One of the stated purposes of the LessWrong Review is to decide what posts stood the test of time, looking back at the last year. We have yet to do a LessWrong Review that looked back at the last decade, but wouldn't it be awesome if we did?

That's what this essay offers. It's short! I wish it had a little more data, or went into details like what nervous system training was tried (what about Yoga works?) but if the biggest complaint I have about an essay is 'I wish it was longer' that's a really good problem to have! 

I'd like to encourage people to write more followups to plans they laid a decade ago. I wish LessWrong had more feedback loops that did look at we were all excited about a decade ago. For both those reasons, I'd like this to be in the Best Of Review. I want Romeostevensit to get a really nice cookie for the followup.

(Self review) Does this essay belong in the Best Of collection? That's a good question. Do people go back and read all the Best Of posts? Do they read the Best Of posts from previous years? Speaking as the person who wrote this, if there was a collection of posts everyone on LessWrong read when they joined, I might not need this essay included in that collection because the essay would have already succeeded. I'd want basically any other essay that taught an object-level thing.

Then again, this essay is a useful pointer to why a group might repeat information that most people already know. If I imagine a Five Books Of Moses for the Rationality Community, I actually do think it would be good to include one chapter that said essentially "make a copy of this book and read it every year, because that's how you make sure everyone in the community actually knows this stuff." If you left out that chapter, eventually someone would forget why they were supposed to have that habit of rereading the thing as a group every year, they wouldn't do it, and then years later the community would have a bunch of people who didn't know the basics.

(Amusingly, I plan to create a different version of this essay every couple of years and post it somewhere. This is because I don't want people to forget about it, and it's easy to forget about, and I think newcomers read new stuff more than they reliably dig into old stuff. This information isn't especially important on the object level, but I stand by my argument that if there isn't something that teaches new people the things you want everyone in a space to know, new people won't know it. )

I don't think the Best Of posts are actually intended to be the collection of common knowledge everyone is expected to eventually know. Absent that, this is just a good essay about how common knowledge works. It's my essay so I can't vote on it, but if I could I'd have given it a 1 upvote for the Best Of collection- a serviceable addition, but probably replaceable. 

Most LessWrong readers do not attend meetups, and this is basically useless to them. Some readers do attend meetups, which Ziz will not attend because the organizers are aware of this and are will keep Ziz out. Some organizers aren't aware, and this is a useful thing to be able to point to in that case, though since this was written describing a developing situation it would be kind of nice to have a conclusion or update somewhere near the top.

Overall, I wouldn't want this in the Best Of collection, but I do expect to link people to it in the future.

A year ago: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/bF353RHmuzFQcsokF/cohabitive-games-so-far This post introduces the idea, motivation, and a bit of information about the game itself.

Four months ago: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/xY3A8xy6ox5jzmCAm/release-optimal-weave-p1-a-prototype-cohabitive-game A playable version is released, with rules.

(Apologies for link formatting, I'm on mobile at the moment.)

My recommendation for this essay's inclusion in the Best Of LessWrong collection comes down to two questions.

1. Are the places decorated like this actually that nice?
2. Is this a useful guide for creating those spaces?

Having been to Lighthaven (Lightcone's venue) a lot over the last year, I think the answer to 1. is a straightforward yes. Lots of other people love Lighthaven. It's possible that this style doesn't work if you're putting less oomph into it than Lightcone put into Lighthaven. I've visited a couple of homes decorated like this and think the style works pretty well.

As for 2, yeah, I think this is useful. It points out things people might not think of (colour! I didn't think about colour when decorating a space, because I hadn't sat down and thought about it or done much research. Light! Luminators are great and pointing people at them is helpful) and is organized neatly by sections.

I like this essay. I am not a paladin and do not particularly plan to become one. I do not think all the people setting out to maximize utility would stand behind this particular version of the rallying cry. 

But I do think paladins exist, I want them to have a rallying cry, and when it works — when they do manage to point themselves at the right target, and are capable of making a dent, then I appreciate that they exist and chose to do that. I also appreciate the "if you want to save the world, then here's how" framing.

