I do not recommend paying attention to the forum or "the community" as it exists today.
Instead, read the Sequences! (That is, the two-plus years of almost-daily blogging by Eliezer Yudkowsky, around which this forum and "the community" coalesced back in 'aught-seven to 'aught-nine.) Reading and understanding the core Sequences is genuinely life-changing on account of teaching you, not just to aspire to be "reasonable" as your culture teaches it, but how intelligence works on a conceptual level: how well-designed agents can use cause-and-effect entanglements to correlate their internal state with the outside world to build "maps that reflect the territory"—and then use those maps to compute plans that achieve their goals.
Again, read the Sequences! You won't regret it!
I have some difficulty distinguishing personal growth I've experienced due to the culture on LessWrong with that from other parts of society and culture and myself. But here's some things feel substantially downstream of interacting with the ideas and culture in this small intellectual community.
(I imagine others will give very different answers.)
Help me focus more on what I care about, and less on what people and society expect of me.
Help me think about modern technology clearly and practically.
Help me figure out who I am and build my life.
I guess there's a ton of things, the above are just a couple of examples that occurred to me in the ~30 mins I spent writing this answer.
By the way, while we care about understanding the human mind in a very concrete way on LessWrong, we are more often focused on an academic pursuit of knowledge. We recently did a community vote on the best posts from 2018. If you look at the top 10-20 or so post, as well as a bunch of niche posts about machine learning and AI, you'll see the sort of discussion we tend to have best on LessWrong. I don't come here to get 'life-improvements' or 'self-help', I come here much more to be part of a small intellectual community that's very curious about human rationality.
If you look at the top 10-20 or so post, as well as a bunch of niche posts about machine learning and AI, you'll see the sort of discussion we tend to have best on LessWrong. I don't come here to get 'life-improvements' or 'self-help', I come here much more to be part of a small intellectual community that's very curious about human rationality.
I wanted to follow up on this a bit.
TLDR: While LessWrong readers tangentially care a lot about self-improvement, reading forums alone likely won't have a big effect on life success. But that's not really that relevant; the most relevant thing to look at is how much progress the community have done on the technical mathematical and philosophical questions it has focused most on. Unfortunately, that discussion is very hard to have without spending a lot of time doing actual maths and philosophy (though if you wanted to do that, I'm sure there are people who would be really happy to discuss those things).
___
If what you wanted to achieve was life-improvements, reading a forum seems like a confusing approach.
Things that I expect to work better are:
[Edit: Turned into an answer after the OP author's reply.]
This isn't exactly an answer to your question, but here's a post from Scott Alexander in 2013 about progress LW had made in the last five years. So it doesn't have the element of personal application that you're after, but it does offer an answer of sorts to the related question "what has LW produced that is of any value?". I have a feeling there's at least one other thing on Scott's blog with that sort of flavour.
Also from Scott (from 2007) and pointing rather in the opposite direction: "Extreme Rationality: it's not that great", whose thesis is that LW-style rationality doesn't bring huge increases in personal effectiveness beyond being kinda-sorta-rational. (But the term "LW-style rationality" there is anachronistic; that post was written before Less Wrong as such was a thing.)
A counterpoint from many years later: "Is rationalist self-improvement real?", suggesting that at least for some people LW-style rationality does bring huge personal benefits, but only after you work at it for a while. I think Scott would actually agree with this.
(None of these things is exactly an answer to your question, which is why this is a comment rather than an answer, but I think all of them might be relevant.)
Those Scott Alexander links are fascinating and just what I was hoping for. Thank you for posting them...
In case it isn't clear: the first two are both Scott; the third is a chap called Jacob Falkovich. The thing I linked to is a crosspost here of a post from his own blog. I think Jacob also has at least one other post on the theme of "what has rationality ever done for us?" Maybe I'm thinking of this one.
Also possibly worth a look, if at some point you're in critical mood: Yes, we have noticed the skulls. That one's Scott again, as so many of the best things are :-).
Somewhat prosaically: thinking carefully about the implications of questions about the history of life and astrobiology that come up in the comments section here has lead directly through long and winding paths to two publications I am currently in the process of writing up in my scientific career.
Additionally, thinking carefully about such questions here reinforced my impression that such problems are important and was one of several things that kicked me into direct contact with and work within actual astrobiology academia.
I'm not quite sure I'd attribute the whole effect to 'being more rational', but I think exposure to LessWrong explains my choice to study artificial intelligence, and specifically how to ensure that future AI systems are highly reliable, to live in a group house with other LessWrong diaspora members, to sign up for cryonics, to be vegan, to donate 10% of my income to weird charities, and more mundanely to happen to be wearing a LessWrong shirt at the moment.
