Link: My something-like-Friendliness-research blog

post by Will_Newsome · 2010-12-16T01:12:59.097Z · LW · GW · Legacy · 5 comments

Contents

5 comments

If you want to know what that something-like-Friendliness is, you can read the blog! You can find it here: http://willnewsome.wordpress.com/ (About page here: http://willnewsome.wordpress.com/about/ )

Anyone who's bothered to notice the trend of my posts and comments to Less Wrong has probably noticed that I aim to be as metacontrarian and contentious as possible. Other times I run small social experiments. Sometimes this is interesting, sometimes it's probably just frustrating, but I do hope it's at least thought-provoking. With my blog I'm trying to showcase interesting ideas more than bring up counterintuitive alternatives, so perhaps those who don't generally like my posts/comments will still find my blog tolerable. It's also about something that I take more seriously than other rationality-related topics, that is, building an AI that does what we want it to do.

The names of of the posts I've put up already: "What are humans?", "Are evolved drives satiable?", "Why extrapolate?", and "Gene/meme/teme sanity equilibria".

I hope to get a new post out every few days, but honestly I have no idea if I'll succeed in that. At the very least I have a few weeks' worth of cached ideas to post, and I'll continue studying related things in the meantime. 

I'd really like anyone else who has a blog about anything mildly related to rationality to post a link in their own discussion post. Currently I only know to follow Vladimir Nesov and Luke Grecki (whose blogs are linked to from mine), and my RSS feed has room for many more.

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comment by Vladimir_Nesov · 2010-12-16T11:29:51.211Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

Anyone who's bothered to notice the trend of my posts and comments to Less Wrong has probably noticed that I aim to be as metacontrarian and contentious as possible.

Better aim to be less wrong!

comment by Larks · 2010-12-16T13:38:54.293Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

I'd really like anyone else who has a blog about anything mildly related to rationality to post a link in their own discussion post.

I attempted to bring some rationality to the mind-killer here; writing about understanding the scope of theorems rather than blindly chanting 'comparative advantage', that socialists aren't inherently evil, etc.

Replies from: Vladimir_Nesov
comment by Vladimir_Nesov · 2010-12-16T19:23:12.706Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

I liked those articles: keen application of standard LW methods. Consider linking to them from a top-level (discussion) post, as this post does.

comment by gwern · 2010-12-17T00:42:16.176Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

I've read through what you have so far; some of them are decent, but why are they on a separate blog?

Replies from: Will_Newsome
comment by Will_Newsome · 2010-12-17T01:41:26.722Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

They're not about rationality, they're more organized this way, I have a smaller and more selected audience, and don't have to worry as much about wasting peoples' time or sanity, thus making it easier for me to braindump. A big part of why I'm writing is so that people I work with at SIAI can examine some of my intuitions, since I'm not good at explaining them on the fly. It also makes me appear more productive than just reading a bunch of books and storing them in my brain, waiting for big insights.

Spewing out lots of content also seems personally useful since I'm not that good a writer, and I strongly dislike being not-great at things.