Brainstorming: neat stuff we could do on LessWrong

Guest posts/Public Q&A : we could invite "celebrities" (other bloggers, mostly) to either write a guest post about a topic they care about, or just answer questions from the community. For example a feminist blogger, or Razib Khan, or, I dunno, someone that has interesting things to say but isn't part of this community.

This would be different from a "normal" post in that we wouldn't expect the poster to stick around much, wouldn't chastise him for not "fitting in" ("Have you read the sequences?") or for linking prominently to his own blog, etc.

Reposting old posts. Reposting classic LW posts among the new posts (either in the discussion section or on the main page) can make them more accessible and can serve as a focal point for discussion. It can help introduce new readers to important background material, fill in some gaps for people who have been around LW for awhile but haven't read everything, and refresh the minds of oldtimers who read the post long ago. The sequences are an important part of LW, and along with frequent suggestions to read the sequences and other efforts, reposting can help get people to read them.

One option: repost individual posts. It could be one of your favorites, or any old post that you consider relevant or want to discuss. Just make a post in the discussion section with a link to the old post plus an explanation of why you reposted it. The explanation could just be a sentence saying that it's great post about X, or you could give a longer commentary on the post. Further discussion can take place in the comments to your post.

Option two: Cycle through the sequences. Start with the first post in the first sequence and repost one post per day in the discussion section. Each repost would contain a link to the original post, a link to the previous & subsequent posts in the sequence, and a one paragraph summary of the post (which could be copied directly from the wiki). Any additional comments or discussion would take place in the comments to the new post.

We could do either one of these options or both of them, or try another variation on the idea of reposting old posts. If we pin down some details, like a standardized format for the title & tags to indicate that it's a repost, we could turn this into a convention that's helpful for people who want to reread classic posts and easy to ignore for people who don't.

  SELECT (original_post_date-first_post_date+feed_url_date), title, etc.
    FROM posts
   WHERE original_post_date<(now()-feed_url_date+first_post_date)
ORDER BY original_post_date DESC
   LIMIT size_of_feed  -- a constant, like 20

Making Rationality-related Videos for Khan Academy

"If you're an expert (especially at something that Sal's unlikely to be able to learn in the next 5 years) and want to become a minor education celebrity (but a major one in your field), make a handful of videos and contribute them. If they gel with the style--conversational while focused on intuition and rigor--of the current library, it might make sense for you to make a playlist or two (with all credit going to you of course). "

Pros:

• Massive exposure (to a relatively young demographic group)
• Probably the best currently available method for spreading rationality

Cons:

• Do we really want to attract a horde of elementary to high schoolers? (I say this as a teenager myself.)
• Fairly significant time commitment
• Requires (freely available) screen capture software and any graphics software (Khan started out using Paint)
• LW's typical discourse tends to be arguing for relatively controversial points of view; KA videos would presumably require either avoiding controversial points, or presenting both sides. This would be worst for LW-originated ideas that lack an opposing side (e.g. TDT)

Possible topics:

• A list of biases
• More advanced (Bayesian?) probability than is currently available on Khan Academy
• Anthropic Bias
• Game Theory
• Decision Theory (which would bring TDT, in particular, to a broader audience)
• Quantum physics

If you'd be interested in doing a video, please comment, (or just go do it); however, I really doubt if I have enough knowledge to do any of these series on my own.

Illustration contests

Seriously, the sequences are under-illustrated. The guy running You Are Not So Smart ran a contest for illustrating some of his posts.

Surely we can do something like that! (without it degenerating into lolcats, though come to think of it a lolcat/trollface/rageface explanation of some deep ideas would be pretty awesome)

I've noticed for a while how quote-worthy the comments here are. It might be worthwhile to have those quote-worthy bits all in one place. Maybe a "Most Quotable Comments" thread? Yes, this is a little bit self-indulgent.

I thought the recent Delayed Solution Game discussion post was a pretty neat idea. We often hear people lamenting the lack of real-life applicability of what they read on LW. Seeing what solutions the community comes up with for genuine day-to-day problems would be both interesting and helpful.

I'd also be interested to see some sort of clever aggregate of LW-readers' web browsing habits to see if there are any unexpected trends. Would anyone else be prepared to anonymously submit their browser histories to this end?