I don't quite think someone could follow this essay to paladinhood so I'm mixed as to whether it succeeds at what it's setting out to do. I've given this a small upward vote in the review, with the intent to say yeah, hey paladins, I'm glad you're around LessWrong and I think something would be lost if you all left.

In contrast, your article meandering for 11 paragraphs defining concepts that basically everyone already has installed before dropping the definition of cohabitive game in a paragraph that looks just like any of the others.

This is an excellent point and I've added a summary at the start, plus some headers. Thank you!

I want to take a moment and note that I'm currently approaching this cooperatively. (Yes, ironic given the subject.) I want the idea of cohabitive games to be in the LessWrong lexicon, I think you also want this, those are the articles we have the chance to put in a higher profile Best Of list, so anything that strengthens either is good. 

I don't think that's a good criticism, those sections are well labelled, the reader is able to skip them if they're not going to be interested in the contents

Plausible this is a stylistic thing and you should feel free to ignore me. I found that I lost track of the flow in the bullet points. For a specific example, the area that starts "Instead of P1's omniscient contract enforcement system..." has a mix of long and short bullets that go like this-

• Instead of P1's omniscient contract enforcement system...
  • Let us build a strand-type board game...
  • I've heard it suggested that if we got world leaders...
    • But I'll make an attempt...
      • If you initially score for forests...
      • If you want your friends to be happy...
    • Taken to an extreme...
• Give some players a binary...

- and when I get to "Give some players a binary..." I've sort of lost track of which level it's on and what thought it's continuing from, in part because "I've heard it suggested..." is long enough to take up most of the screen on my laptop. 

The rules of OW.1 aren't in a zip file

Now they aren't :) This is a case where I think the review's sort of caught the development process in amber. Release: Optimal Weave (P1) has the clean game links up front and easy to find; it's the answer to my second part basically. I am still a little worried about those links going dead sometime down the line, though I also think it's quite reasonable to want to keep a prototype where it's easier to update for you and in a format that's best for the standalone game.

I think this, or something like this, should be in a place of prominence on LessWrong. The Best Of collection might not be the place, but it's the place I can vote on, so I'd like to vote for it here.

I used "or something like this" above intentionally. The format of this post — an introduction of why these guidelines exist, short one or two sentence explanations of the guideline, and then expanded explanations with "ways you might feel when you're about to break the X Guideline" — is excellent. It turns each guideline into a mini-lesson, which can be broken out and referenced independently. The introduction gives context for them all to hang together. The format is A+, fighting for S tier.

Why "something like this" instead of "this, exactly this" then? Each individual guideline is good, but they don't feel like they're the only set. I can imagine swapping basically any of them other than 0 and 1 out for something different and having something I liked just as much. I still look at 5 ("Aim for convergence on truth, and behave as if your interlocutors are also aiming for convergence on truth") and internally wince. I imagine lots of people read it, mostly agreed with it, but wanted to replace or quibble with one or two of the guidelines, and from reading the comments there wasn't a consensus on which line was out of place. 

That seems like a good sign. 

It's interesting to me to contrast it with Elements Of Rationalist Discourse. Elements doesn't resonate as much with me, and while some of that is Elements is not laid out as cleanly I also don't agree with the list the same way. And yet, Elements was also upvoted highly. The people yearn for guidelines, and there wasn't a clear favourite. Someday I might try my own hand at the genre, and I still consider myself to owe an expansion on my issues with 5.

I'm voting for this to be in the Best Of LessWrong collection. If there was a process to vote to make this or at least the introduction and Guidelines, In Brief into a sitewide default recommendation I would vote for that.

The census is live! 

The post itself is here if you want a little more detail, but I thought I'd save you a click.

I really like cohabitive games. I enjoy playing this one. I'm somewhat mixed on this post in particular being in the Best Of LessWrong collection. Cohabitive Games So Far looks like it's doing two things; it's outlining what a cohabitive game is and why it's interesting, and it's describing one specific cohabitive game but not in enough detail to play it. 

