Another example pointing at what I want here is bewelltuned.com. The content may or may not be right, but the sort of thing seems exactly right to me—actionable skills you can keep working on regularly after getting simple explanations of how to do it. And furthermore, the presentation seems exactly right. LessWrong has a tendency to focus on wordy explanations of intellectual topics, which is great, but the bewelltuned style seems like an excellent counterbalance.
Somewhat side note, but I think bewelltuned is deeply great, and a minor obstacle I’ve found is that because the author is dead, and there’s no clear steward of the content, and the content is blatantly incomplete, I’m sort of unsure what to do with it.
One option would be for someone else to rewrite it in their own voice, but honestly in most cases the original writing was quite clear, and rewriting it would just make it worse. I think some of parts of the models might turn out to be false and some instructions suboptimal, in which case rewriting makes sense, but for now AFAICT they’re just sort of the best version of themselves around.
edit to be clearer/more-actionable:
I’d like to be able to copy posts over to LessWrong so they can be more tightly integrated into other sequences, but I don’t know if that’s reasonable, and don’t know how to get into an epistemic state where it’s either clearly reasonable (and I can do it) or clearly unreasonable (and I can move on). Does anyone know anyone who knew squirrel-in-hell/Maia/Chris Pasek well enough to figure out an answer to that?
They were couchsurfing with me a few days around the LessWrong Community Weekend when they were still known as Chris. This means that I have a decent insight into them but I’m not one of the people who lived with them in Crow’s nest.
At the time there morals were that people should interacted in a way that maximizes utility if they were a timeless decision based agent. I think they were vegan for some timeless decision theory based justification. I don’t think the person I might back them would raise an objection.
It’s my understanding that at the time of their death they were of the opinions that nothing matters. From that point of view there would also be no objection to his work being used by other people.
I’m wary of such mind hacks, because they teach you to treat a person (yourself) as a machine. Most people have an instinct for human connection that refuses to be satisfied by machines, so gradually teaching yourself that you live in a world of machines can lead to isolation and emptiness. That might have contributed to SquirrelInHell’s suicide, though I didn’t know them in person.
I get that vibe from some of the overall things I’ve read and heard about re: Pasek. There’s an outlook that’s kinda excited about tinkering with the mind in ways that seem particularly prone to “dangerous mindhacks”, and it does seem like this was relevant to Pasek overall.
But I don’t get that vibe much at all from bewelltuned – the things pitched there feel more like “pretty reasonable skills to develop” (and mostly aren’t about connection, they’re about inward facing skills that seem like they should be relevant no matter what your goals are)
I do think think that is also something good to do. In this case I’m actually worried about the site eventually disappearing (I suppose you could link to archive.org versions)
(sequences linking to other sites will also have some properties like a lack of “read next post”. Currently also won’t have hover-previews as you’re skimming the sequence list, although I hope we’ll build out hover previews for most external sites at some point) [edit: actually I guess if it’s a linkpost the linkpost can still have it’s own hover-preview-text, so maybe that part is fine]
Somewhat side note, but I think bewelltuned is deeply great, and a minor obstacle I’ve found is that because the author is dead, and there’s no clear steward of the content, and the content is blatantly incomplete, I’m sort of unsure what to do with it.
One option would be for someone else to rewrite it in their own voice, but honestly in most cases the original writing was quite clear, and rewriting it would just make it worse. I think some of parts of the models might turn out to be false and some instructions suboptimal, in which case rewriting makes sense, but for now AFAICT they’re just sort of the best version of themselves around.
edit to be clearer/more-actionable:
I’d like to be able to copy posts over to LessWrong so they can be more tightly integrated into other sequences, but I don’t know if that’s reasonable, and don’t know how to get into an epistemic state where it’s either clearly reasonable (and I can do it) or clearly unreasonable (and I can move on). Does anyone know anyone who knew squirrel-in-hell/Maia/Chris Pasek well enough to figure out an answer to that?
They were couchsurfing with me a few days around the LessWrong Community Weekend when they were still known as Chris. This means that I have a decent insight into them but I’m not one of the people who lived with them in Crow’s nest.
At the time there morals were that people should interacted in a way that maximizes utility if they were a timeless decision based agent. I think they were vegan for some timeless decision theory based justification. I don’t think the person I might back them would raise an objection.
It’s my understanding that at the time of their death they were of the opinions that nothing matters. From that point of view there would also be no objection to his work being used by other people.
I’m wary of such mind hacks, because they teach you to treat a person (yourself) as a machine. Most people have an instinct for human connection that refuses to be satisfied by machines, so gradually teaching yourself that you live in a world of machines can lead to isolation and emptiness. That might have contributed to SquirrelInHell’s suicide, though I didn’t know them in person.
I get that vibe from some of the overall things I’ve read and heard about re: Pasek. There’s an outlook that’s kinda excited about tinkering with the mind in ways that seem particularly prone to “dangerous mindhacks”, and it does seem like this was relevant to Pasek overall.
But I don’t get that vibe much at all from bewelltuned – the things pitched there feel more like “pretty reasonable skills to develop” (and mostly aren’t about connection, they’re about inward facing skills that seem like they should be relevant no matter what your goals are)
Rather than gathering content here, we could recognize sequences on other sites.
I do think think that is also something good to do. In this case I’m actually worried about the site eventually disappearing (I suppose you could link to archive.org versions)
(sequences linking to other sites will also have some properties like a lack of “read next post”. Currently also won’t have hover-previews as you’re skimming the sequence list, although I hope we’ll build out hover previews for most external sites at some point) [edit: actually I guess if it’s a linkpost the linkpost can still have it’s own hover-preview-text, so maybe that part is fine]