Can LessWrong provide me with something I find obviously highly useful to my own practical life?

post by agrippa · 2023-07-07T03:08:58.183Z · LW · GW · No comments

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When I meet new people, I often like to figure out how I can be useful in a really short amount of time, just by talking. 

Example: 
Often this will involve evangelizing some items from a short list of technologies that have impacted my life a lot, such as erotic hypnosis (you can use this to have really good sex over any distance or even asynchronously, those 2 facts alone have a lot of lifechanging implications imo).

Telling people about the (very large and real) efficacy of erotic hypnosis is useful because most people go from not imagining this is possible to imagining its possible and having a clear path to test it out in a very short amount of time. If it works, the benefit is obvious, and I give a lot of update about whether it works + info about how to see for themselves quickly and easily. 

Another example:
In 2021, Sapphire gave me really good intel about founding crypto companies and really good generic arguments about why the EMH is false and therefore I should in fact act upon the good intel.

Another example:
A post about how candles are bad for you

Non-example:
When I try to extract useful conversations from others, a common reply is "if you meditate a lot its really good". That's not useless to hear, I guess (I don't meditate and wouldn't know), but it's not super useful since people say it all the time and it's not really that easy to verify for myself. 

 

I would really like a forum where the entire point of the forum was stuff like this: Read this -> instantly or near-instantly become way smarter about things of actual practical relevance to your life. To me, this is the best possible kind of post in the world, and the space of possible posts of this kind is so big that you could just fill a forum with only that. Why bother with anything else? 

As far as I can tell, LessWrong is not such a forum, but people do try to do this some of the time successfully. I really want to engage with the people who are trying to do this, but I'm lazy and I don't really know how to easily find them. 

So I'm wondering if people who are more familiar with LessWrong can/would easily provide me with content that is immediately obviously highly useful to me. 

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