For the first part (outlining what a cohabitive game is and why it's interesting) I prefer Competitive, Cooperative, and Cohabitive. (Though I wrote Competitive, Cooperative, and Cohabitive, so I might be biased here.) I think it would be good to get "Cohabitive" into the general rationalist lexicon via some means though, and would vote in favour of post explaining the concept for the Best Of LessWrong collection. Overall Cohabitive Games so Far sprawls a bit in a couple of places, particularly where bullet points create an unordered list.

For the second part, I'd like to see a writeup of how Peacewager works in enough detail to play a couple games. That writeup exists, but this post has a link to a website that has a link to a .zip file with the rules. I get that Peacewager is a prototype and the rules are likely to change in the future, but if I'm going to review a post on the basis of the game itself, I'd like the rules to be in the post where it's easier to comment on them. It'd be awkward if five years from now the Best Of posts had a dead link to an important part of the post. If I imagine I'm voting on the Peacewager rules themselves for the Best Of LessWrong. . . eh. I think I'd tentatively vote for their inclusion if the game succeeded at what it was trying to do, and against if I thought it was missing the mark. Right now the game is rough enough around the edges I think it doesn't quite get there for me.

(Mako Yass does get the points for being the idiomatic man in the arena though- It's been a year and I haven't yet published either of my cohabitive games.)

Where does that land? I think Competitive, Cooperative, and Cohabitive is better for explaining the concept, but one of the two is worth putting in the Best Of LessWrong collection and if you like Cohabitive Games So Far then vote for it.

(Self Review) I stand by this post, and if the Best Of LessWrong posts are posts we want everyone in the community to have read then this seems worth the space.

Tapping out is a piece of rationalist jargon that has a definition in the LessWrong tags and has been used in the community for years, but doesn't really have a canonical post explaining why we use it. The tag definition is a good explanation of what it means and it's shorter, which is good. I think tapping out is a good and useful tool when having debates or discussions, and it's one that works best if everyone involved already knows the term.

If we could nominate tags to the Best Of LessWrong posts, I'd say either the tag definition or this post would be fine additions. Since the timing works out for the post, sure, let's go with this post.

This essay is an example of the ancient LessWrong genre, "dumb mistakes your brain might be making which feel obvious once someone points them out." I love this genre, and think You Don't Get To Have Cool Flaws should be included in the Best Of LessWrong posts.

It's so easy to make this mistake! In fiction, complex and beloved characters have flaws. Fiction can set examples we try to live up to. Flaws are easier to emulate than virtues. I can't train as hard as Batman, and I can't be as wealthy as Batman, but I can brood! Brooding is easy! But the flaw isn't why I want to be like Batman!

This is such a succinct essay that I worry my review might get longer than the essay itself and I'm just repeating the good points, but pointing out that people can identify with their flaws is worth the verbiage. Sure, perfection is hard, but flaws shouldn't be accepted stable parts of yourself. Why would you ever operate like that? Because the flaw is cool? Because it's been a part of me for a long time? Because it distinguishes me from other people nearby? Because it means less work? None of those are good reasons. 

I'm not going to fix all my flaws tomorrow, but I can at least remember that they are things I would fix if I could snap my fingers and change myself however I wanted.

I'm glad I read this, and it's been a repeating line in my head when I've tried to make long term plans. I'd like this to be included in the Best Of LessWrong posts.

Even if you are doing something fairly standard and uncomplicated, there are likely multiple parts to what you do. A software engineer can look at a bunch of tickets, some code reviews, the gap where good documentation can be, and the deployment pipeline before deciding that the team is dropping the ball on documentation. A schoolteacher might look at the regular classes, the extracurricular programs, the recess policy, and decide that the school is dropping the ball by focusing too much on sports and not having any theatre program.

If you're doing something weird and unusual, this gets more useful. While I haven't done it, my understanding is that finding a place where everyone else is dropping the ball is a good way to find startup ideas. If you're a new non-profit trying to help people, looking for the underserved parts of your community seems like a good way to make an impact.

