The Rationalistsphere and the Less Wrong wiki

One of the things that we've noticed, doing user interviews of several solid posters from previous eras of Less Wrong, is that most of them didn't write their first comment or post until they had been on the site for months, and had been spending that time lurking and reading the Sequences. (This was my introduction to the site, for example.)

This suggests to me that there is actually something really good that happens when you read the Sequences front to back. (Like Viliam points out, there's an ebook and physical book versions are starting to come out, and also the redesign involves making the UI for reading through the Sequences much better.)

I probably don't have time to be involved in this, but just commenting to note my approval for this project and appreciation for anyone who choses to contribute. One major advantage of this project is that any amount of effort here will provide value - it isn't like a spaceship that isn't useful half built.

There was a historical attempt to summerise all major Less Wrong posts, an interesting but incomplete project. It was also approach without a usefully normalised approach. Ideally, every article would have its own page which could be heavily tagged up with metadata such a themes, importance, length, quality, author and such. Is this the goal of the wiki?

I wrote a dozen or two of those summaries. My goal was to write a highly distilled version of the post itself.

I aimed for summaries that were about four or five sentences long. Very roughly speaking, I tried to have a sentence for each principle thesis, and a sentence for each supporting argument. As a self-imposed constraint, I kept my summaries under 70 words.

For me, the summary should capture just the logical structure supporting the final take-away of the post, while losing all the anecdotes, illustrative examples, tribal signals, pseudo-dialectical back-and-forth, and discursive meanderings in the original.

Speaking of transhumanism and LessWrong, let me know if you're interested in knowing more about the early history, especially how it grew out of earlier discussions starting on the extropians mailing list. I'm not sure exactly what you might like to know, but I'm happy to pass on some of the history to others if they want to do something with it.

I've shirked reading all the sequences end to end, instead focused on the most popular ideas transmitted by Internet cultural osmosis.

I don't expect to convince you, but (1) the sequences exist in the book form, free to download, which has the advantage that it is a little more polished, linear, and without the distraction of comments, but still quite long, however (2) when I once actually measured how many pages of text I read on an average day of online browsing, I got the impression that the sequences are actually not as long as they seem. I mean, reading a 1000 pages long book seems like a big deal, but sometimes I spend an afternoon reading hundred web pages, some of them several pages long, so I actually process the same amount of text in a week.

Ideally, every article would have its own page which could be heavily tagged up with metadata such a themes, importance, length, quality, author and such.

That would be an insane amount of work. Perhaps doing this only for articles with karma 50 and more would be less insane, but still a lot of work.

Arbital as a community project is on the back-burner right now, though Alexei and Eliezer apparently have plans to develop into something new in the future. Oliver Habryka and Matthew Graves are two community members working on a successor site to this one.

Are you sure that gathering and condensing existing material is the highest value action the community could take? The main alternative would be to improve it. Is CEV still an extant idea? No one seems to know. Can Bayes and Solomonoff Induction be used the way LessWrong says? The experts think not.

Not precisely related but not precisely unrelated either: I coined the term "rationalsphere" to refer specifically to people who don't necessarily identify as a rationalist, or in the rationality community, but are nonetheless connected to the blogosphere somehow. (i.e. people like Tyler Cohen).

I got this this doc from the facebook group. I urgently need to find out if this can merge to the wiki or is going to be a hard forked doc