Summer Programming Notice

post by Jacob Falkovich (Jacobian) · 2017-06-09T17:37:17.000Z · LW · GW · 0 comments

For the last 20 months, Putanumonit has been your reliable source for wanton quantification of romantic relationships, devaluation of p-values, the sort of liberal politics that makes liberals angry, and updates on Asians doing sports. For the next 3-4 month, the supply of all the above is going to become much less reliable.

I’m not taking a break from writing, quite the opposite: I have taken on two serious writing projects for this summer. I also have to maintain my day job, plan my wedding, and raise a hedgehog. You’ll see my progress towards the first project on Putanumonit, but there may not be a lot else.

The first project on which I’m collaborating is writing a guide to human rationality based on the LessWrong Sequences. I endorsed reading the Sequences themselves for this purpose because they’re the best guide to rationality that currently exists. But the Sequences are far from perfect: they take on too many subjects that are important but unrelated to human rationality, Eliezer’s writing style can turn people off, and at 1800+ pages they’re too damn long.

Also, in the decade since the Sequences were written the Rationality community grew in both numbers and wisdom, no guide to rationality can be complete without the contributions of Scott, Robin and everyone else.

A lot of my readers are exactly the audience that we are targeting – smart and nerdy people who are sympathetic to the ideas of rationality but were turned off by the core of LessWrong for various reasons. My first contribution to the “Sequences 2.0” project is tackling the Fake Beliefs sequence. As I progress on it I will post chunks on Putanumonit to get feedback from all of you, which will hopefully lead to a better product in the end.

If nothing else, there may at least be some value is trimming down the Sequences to 400 pages and avoiding saying “so it is written” and then quoting myself, like Eliezer does. That’s our minimum standard: LessWrong, LessLong, LessSelfQuoting.

The goal of the first project is to contribute to pure LessWrong rationality. The goal of the second project is to betray it – I signed up for the Ribbonfarm longform refactored perception blogging course.

I don’t know what refactored perception is, and I don’t like “postrationalists”. I knew that if I wrote about my dislike on the course application I was certain to be accepted, and I was. I don’t know what I’ll learn and what I’ll end up writing, but the answer to both is probably “a lot”.

The bottom line is: I’ll be writing a lot this summer while being critiqued and edited by different people with different approaches to thinking and writing. You’ll see less variety and probably less volume of posts on Putanumonit, but I hope that these projects will help me level up significantly as a writing.

Or, the tension of writing thousands of words of core rationality and post-rationality at the same time will cost me my sanity and gain me a drinking problem, in which case Putanumonit will turn into this.

Either way, this blog may have a boring summer but an interesting future. Don’t go anywhere.

 

 

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