I don't know how idiosyncratic my situation is, and suspect there should be a contrasting essay. Sometimes the reason it looks like everyone is dropping the ball is because there's some hidden hard part. Inadequate Equilibria might be the long version of that essay, but I'd like a short one to put next to Focus On The Places Where You Feel Shocked Everyone's Dropping The Ball.

I'd say non-theistic religions should mark "Athiest but spiritual."

I'm confident that's not the least principled way someone has answered the probability questions. I'm currently like asking people to come up with a number, even one they're pulling out of their rear, and explicitly mentioning N/As feels like it gets me fewer numbers to play with.

Thank you, both for taking the survey and for the appreciation!

How do you feel about pinning the census for a few days at some point this month?

I think this should be included in the Best Of LessWrong posts.

This post exemplifies the virtue of scholarship, of looking at every field and skillset as one more source of information. It's well packaged into specific lessons and it comes from someone who can speak in both the Rationalist idiom and the local idiom. It's also on a subject many of us are working on: EA and LW nonprofits do work alongside 'normal' charities, and it's helpful to see their different views and frames. I'd be delighted by a dozen posts like this, field reports from other fields from the perspective of someone who spent years there.

Just the line "what is your fantasy partner/complement organization?" is worth having. It's changed how I evaluate neighboring organizations, and how I try and prioritize my own projects. Think of it as a scalled up, non-profit version of YCombinator's "Make something people want."

Thanks! 

I don't believe it's a reference to a particular post. Some people have fun as a group, whether partying or playing games together or just spending time showing each other cat pictures. Some ways to have fun as a group result in more fun than others, and people might try to test which ways have more fun.

Thank you!

You're welcome!

Last year I had a version of that question where (mimicking a question the LW team asked) I said I'd keep it private. Reading the answers felt nice, and I realized an anonymous but public version of that could be really nice for a lot of people.

I think the passphrase got introduced when there was a monetary reward attached at one point, and then reused for some prisoner's dilemma questions later.

Thank you for taking the survey!

I wasn't the one who first put the ID key in there, but I've kept it because it means I can sometimes compare the same person across years. I'm interested in whether people get more rational- for many definitions of that word- as a result of ongoing exposure to LessWrong and the community. 

Thank you for taking it!

. . . yep, it should be. I think I just fixed it, but I can't figure out how that got like that in the first place. Thanks!

"Hourly" doesn't count while asleep. If you use it for work, weekends don't count against "Daily." Etc.

Thank you, that's appreciated!

Hrm. My definition of "anti-agathic" is something that prolongs life, so it isn't obviously not counting a brain transplant to a younger body.

I'm somewhat opposed to tweaking the wording on long-standing parts of the census, since that makes it harder to compare to earlier years. If we want to go this route, I'd rather write a new question and ask both some year so we can compare them.

Not easily.

In order to give people a copy of their responses with google forms, I would need to collect emails. It even becomes a required question on the form. Collecting emails changes the tenor of the survey quite a bit I think, even if I invited people to enter nonsense for an email if they didn't want to give that information.

You're welcome! Thank you for taking it.

Noted. I'm already expecting marginal values of IQ to be weird since IQ isn't a linear scale in the first place.

I admit I'm testing a chain of conjectures with those questions and probably will only get weak evidence for my actual question. The feedback is really appreciated!

Argh, I hate tweaking historical questions. This seems equivalent so lets try it. 

It wound up phrased that way trying to make a minimal change from the historical version of the question, where the question and the title were at odds.

Whelp, that's a dumb error on my part. Fixed and thank you.

Survey is up!

Done!

I imagine two people are talking and one says "oh, I think you should read this essay, here's the link!" and the second asks "oh, what's it about? Any good quotes?"

If the first doesn't have an answer to that, then it feels like a weird recommendation? I guess that's the second stage of, where people review them.

We're looking for speakers for the Boston Solstice. This year Solstice is December 28th, 7pm. Being a speaker at solstice is pretty straightforward; public speaking skill is useful but you can read off a script, don't feel like you need to memorize something.

If you're at all interested, reach out. We have speeches ranging from very short and silly to a couple of pages and somber.

