Unjustified ideas comment thread

The Open Thread is by tradition a venue where there are lower standards for posting. It's okay to start an additional thread under a "unjustified ideas"-header but I see no argument for why such a thread should be weekly.

We generally had a monthly rhythm for the Stupid Question thread, and the only reason to have something more regular would be if multiple people post enough to the thread that it warrants a faster rhythm.

That said in your case I don't think "sometimes I don't have the time" is a good excuse. If you would sometimes engage in a deep argument, it would be viable but I haven't seen a single post from you do try to deeply argue a case.

Evernote works well for getting ideas stuck in your head on paper. I don't publish every random idea that I record in Evernote online and I see no reason why this community would encourage such behavior.

I think something like this could be valuable, but that once a week is too often. Once a month seems more reasonable.

LW2.0 is trying to solve intellectual progress online. As Oli pointed out above, creativity and original thinking is a bottleneck. However, I believe there are much better ways of supporting this than having threads of the kind "let's just get together and be creative and throw out all our half-baked ideas".

Via metaphor. If we want more black swan startups, we must increase the variance in startups that get funded. If you had 1 million to try to achieve this, I think you'd be better off providing actual seed funding to just 2-3 projects that are actually creative, thereby changing norms and creating incentives for creativity; as opposed to funding regular meetings for random people to jot down and discuss whatever unfinished ideas are on their mind.

Hence, to support creativity on LW2.0, I think the right thing would be to strongly encourage and support people who spend effort developing contrarian arguments or exploring underexplored areas, and do so in a somewhat rigorous/serious manner, rather than just lower the signal-to-noise ratio and effort threshold of some posts and comments.

This view derives from models I find hard-to-verbalize given the time I have available to write this. Happy to double-crux though.

In the long run, ETH >> BTC. I'll even provide a few intuitions for why I think this:

• Feature-wise ETH is strictly better.
• Single founder >> committee. Especially since Vitalik is really smart.

I was very happy to see this post. It filled me with joy to see someone updating on community feedback. I thought a newcomer was improving.

Then I saw this comment, and my exhilaration was deflated.

I think the correct place to look for new content on LerW (like the place to actually bookmark?) might be the daily post list so as to see the posts that the magical scoring system thinks are not worth showing on the main page. However, I only saw this post to make this comment after discovering that link, so there is a decent chance that a lot of test users have not discovered the link yet, and won't be helped by this comment unless the magical sorting algorithm changes its mind somehow.

I really like the idea, but what are the limits? Can one just spit out random, speculative opinions? Can one come and just unironically state "I think Trump being president is evidence that the aliens are among us" as long as they sincerely suspect the correlation?

I bet Eliezer's readership could be doubled if someone rewrote his posts in a more positive tone. His style of "haha, look at how dumb everyone is" just doesn't sit well with a good number of people (and I've talked to a few of them), even if that's not quite what he is saying.

This is an interesting idea, but sadly no-one seems to have engaged in any non-meta discussion here.