Rationality Power Tools

This may not be an appropriate place for this suggestion, but it might be. Related to a previous comment I made and the mention of the job ads debate and the sidebar idea.

I would like to see various concrete projects that should be referenced often, like the akrasia tactics review or links to various power tool projects on the main site. If there were a sidebar which contained something like a list of job ads relevant to the topics of the site, a link to akrasia tactics to help get everyone focused, and links to various power tools to help people pursue their goals effectively or find projects to contribute to.

These seem like topics that are very likely to be instrumentally useful to most users, and far less likely to be used or known of when they are not on the front page.

Awesome.

My tech skills aren't of the type that seem likely to be useful to this, but I'll earmark $100 to donate to some part of this that looks interesting and needs money thrown at it.

I had an idea for a web-based app for evaluating instrumental rationality techniques, something like Digg or UserVoice-based forum where techniques get upvoted, downvoted, merged, separated and discussed. However, I don't currently have a solution for the problem of 'impulse upvoting' ("hey, this technique sounds cool, let's upvote it!") -- I don't know how to make the upvotes reflect long-term usefulness of the techniques.

We must also be aware of the PredictionBook problem. It isn't integrated into LW, therefore it gets little traffic, and, as a result, is underused -- as of this writing, it's not even mentioned in this thread. Lesson to learn: if we want the power tool to work, it must be properly integrated into LW (same login, homepage / sidebar widget, LW moderation policy to redirect relevant discussions there etc.)

In October I will be writing a Ruby on rails web app for experimenting with control markets to control a real world organisation.

Simple control markets* are used in Learning Classifier systems to make the system goal oriented. I'm heavily modifying it from that, but the basic idea remains the same, control of parts of the system is based on bidding a currency which is gained from feedback. I'm curious to see if they will work in the real world, or whether aspects of human psychology will make them untenable.

The theory behind them needs to be tightened up a lot as well. What you need to do is prove that the Evolutionary Stable Strategies for your control markets are non-malicious. But that is hard for me, at the moment.

*Warning - Neologism. I chose it for the allusion to prediction markets. Related: Agorics and market-based control.

Edit: An article not designed for lesswrong, can be found here please put any notes of what you would like in a lesswrong article there as well.

I'd like to second the idea of a system for matching people who are willing to teach a particular skill with those who are interested in learning it. To throw out some ideas:

• Reputation tracking ala eBay so that people who are good learners or good teachers will be recognized and easily distinguishable from people who make trouble.

• One-on-one training, rather than one-to-many. The former is much easier for teachers who have domain experience but no education experience, and also allows the project to move more towards attempting novel things that haven't yet been done in standard classroom & online training sessions.

• Reciporical training: i.e. Alice teaches Bob how to program Ruby at the same time as Bob teaches Alice how to do integral calculus. I think this might help prevent a status difference from forming, and also create a motivation for people who prefer the teaching side over the learning side (or vice versa) to engage in both.

• Training-related conversations (over IRC and the like) to be recorded on the website and accessible indefinitely to the people involved. Optionally the trainer and student could jointly choose to make those conversations publically accessible, along with any supplemental documentation that was created or used (homework assignments or the like).

I'm not sure these tools are really about rationality per se, but anyhow the LW-community seems to have many people who are interested in this kind of thing - myself included.

My personal favorite to bring to a Swiss army knife fight would be emacs and, in particular, org-mode, which keeps me sane in the daily maelstrom of information coming to my desk, in the form of emails, meeting notes, action points etc. org-mode can do clocking (to see how long I'm spending on tasks), all kinds of reminders, todo-lists and can even check which of my 'projects' currently don't have a NextAction defined (as per GTD). It can display all these things in many ways, say, only '@phone' items or only items I've been waiting for for more than a week.

It even integrates with my e-mail, and I have hooked it up with my web browser, so with a few clicks I can store interesting snippets (with a source link of course) for review later.

The downside? Well, you'll have to learn emacs first, which does many things differently from other programs. All can be customized by writing a little lisp to make it behave as you want, but I understand that could be a non-trivial barrier. Having crossed that barrier, I would say that it's worth it (bias alert).

