The Best of LessWrong

Why do some societies exhibit more antisocial punishment than others? Martin explores both some literature on the subject, and his own experience living in a country where "punishment of cooperators" was fairly common.

Social reality and culture work a lot like improv comedy. We often don't know "who we are" or what's going on socially, but everyone unconsciously tries to establish expectations of one another. Understanding this dynamic can give you more freedom to change your role in social interactions. 

Scott reviews a paper by Bloom, Jones, Reenen & Webb which argues that scientific progress is slowing down, as measured by outputs per researcher. Scott argues that this is actually the expected result - constant progress in response to exponentially increasing inputs should be our null hypothesis, based on historical trends.

Frustrated by claims that "enlightenment" and similar meditative/introspective practices can't be explained and that you only understand if you experience them, Kaj set out to write his own detailed gears-level, non-mysterious, non-"woo" explanation of how meditation, etc., work in the same way you might explain the operation of an internal combustion engine.

Here’s a pattern I’d like to be able to talk about. It might be known under a certain name somewhere, but if it is, I don’t know it. I call it a Spaghetti Tower. It shows up in large complex systems that are built haphazardly.

People who helped Jews during WWII are intriguing. They appear to be some kind of moral supermen. They had almost nothing to gain and everything to lose. How did they differ from the general population? Can we do anything to get more of such people today?

A tradition of knowledge is a body of knowledge that has been consecutively and successfully worked on by multiple generations of scholars or practitioners. This post explores the difference between living traditions (with all the necessary pieces to preserve and build knowledge), and dead traditions (where crucial context has been lost).

What causes some people to develop extensive frameworks of ideas rather than remain primarily consumers of ideas? There is something incomplete about my model of people doing this vs not doing this. I expect more people to have more ideas than they do.

A question post, which received many thoughtful answers.

One of the biggest intuitive mysteries to me is how humanity took so long to do anything. Humans have been 'behaviorally modern' for about 50 thousand years. And apparently didn't invent, for instance, rope until 28 thousand years ago. Why did everything take so long?

In the 2012 LessWrong survey, it turned out LessWrongers were 22% more likely than expected to be a first-born child. Later, a MIRI researcher wondered off-handedly if great mathematicians (who plausibly share some important features with LessWrongers), also exhibit this same trend towards being first born.

The short answer: Yes, they do, as near as I can tell, but not as strongly as LessWrongers.

Analyzing Nobel Laureates in Physics, there's a statistically significant birth order effect: they're 10 percentage points more likely to be firstborn than chance would predict. This effect is smaller than seen in the rationalist community (22 points) or historical mathematicians (16.7 points), but still interesting.