Rationality (Eliezers masterful rationalist fanfiction)
http://utilitarian-essays.com/ (some LW like articles)
http://thejuicemedia.com/ (Warning! Mindkiller!)(Although the political alignment probably is similar to much of LW, that’s not the reason to watch these. That reason is it being a fantastic example of how art and humour can communicate serous things better than solemnity can.)
http://hyperboleandahalf.blogspot.com/ (random funny blog)
http://extvia.deviantart.com/gallery/ (Awesome arts that I for some reason have a strong intuition most LWers will love)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HhGuXCuDb1U (funny rant relevant to Joy in the merely real)
http://people.mokk.bme.hu/~daniel/rationality_quotes/rq.html (like the rationaltiy quote threads here on LW? This is a compilation of the best ones.)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JeJ6-gN0eB4 (If you ae rational enoguht to overcome your prejudices to wathing this, you will discover it’s amazingly good art and even has antidepresant properties.)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rEUxlwb2uFI (WTF?!)
http://www.skytopia.com/project/fractal/mandelbulb.html (pretty pictures!)
http://www.orionsarm.com/xcms.php?r=oa-story&story=dr_yes_jolonah (scary story, gives you an healthy appreciation for what might happen if you fail to win.)
http://www.kuro5hin.org/prime-intellect/mopiidx.html (good free scifi)
http://everything2.com/index.pl?node_id=1857290 (good free scifi)
http://www.raikoth.net/Stuff/story1.html (good free scifi)
http://www.infinityplus.co.uk/stories/under.htm (good free scifi)
http://www.pixelscapes.com/sailornothing/ (fiction)
http://www.xeper.org/maquino/nm/Morlindale.pdf (LotR fanfiction)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pdxucpPq6Lc&feature=player_embedded (good animation about copies, reminds me about Eliezers “the simple truth”)
http://arxiv.org/abs/0704.0646 (Tegmarks original Mathematical Universe paper)
http://www.nickbostrom.com/fable/dragon.html (Classic parable about death)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yfRVCaA5o18&feature=player_embedded (interesting facts that are very telling about how the brain works)
http://gwynethllewelyn.net/2006/07/09/what-is-real-anyway-an-essay-by-extropia-dasilva/
http://hanson.gmu.edu/mangledworlds.html (What an explanation to the born probabilities might look like.)
http://www.000webhost.com/ (great free webhost, donate the money you’d have paid for hosting to the SIAI instead)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iGFqfTCL2fs (everyone who regularly dives a car must see this)
http://www.symphonyofscience.com/videos.html (Awesome music to help you take joy in the real)
http://www.erfworld.com/book-1-archive/ (webcomic)
http://www.webcomicsnation.com/shaenongarrity/narbonic/series.php?view=archive&chapter=9802 (webcomic)
http://unicornjelly.com/uni001.html (webcomic)
http://www.project-apollo.net/mos/index.html (webcomic)
http://www.rhjunior.com/totq/00001.html (webcomic)
Request that you split these up by topic. For example, I see at least half a dozen webcomics that I recognise in there mixed in with artwork, essays, Nick Bostrom and links whose URLs give me no hint at all as to what they’re about.
EDIT: Thank you, that’s a vast improvement
I deliberately didn’t try to classify them because the majority are either unclassifiable, or the only information communicated by the classification would be stereotypes that doesn’t apply to the particular work. “what I like” explicitly selects for things where classifications are useless, that break boundaries between classifications and the best off many worlds.
ok, to make the reasons behind my request more concrete—I am very bad at reading just half an archive, watching just one TED talk, or stopping halfway through a story or video. As such, I prefer my memetic hazards to be as clearly labelled as possible.
Is “unclassifiable” like “unexplainable”?
Some of them, some not.
I very much like Dresden Codak as a comic, it fills the hole in my heart left by A Lesson is Learned but the Damage is Irreversible, and I really like that sort of comic book science fantasy but it’s a classic example of what the XKCD writer dismissed as “shouting science in the same way you’d shout Alakazam!”, I’m not sure I’d pitch it for it’s treatment of the singularity.
I was wondering how long it would take for this to hit LW, and in what context. Also, one of the few grayed-out links in your post (i.e., in my browser history).
Heartily seconded!
You’ll like another thing I’m working on. :D
Linking for posterity.
why is this so compelling
Because it’s really really good art, great characters, great story, etc.?
Because it’s in the nowadays very rare category of things that have a real plot but dosn’t build it on sex/violence/grimdark?
Because it has antidepressant properties and teaches lessons that are often valuable to a rationalist?
Because it’s very different from everything else you’ve seen, and keeps subverting your expectations?
Because you find pleasure in subverting meatspace expectations, and with this you can comfortably do it in a way that’s still acceptable from other contexts?
It’s adorable! It’s happy!
