Lots of great points. If you can’t make the full conversion to using the site for instrumental rationality and helping it accomplish that, there are some baby steps that should be easy to take:
Any time you make an insightful, upvoted post, which is applicable beyond the present thread, find some way to incorporate into the Wiki.
Organize existing articles into shorter sequences (~5 articles) targeted at people coming from a specific background. (Don’t forget Truly Part of You, which for some reason doesn’t show up in any sequence.) Provide a short summary of each article. It’s killing us to only be able to refer newcomers to intimidatingly long lists.
Think of and suggests places in your area that could be repurposed into a “rationalist dojo”, complete with concrete general problems and personal optimization techniques that the dojo could focus on.
Generally, spend at least as much time helping the wiki be informative as you do posting.
(Maybe): Explain an academic problem that is excessively obscure for outsiders, so that people here can try their hand at applying rationality to it.
Suggest wealth-enhancing careers that people could easily enter if they’re of the general characterists of posters here, with instructions for how to break in.
Stop replying to or upvoting trolls like Clippy.
With that said, I have to express some caveats about this article: First, it’s not such a bad thing that LW is fun to go to: few sites can accomplish even this, and you will improve your method of thinking by reading posts and comments here, even if you don’t apply that to more general personal or academic success.
Second, the focus of the site is rationality in general, not specifically instrumental rationality. So if we’re doing too much epistemic rationality, then it’s a valid critique that we’re not doing enough of the other, but the site shouldn’t judge itself solely on the instrumental side; that would just be copying self-help sites.
Lots of great points. If you can’t make the full conversion to using the site for instrumental rationality and helping it accomplish that, there are some baby steps that should be easy to take:
Any time you make an insightful, upvoted post, which is applicable beyond the present thread, find some way to incorporate into the Wiki.
Organize existing articles into shorter sequences (~5 articles) targeted at people coming from a specific background. (Don’t forget Truly Part of You, which for some reason doesn’t show up in any sequence.) Provide a short summary of each article. It’s killing us to only be able to refer newcomers to intimidatingly long lists.
Think of and suggests places in your area that could be repurposed into a “rationalist dojo”, complete with concrete general problems and personal optimization techniques that the dojo could focus on.
Generally, spend at least as much time helping the wiki be informative as you do posting.
(Maybe): Explain an academic problem that is excessively obscure for outsiders, so that people here can try their hand at applying rationality to it.
Suggest wealth-enhancing careers that people could easily enter if they’re of the general characterists of posters here, with instructions for how to break in.
Stop replying to or upvoting trolls like Clippy.
With that said, I have to express some caveats about this article: First, it’s not such a bad thing that LW is fun to go to: few sites can accomplish even this, and you will improve your method of thinking by reading posts and comments here, even if you don’t apply that to more general personal or academic success.
Second, the focus of the site is rationality in general, not specifically instrumental rationality. So if we’re doing too much epistemic rationality, then it’s a valid critique that we’re not doing enough of the other, but the site shouldn’t judge itself solely on the instrumental side; that would just be copying self-help sites.