Uploading is still years to decades away.

Years? Are you insane?

To build such tools, don't we need to know what techniques help increase rationality?

I suspect that tools built in the course of a directed rationality practice will be much more useful than those we come up with in advance.

That said, a website specifically structured to share rationality practices, as I discussed in my Shiny Distraction post, would be very useful. I could contribute content, wouldn't have time to contribute code.

Currently, the only software listing on the wiki seems to be puzzle games and the only discussion I’m aware of for creating software in the community is the proposal for a Less Wrong video game.

See Debate tools (note to volunteers: this page is in need for improvement, it's terribly structured).

Here is a collection of some calibration tools.

IRC was mentioned -- it'd be nice to see an IRC-bot with knowledge about LW-related topics; other tools could be added as well, to help discussions.

[ After that it's only a small matter of programming to add recursive self-improvement to the bot and see where that leads.. :) ]

I can probably help some - ages ago I had set up a few wiki-based experiments on debate, but they never did amount to much. I'm also pretty interested in facebook game design, I follow a few blogs on the subject, have stacks of design ideas in various notebooks, and once made a prototype for the company I work for (though flash and web development aren't my primary domain of expertise).

My track record of getting this kind of project done on my own is, um, imperfect, though. I tried helping lesswrong development a year or so ago, but after a week of fighting with configuration files and versions of the database library (was it mysql? I think so) and github, I put things on hold and never picked them up since. I can certainly understand when Eliezer and Michael Vassar complain about getting a lot of offers for help, but having very few of them follow through.

In the meantime, I did improve my skills in Python web development and in using git, so maybe things wouldn't seem so complicated if I tried again now.

It's more of an awl than a power drill, but for gathering data on the fly, I've been using your.flowingdata. It's useful for tracking quantifiable information over time, and might work well in concert with other tools for e.g. fighting akrasia. There are other such sites--daytum is one--but yfd is the only one I've used personally.

a database of practice programs for developing various skills

Creating one of these is on my ongoing to do list.

I do recall there being discussion here earlier of software for diagramming arguments. Also Analysis of Competing Hypotheses seems relevant though I don't know how good it is.

Edit: Vladimir Nesov has found what I was thinking of.

I immagine a kind of program that tracks everything you do on your computer, not like personal information or anything, but just what kind of activities you are doing and how you are managing your time. Then some kind of function would determine how productive you are, maybe by manually inputting some measure of how much you got done that day, or just by analyzing where you spent your time, how much you were typing, etc. Then over time you could get some useful data about what makes you more or less productive. The program could then suggest when and where you should spend your time.

For example, watching youtube videos is not productive (usually), but it may help you refresh your mind so you can get better performance at things that do. This kind of constant experimentation is exactly what I think is needed to generally optimize your time managment. Doing it on my own just doesn't work. I don't experiment enough, something sounds like it should intuitively help so I do it and don't get any objective measure of how much it helped. I tend to make spontaneous decisions on how I should manage my time and not carefully thought out plans.

Anyways, this is beyond my skills to program at the momment, but does this sound plausible to anyone and if so do you have any suggestions?

I would like a tool that helps me manage my goals and my tasks, as well as information relevant to them.

It could be something like a hierarchical list: supergoals would be at the top, subgoals would inherit from some supergoal, and tasks (things to do now) would be at the bottom, inheriting from some subgoal. Additionally, each (super/sub)goal could have attached information concerning achievement criteria, possible strategies, current strategy, etc. My hope is that this system helps me keep my tasks connected to my goals and aids me in becoming more strategic.

I'm currently using Google Tasks for the hierarchical list part, but there isn't a nice way to integrate relevant information. I haven't looked into it much yet but Goalbot might be a step in this direction.

I would be happy to donate money for development.

Has anyone had much experience with collaborative writing software like EtherPad? I'm currently creating an article using this. While similar to revision-control systems (like github, etc.), it lets you watch people type in real time, and has a chat-bar on the side for authors to communicate.