And however it might rankle the physicalist majority, I think the most parsimonious explanation is that Friendship Is Magic.
Thanks for the link to Homestuck. It managed to amaze me more than HP:MOR. It’s unbelievably awesome, as in, I cannot quite believe that something so awesome can exist on the internet.
Which one is the link to Homestuck? I can’t tell, and your comment makes me really want to know.
This one.
Thanks.
Exactly.
Thank you for adding the descriptions.
I can’t second the recommendation of Homestuck enough! It does start slow, I stopped reading it the first time because I thought it was some kid’s random shenanigans with a weird inventory system… Was I ever wrong!
Is there a point at which one can clearly say that if they don’t like it by that point they probably aren’t going to like it at all? I got pretty far into it—a good bit past the explanation of troll relationships—and it just never seemed to pick up for me.
Hmm. I don’t know… It might be a lost cause (on the other hand, if you do end up liking it it’ll have been worth sinking some more hours into.) I liked it by then, though.
The end of Hivebent might be a good point… but not really before that.
What happened at the end of Hivebent that I might remember? It’s been a few months since I gave up on it, and that name isn’t ringing a bell, but names rarely do for me.
Hivebent is the part focusing entirely on the trolls, it ends with Karkat watching John grow up.
That’s about where I was when I left off, I think. I don’t remember John growing up (unless you meant the bit with the time-transporter thing and the babies) but I do remember a part that focused on the trolls and went into some depth about their society and biology and stuff.
Not worth getting back to, then, I’m going to say.
Yes, this really can’t be stressed enough.
Thanks for these links (also, fellow DF player here :)).
Ok, why was this downvoted? There is no way you’ve actually checked out a significant number of them yet. Is someone actually down-voting just because I posted MANY links without caring about the quality of the stuff they link to?
No shit, Sherlock!
My rule for posting links, anywhere on the web, not just here, is this: the reader must be told enough to know whether they are interested in following the link, without following the link. And please, keep it relevant to LessWrong.
I suspect you read the OP as meaning (down-voting (just because I posted MANY links (without caring about the quality...))), whereas I suspect the OP meant ((down-voting (just because I posted MANY links) (without caring about the quality...)).
That said, I completely agree with your main point.
Umm, then you either never post links to anything or you have a really bad case of Double Illusion of Transparency. You can try to provide evidence for if people are more or less likely to like the link, but only in very rare cases will the probability stray even outside 10%-90% probability for most people.
Oh, come on.
It’s clear to me that a link with a description that lets me make even a 50%-accurate judgment, let alone a 90%-accurate judgment, of whether I’ll like it is far more useful than a link with no description at all.
Do you disagree?
No, obviously not, I spend a fair amount of cognitive resources every day trying to sort through online content and am partial to norms conductive to that purpose indeed.
I just interpret “knowing without following the link” as “at least 99% sure it’ll be worth it”.
No downvotes from me, but I can imagine that someone might think that people posting long lists of basically random stuff from their browsing history they themselves found interesting without any kind of commentary on what they are about, whether there’s an unifying theme to the list or why LW readers in particular might be interested in the links is not something they would like to see more of here.
I haven’t downvoted, but I assume it is because it is overwhelming to the reader. I would second erratio’s suggestion to post them separately, and add that this could happen over several months (assuming this thread idea takes off).
Even with the descriptions, that’s a pretty random list of things. I haven’t even clicked any of them—there’s some good stuff in the ones I recognize, but also a lot of stuff that doesn’t seem to have anything to do with LW at all (Hyperbole and a half? Really? Allie’s funny, sure, but if she has any rationalist tendencies I haven’t noticed ’em, and her kind of humor isn’t even the same general type as what seems to be popular here), so my overall impression is that you haven’t done a very good job of filtering things, and the rest of the stuff probably isn’t worth spending my time exploring.
Huh? Hyperbole and a half has a bunch of anecdotes that illustrate interesting human behaviour, that’s totally relevant to LW.
There is the possibility that people who have an actual social life already knew that things I’ve learnt from there since so long they don’t notice it’s knowledge, that’s probably the source of confusion.
Can you list some things you have learned from Hyperbole and a Half? Allie’s a fantastic storyteller but I don’t find her especially didactically inclined.
Not any explicit, declatative facts that I can think of, more an quantitative improvent in intuition about the kind of things humans might do.
This Is Why You’ll Never Be an Adult has a clue about how grandiosity can make motivation collapse.
My Boyfriend Doesn’t Have Ebola… Probably is good about the difficulties of communicating qualia.
However, I think they’re mostly brilliantly funny about neurotic states of mind rather than an obvious rationalist resource.
how’s not being obviously rational an argument against it? Linking rationalists to somehting they might have just rejected as irrelevant otherwise and pointing out how to learn from it seems more valuable than just pointing at somewhere so obvious they’d have found it themselves eventually no matter what.