If someone has anxiety about a topic, I suggest they go after all the normal anxiety treating methods. SSC has a post about Things that Sometimes Work If You Have Anxeity, though actually going to see a therapist and getting professional help would likely help more.
If he wants to try exposure therapy, good results have apparently recently occurred from doing that while on propranalol.
Immediate ideas that come to mind: lots of CFAR goal-oriented techniques like goal factoring, pre-hindsight, murphyjitsu, seeking strategic updates, and urge propagation. You can learn those at CFAR itself or Anna might be writing up something on them at some point during this year.
From other stuff I’ve been exposed to: Generating 3rd option alternatives Noticing and rejecting Fool’s Choices (presented with A but not B and B but not A, which you reject and then find a way to obtain both A and B) being sure to write down actual models for decision trees and assign probabilities to them finding people who failed in the past and avoid their failures thinking about what someone cleverer or craftier than you would do asking someone who is cleverer and craftier than you what they would do etc.
In what specific areas do you think LWers are making serious mistakes by ignoring or not accepting strong enough priors from experts?
I’m curious: what were your direct motivations for posting this in a thread instead of as a comment in the Open or Media threads?
This article looks like a good Part 1 of Many. I would normally expect this article to be followed by several more that go into detail about what good, rational planning actually looks like and how to do effective and useful research on topics like these.
Breaking things down into smaller parts and doing research sound like good ideas #1 and #2 of 20 or 30 needed to do really awesome planning.
Nate Soares’ recent post “The Art of Response” on Minding Our Way talks about effective response patterns that people develop to deal with problems. What response patterns do you use in life or in your field of expertise that you have found to be quite effective?
Finally completed my dieting goal of losing 20% of my original body weight.
You put the person’s name on both sides of the badge (this is a flat badge on a lanyard) so that if it gets turned around it’s still visible.
CFAR uses double sided badges and they helped me substantially in memorizing people’s names by the end of the workshop.
I’ve also talked to many of the prominent posters who’ve left about the decline of LW, and pointed out that the coordination problem could be deliberately solved if everyone decided to come back at once. Everyone that responded expressed displeasure that LW had faded and interest in a coordinated return, and often had some material that they thought they could prepare and have ready.
High value is assigned to many original top posters. This leads me to three questions:
What demand will LW 2.0 satisfy that will keep these prominent original posters returning to LW regularly in the future over the course of 2+ years?
Do you think the reasons that led them to leave the first time can be prevented this time and will not be soon reiterated?
How can new top posters as good or better than the old ones be found/recruited/marketed to?
Could you expand on this further? I’m not sure I understand your argument. Also, intellectual humility or social humility?
A few points:
I would hate to see LW close and I don’t think that would be a helpful step in getting people exposed to rationality unless a new central hub rose to take its place. I found LW through HPMOR just this year and have very little idea of what LW looked in it’s supposed glory days. Things aren’t great now, but if LW had been completely dead I likely wouldn’t have moved from wanting to be rational to reading 600+ pages of Rationality:From AI to Zombies, making tons of connections and rationalist friends, attending CFAR, starting a LW meetup in my area, and more. A completely dead website would have given the impression of a dead philosophy that was abandoned by the people who followed it because it wasn’t actually that useful after all.
Decreases to the level of polish, rigor, and rationality knowledge publicly deemed necessary before posting in the various areas could be helpful (in current LW or a LW 2.0). I mainly post in Open and Stupid Question threads because of this.
People here can be pretty cold and harsh in their replies. I’ve also heard of issues regarding downvote brigades or mass downvoting of people’s posts due to personal disagreements. If this place really is full of “unquiet spirits” then a method of removing them, discouraging that kind of conduct, or changing them into kind benevolent spirits should be included in the works.
This is a perspective I hadn’t seen mentioned before and helps me understand why a friend of mine gives low value to the goal-oriented rationality material I’ve mentioned to him.
Thank you very much for this post!
•Discourage/ban Open threads. They are an unusual thing to have on a an open forum. They might have made sense when posting volume was higher, but right now they further obfuscate valuable content.
I don’t think this is a practical idea. The site is hostile enough to new users who lack much rationality knowledge and perspective on the content. The Open threads (and even moreso the Stupid Question threads) give people a place to pose questions and try out ideas that they aren’t confident enough in to make into Discussion posts. People are less harsh in those threads (although I’ve seen people be harsh in stupid questions threads) and it provides a chance to participate in content without having read the 1700 pages of The Sequences or having lurked on the site for 2+ years.
What are the strongest arguments that you’ve seen against rationality?
Whoever is running the meetup needs to make Meetup Posts for each meeting before they show up on the sidebar. IIRC regular meetups are often not posted there if the creator forgets about it. You can ask the person who runs the meetups to post them on LW more often or ask them if you can post them in their stead.
I run the San Antonio meetup and you are very welcome to attend here if it’s the nearest one to you!
What % do you define as “many”? Those percentages of content already known sound very high to me in regards to the first 1/3rd of the Sequences. (I’m still working on the rest so can’t comment there.) Also, they can use the Article Summaries to test out whether they’ve seen the concept before and then read the full article or not. I don’t recommend just reading the summaries though. I think a person doing that would be doing a disservice to themselves because of the reasons supplied by Vaniver above.