I think this discussion is somewhat confused by the elision of the difference between 'autodidact' and 'lone wolf'. 'Autodidact', in internet circles, is generally used to mean 'anyone who learns things primarily outside a formalized educational environment'; it's possible to be an autodidact while still being heavily engaged with communities and taking learning things as a social endeavor and so on, and in fact Eliezer was active in communities related to LW's subject matter for a long time before he started LW. By the same token, one of the main things I... (read more)
... (read more)When you ask someone if they would like a debate platform and describe all the features and content it'll have, they go: "Hell yeah I'd love that!" And it took me a while to realize that what they are imagining is someone else writing all the content and doing all the heavy lifting. Then they would come along, read some of it, and may be leave a comment or two. And basically everyone is like that: they want it, but they are not willing to put in the work. And I don't blame them, because I'm not willing to put in the work (of writing) either. The
Would be interested if I lived in a place amenable to this. Seconding dropspindle's recommendation of Appalachia, since that's where I'm already planning to move if I can get a remote job.
It may be worth looking to see whether there are any large, relatively inexpensive houses near major cities that could be converted. There are a lot of McMansion developments in the suburbs north of DC that have never looked particularly inhabited.
Similarly, when a third party describes SSC, they cannot credibly accuse Scott of what someone else wrote in the comments; the dividing line between Scott and his comentariat is obvious.
They can accuse Scott of being the sort of fascist who would have a [cherry-picking two or three comments that aren't completely in approval of the latest Salon thinkpiece] far-right extremist commentariat. And they do.
I don't feel like I can just share Less Wrong articles to many places because Less Wrong lacks respectability in wider society and is only respectable with those who are part of the LW ghetto's culture.
That's mostly a CSS problem. The respectability of a linked LW article would, I think, be dramatically increased if the place looked more professional. Are there any web designers in the audience?
Walled gardens are probably necessary for honest discussion.
If everything is open and tied to a meatspace identity, contributors have to constantly mind what they can and can't say and how what they're saying could be misinterpreted, either by an outsider who isn't familiar with local jargon or by a genuinely hostile element (and we've certainly had many of those) bent on casting LW or that contributor in the worst possible light.
If everything is open but not tied to an identity, there's no status payoff for being right that's useful in the real world -- o... (read more)
Let's consider the number x = ...999; in other words, now we have infinitely many 9s to the left of the decimal point.
My gut response (I can't reasonably claim to know math above basic algebra) is:
Infinite sequences of numbers to the right of the decimal point are in some circumstances an artifact of the base. In base 3, 1/3 is 0.1 and 1/10 is 0.00220022..., but 1/10 "isn't" an infinitely repeating decimal and 1/3 "is" -- in base 10, which is what we're used to. So, heuristically, we should expect that some infinitely repeating rep
Language could be more or less frozen wherever it stands at the time.
No it wouldn't -- language is for signaling, not only communication. There would probably be a common language for business and travel, but languages would continue to develop normally, since people would still want to use language to determine how they present themselves.
If you never publicly state your beliefs, how are you supposed to refine them?
But if you do publicly state your beliefs, the Rebecca Watsons can eat you, and if you don't, the Rebecca Watsons can coordinate against you.
How do you solve that?
"I believe that it's always important to exchange views with people, no matter what their perspectives are. I think that we have a lot of problems in our society and we need to be finding ways to talk to people, we need to find ways to talk to people where not everything is completely transparent. ... I think often... (read more)
Right, and he addresses this in the article:
... (read more)This lack of motivation is connected to another important psychology – the willingness to fail conventionally. Most people in politics are, whether they know it or not, much more comfortable with failing conventionally than risking the social stigma of behaving unconventionally. They did not mind losing so much as being embarrassed, as standing out from the crowd. (The same phenomenon explains why the vast majority of active fund management destroys wealth and nobody learns from this fact repeated every year.)
I'd be surprised if Yudkowsky has read Sartre. But it's a natural thing to do. Harry Potter is (unfortunately) the closest thing we have to a national epic we have these days... well, an Anglosphere epic, but you get the idea.
If this is the sort of thing you're interested in, you might want to read Benedict Anderson's book Imagined Communities.