What other causes are relevant to LessWrong?

I spend most of my free time on my FIRST Robotics team. http://www.usfirst.org/

Dean Kamen founded FIRST (For Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology) in order to try and increase interest in science and technology among school children. It does this by sponsoring robotics competitions at the elementary, middle, and high school levels.

Its oldest competition is the FIRST Robotics Competition, which is the one that my team participate in. Every year, FIRST releases a game that we have six weeks to design and build a robot to compete in.

It's basically trying to be an alternative to varsity sports teams, where instead of playing a game kids do engineering, and build technical skills before college (and it helps a lot in college admissions).

Insofar as it does that, it raises the sanity waterline, but not to a particularly high level. It does however, raise it for a lot of people.

It's not really a rationality organization per se, but it might be of interest to the community.

Some statistics about their total support from their site:

• 248,000+ students

• 22,475 teams

• 20,675 robots

• 66,000+ mentors/adult supporters

• 33,000+ event volunteers

Interesting things:

• They've been very successful at getting sponsors, with more than 3,500 participating. FIRST has about $33,000,000 in operating expenses. But that doesn't reflect all of the money that it pulls in because of how many companies directly sponsor teams or provide scholarships.

• It has a very decentralized structure, easy to scale

• Dean Kamen does a few other things like technophilic TV shows and inventing

If anyone wants to hear more about it, just ask or something. I believe Randaly is also involved.

A good cause that I would like LW to talk about more is "competitive government", including Patri Friedman's seasteading project and Paul Romer's efforts to establish charter cities.

It would rock really hard to create new states to which people could move and in which people could put down roots that were better than the current options although of course there are very formidable barriers to doing that.

The art of creating and maintaining effective online communities has significant overlap with the art of government and at the current time is probably the best place to advance the art of government because the cost of trying new things and getting feedback from reality is vastly lower than the cost of other ways of trying new things in the field of governance.

Like David Brin says, it is good for each of us to remind ourselves that we or I am a member of a civilization. I take that to mean that for me to have any non-negligible hope of having a persistent (positive) effect on reality depends on my being a part of a sufficiently healthy civilization. There are some unhealthy aspects to American society, and I wish I could relocate to a society with a lower probability of my society's canceling out my efforts to improve the world. (According to my current understanding of the world, such a society probably does not currently exist.)

Contributing to Free Software projects, especially scientific ones, could be the best use of time for a lot of rationalists. And (allowing for politics being The Mind Killer and all that) cause- or issue-based political campaigning. For example the current campaign to introduce the Alternative Vote for UK General Elections is a pretty clear example of something where there is an obvious rational and irrational side (AV allowing more information into the system, providing better feedback).

Interesting. It occurs to me that there are a variety of compatible communities out there with quite a bit of overlap with LW - Wikipedeans, Open Source software geeks, even PUA. But most of them already have a community infrastructure in place - members of those communities already know where to go.

Two communities that I might be interested in joining (as a lurker, at first) might be bloggers and free educational material authors. Does anyone know whether these communities have focal web-sites?

One thing that LW could do is to have a resource page on our wiki providing links to resources associated with causes and service communities.

Another one I just ran into: Project Gutenberg and related ebook initiatives.

One thing that occurs to me is that we can approach the word causes on two levels: The wider movement, and a specific community that caters to it. For example the skeptic/humanist/atheist cluster has a tremendous amount of micro-communities that cater to it.

Another thing that may be a potential blocker is that lesswrong has been identified with the whole SIAI/singularity/transhumanism cluster. In order to accomodate other groups, to the extent that this is reversible, we may have to push that aside (for instance, maybe keep it in the discussion section, like Luke did with his latest advice to SIAI post). But I am not sure whether this community wants to downgrade certain topics in the interest of openning up to other related causes.

Actually, why aren't they here already?

I think that this is because they didn't intentionally come here. SIAI is a fairly popular cause around here because of how many people came to the site to read Eliezer Yudkowsky's writing. That group of people is largely sympathetic to SIAI, and hence SIAI is popular.

Edit: The following is very likely to be inaccurate, as its all based on first-glance impressions. I think that the structure of "people don't come unless they have reason to" applies though.

I don't think that any other groups have had that clear of an incentive to be here. GiveWell has their own blogs and other support areas, and though some of them may be interested in rationality, I don't think the particulars of how politics ruins your decision-making or how to dissolve questions appeals to or is that important to them.

I think the same is true of Wikimedia, where they already have some place to go and without any directed recruitment effort they wouldn't bother to come here as a group.

Every site linked to from Future of Humanity Institute seems like they could potentially be interested in things, but they all seem to have slightly different interests than rationality qua rationality. Quite a few of them (practical ethics, bioethics network) seem to have a philosophy bent, and I'd think that lack of using standard philosophy terms, or knowing standard philosophy arguments is probably hurting us with them.

We have a bunch of individuals with non-SIAI interests, but no causes other than SIAI, despite Eliezer repeatedly saying that they would be welcome.

I think that this might just be the non-SIAI individuals not intentionally trying to work with similarly interested people to advocate for their goals. I'm worried that something like that might get political though.

Here's my plug, for the cause I spend lots of my time and energy on, Wikimedia/Wikipedia

Hear, hear!

None of this implying that anything found on Wikipedia should be uncritically accepted as true, but I can't think of any better testimony for the collective win of rationalists everywhere than the product of Wikipedia. For one, we benefit directly from the resources on Wikipedia; secondly, we benefit indirectly whenever other people benefit from Wikipedia.

The more difficult matter is reclaiming Wikipedia from the barbarians :D

The What are you working on? thread is relevant.

Would something like Gameful fit the bill? It's a community to foster the creation of games which are beneficial to humanity. I thought that Urgent Evoke was a great idea, and want to see more in that spirit.

Of course, you might call games a mechanism for your cause, but if your cause is to generally "make it fun to make smart moves in the interest of humanity", or "help people overcome irrational disincentives toward Pareto improvements", then making and spreading games like this is a good strategy. And definitely fun!

I think if we look at the tagline, the most obvious causes things that either increase our understanding of ratonality in the sense of pushing back new boundaries and increasing the 'maximum possible rationality', or things that increase individuals' rationality so that it approaches or reaches the current maximum rationality. The first is research, the latter generally education or consciousness-raising.

I think there's also a question of whether we can increase rationality in key areas, ranging from academic disciplines which are likely to be important or political decision making. I should declare an interest here: one of my own reasons for being here (possibly a retrospective justification because I just find it interesting) is that I work in the British civil service. There's a drive for 'evidence based policy', analysis of whether reforms are succesful etc., and I think there are interesting arguments to be had about how to best be rational as an individual cog in a policy making machine, and if the machine itself can be tweaked to give better results.

BTW - Wikimedia used to be my handy source of people much smarter than I was to interact with. LessWrong knocks it into the shade.

winning