MathOverflow as an example for LessWrong

This is a good question and I don't have a good answer yet.

That would be interesting. I'm not quite sure how it would work though. I guess examples of appropriate questions and inappropriate questions (as the proposal requires) would help to clarify the purpose of a RationalityOverflow.

Hrm, Laplace at least seems to have been a Laplace of rationality, and I think we might underestimate the strength of a lot of historical rationalists in general. Gautama Buddha is the extreme case, but it's hard to know what the hell happened there. So I agree that it's undisciplined, especially in the sense that it has few explicit disciples, but I'm not sure about its 'youth', as the foundations of epistemology seem to have been being pioneered since the dawn of humanity, and it's hard to talk about the instrumental rationality of agents that seem to not have anything very obvious or tangible to be optimizing for (hence the self-understanding-oriented epistemology).

Semantics does sound like a good starting place. Does anybody know if there are any good semantics sites for beginners?

I think the idea of personas is at least worth trying.

Not sure if I qualify as a lurker, but, well... this is a dojo. If a little kid walks in here and asks a stupid question, rhetorical and logical ass-kicking will commence. The virtues of rationality number twelve, and mercy is not among them. It's all terribly serious.

I very strongly recommend maintaining norms of courtesy, unless we are specifically trying to train the ability to stay calm when attacked-- and that isn't beginner's work.

It's impossible to completely avoid hurting people's feelings, but it cuts down on the noise level if you start with the presumption that people are capable of learning, and that you can't deduce their general defects of intellect and character because they asked a stupid question.

If I've jumped to inaccurate conclusions about what you mean by ass-kicking and lack of mercy, please let me know.

This sounds like fun; I'm not sure how useful it would be, but it might be fun enough to warrant trying even if it probably won't help.

Yeah, really cool idea. And you found a use for this.

If a little kid walks in here and asks a stupid question, rhetorical and logical ass-kicking will commence. The virtues of rationality number twelve, and mercy is not among them. It's all terribly serious.

I actually think a little kid will get a useful answer to either his question or the question he should have asked. Much like in a dojo, ass kicking tends to be reserved for little kids who make obstinate stupid assertions that cannot be backed up.

I nominate Second Life as a potential venue for this (or OpenSim, if we don't want Linden Labs to host the place or want more control than they give). Assuming that I have time to do so among my work obligations, I'd be willing to help set such a place up.

We'd have to be careful flaming didn't spill over into the main threads. I think Karma would take care of that.

The problem with sending people to general philosophy sites is that there is generally a lot of confusion between "philosophy" and "history of philosophy", and the latter is more common. People tend to get railroaded into reading philosophers that're old and prestigious, but much more confusing than a modern rehash of the same topics would be. A quick glance at philosophyforums.com confirmed my suspicion that it's dominated by history of philosophy. If we aren't careful to avoid that, we'll be doing people a great disservice.

I'm not sure we should be sending people to less analytical/technical philosophy forums. Most philosophy is bullshit, and most philosophical debate, as it's usually structured, just serves to reinforce people's confidence in their preferred bullshit. You compared it to MathOverflow referring basic questions to Dr. Math, etc., but I'm not sure the comparison is valid, because people will still usually get the right answers when they ask their more basic math questions on more basic sites.

Whereas if someone comes here and tries to start a discussion about the nature of free will, and we refer them to a philosophy forum, they'll probably end up with ideas about it no better than the ones they started with. If we refer them to the sequence on it without further comment, they may not bother reading it, if they don't have some sense of what to expect or why it would be worth reading a sequence of a dozen posts.

Maybe what we need, to supplement the Less Wrong FAQ, is a Reality FAQ — something that summarizes the generally-accepted LW positions on all the big mysterious deep philosophical questions that we've long since answered. (It would, of course, link each question to posts/sequences on them for anyone who wants to go further into it after reading the summary of the answer.)

Theres /r/philosophy on reddit...

Is that the right link? I didn't see any octagons there, only a discussion forum for a few web comics of no particular rationalist relevance, although I did like the one about the coffee shop where couples go to break up.