Seconding career choices, cryonics, and donating money. Became vegan after my exposure to LW, but not sure if the effect was strong. Exposure to LessWrong has also given me a better working model of how to do the thinking thing better. In particular, I am now much much much better at noticing confusion.
See previous discussion here:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/2TzQuGkoBRmnY2dCh/how-has-lesswrong-changed-your-life
See also here.
It definitely has taught me some epistemic humility, and especially after reading contents by people like Eliezer, Gwern, and Scott I realized the amount of introspection that I had to do to be able to come to terms with the knowledge deficit I had. I always had an emotional alignment with their content, but the fact that these guys could think the way they do, and all using the same set of tools that I have has made me less envious and more curious in general.
Welcome! I've greatly enjoyed some of your books. (I don't mean that the others were bad, I mean I haven't read them.)
A repeated pattern in your books is this: you identify a group of interestingly strange people, spend some time among them, and then write up your experiences in a way that invites your readers to laugh (gently and with a little bit of sympathy) at them. Is it at all possible that part of your purpose in coming here is to collect material that will help internet-rationalists join the club whose existing members include conspiracy theorists, goat-starers, and psychopaths?
Ha! Ok, there's two things I'd like to say to this appropriately wary comment! First, a lot of my work ISN'T about gently laughing at people - most notably and recently So You've Been Publicly Shamed and my two recent podcasts - The Last Days of August and The Butterfly Effect. They're all very much about empathy. If you want me to provide links please say so. Second, perhaps where this idea differs from some of my earlier stories (like The Men Who Stare At Goats) is that I've spent my whole working life as a rationalist. Like the people on this forum, it's guided me for decades... So it feels very personal...
Noted! Also noted, at the risk of passing from "appropriately wary" to "inappropriately wary": you didn't actually say that you're not planning to write a book that presents lesswrongers as weirdos to point and smile at. E.g., what you say is entirely compatible with something that begins "I've thought of myself as a rationalist all my life. Recently I discovered an interesting group of people on the internet who also call themselves rationalists. Join me as we take a journey down the rabbit-hole of how 'rationality' can lead to freezing your head, reading Harry Potter fanfiction, and running away from imaginary future basilisks."
Again, maybe I've now passed from "appropriately wary" to "inappropriately wary". But journalistic interest in the LW community in the past has usually consisted of finding some things that can be presented in a way that sounds weird and then presenting them in a way that sounds weird, and the Richlieu principle[1] means that this is pretty easy to do. I'd love to believe that This Time Is Different; maybe it is. But it doesn't feel like a safe bet.
(I should maybe add that I expect a Jon Ronson book on Those Weird Internet Rationalists would be a lot of fun to read. But of course that's the problem!)
[1] "Give me six lines written by the most honest of men, and I will find something in them with which to hang him." Probably not actually said by Richlieu. More generally: if you take a person or, still more, a whole community, and look for any particular thing -- weirdness, generosity, dishonesty, creepiness, brilliance, stupidity -- in what they've said or written, it will probably not be difficult to find it, regardless of the actual nature of the person or community.
But journalistic interest in the LW community in the past has usually consisted of finding some things that can be presented in a way that sounds weird and then presenting them in a way that sounds weird
Tho there are exceptions worth applauding.
I read the NYT piece about the workshop yesterday, so I understand what you're saying. But I should add that I'm less interested in community dynamics than I am in what happens when a person actively attempts to be more rational. So it's the implementing of the rules that interests me the most... And the ripples that may ensue....
Related: Brienne wrote a really interesting comment about this broader dynamic in journalists and popular, about what stories are available for a writer to tell.
Maybe this is just being cute, I often think of it the other way: if I hadn't been so in need of Less Wrong, Less Wrong wouldn't exist! Any effect it has back on me is just cake.
(This is literally true to the extent that I was among the group of people who were among the early existential risk community that were so confused it drove Eliezer to create what would become LW.)
Hello! I am totally new here so please bear that in mind in the event I commit faux pas! I'm a writer who has written a LOT about rationality and when rationality eludes us. These are books like So You've Been Publicly Shamed, Them, The Psychopath Test and The Men Who Stare At Goats, among others.
I don't know if this question has been asked elsewhere, but I'd love to know: has learning to be more rational impacted your everyday lives, in small or (perhaps more interestingly) BIG ways? Have there been occasions when you've put these skills (perhaps learned at a workshop) into practice in your domestic or work lives and the ripples have been surprising/consequential in positive or negative ways?
I'm thinking of writing about what happens when a person learns to be more rational, hence my question.
Hope this is the start of a wonderful thread!
Jon Ronson