Additionally, if you feel like you have an original speech on the themes of persistence or camaraderie, especially if you feel you have a good speech about not giving up even when it's hard, then please feel free to send a draft! The overall arc is set at this point but you might have something better for a given slot.

Tentative support for only auto-importing the first few paragraphs, if not that then start by auto-importing the whole post and waiting until anybody complains. My guess (~65%?) is that somebody will. Against having an LLM extract some important highlights- if doing highlights is the way to go I think whoever nominated the piece for the review can find the highlights?

I'd love it if I could use LessWrong as a central place to read rationalsphere content, and since more and more rationalist sphere writers are writing elsewhere this seems like it's worth trying.

London, UK

December 19th, 7pm.
Event link: https://partiful.com/e/0ML9Ec1F8SCWh6TszHgt

(I'm not running it, but was asked by one of the organizers to put this here!)

I don't know who you met at LessOnline, but there's a few people looking for roommates.

There's a Discord server for attendees with a Finding Roommates channel. The way I envision this working is people show up in Discord, introduce themselves, and ask if anyone wants to room together. Once people have grouped up, one of them rents the room and the other reimburses them.

This involves a bit more lateral trust than last year where people indicated how many roommates they were comfortable with, paid me for their share of the room, and I sorted people together. On the other hand it allows for a bit more choice and offloads a bit of setup from me to the attendees, which is increasingly useful as megameetup scales up. 

I think NYC is the only solstice with a megameetup tradition. Does anyone know of a second?

Boston

December 28th, 6:30pm.
Connexion, 149 Broadway, Somerville
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/events/1217047559386391

Not the most important response to this essay but "Leave the hand-wringing to those with all their fingers" made me laugh. Thanks for the smile.

I can understand that feeling. I currently disagree with it, but I think I understand it.

Lots of people seem to do something like this on intuition. Some people don't. Take the “why do you care about something boring like horses?” example. What do you say to someone who makes that kind of mistake? 

"Did you mean to make them upset?" "No." 

"Did you think about how they would react to you calling their interest boring?" "No. I didn't mean to call it boring." 

"If you think about it, do you understand how they interpreted what you said as calling their interest boring?" "Yeah, that makes sense."

"Did you think about how they would interpret what you said before you said it?" "Not really."

"Can you think about how someone will interpret what you say before you say it next time?" "Yeah, I can do that."

I say please and thank you when asking for a dish at the table. I worked out what kinds of raised voice parses as anger, and don't use it unless I'm actually angry- and even then, I try to say calmly that something makes me angry rather than yell at people. There are countless small touches in how we phrase things and how we hold ourselves that help everyone feel better about social interactions, and some people genuinely do not do those things automatically. I think it's better to do them by explicitly thinking about it rather than not do them at all.

You can overdo this, leading to complicated webs of half-truths and things needing to be said just right, and I think that can be bad. You can also overdo this and leave yourself an anxious wreck, overindexed on whether anything you say or do will make people upset with you. But for people who don't do the thing, and who are regularly running into people getting mad at them? Yeah, I think it's worth taking some time and energy to practice this.

Huh! I view it as a bit overbroad since "what do I think I know?" is sometimes about things like "is the bloke across the poker table from me holding an ace?" but I think most of my "what do I think I know?" internal questions are about what's happened in the past. "Does sugar dissolve in water?" often breaks down into "the last time I tried it, did sugar dissolve in water?" or "have people told me that sugar dissolves in water and were they usually right about things like that?"

Still, the past/present/future frame isn't the key part of the third fundamental question. Best of luck and skill with the new technique!

Yep, compilers and booting are good examples. Making a compiler from scratch is a pain in the rear, making a second compiler when you already have the first is easier. 

For a concrete example: I once screwed up my operating system and got it into a state where it wouldn't boot. Downloading a fresh copy of an OS is pretty straightforward, if you have a working copy of an operating system already, but I didn't. In this case, I wound up asking a friend to download a copy and then used that to get my machine working again.

I'm not sure I understand your point, but I think you're pointing out that these aren't always booleans?

There's cases where if you're doing well, it's easier to do even better. Money is fairly continuous but so is friendship. (You might have acquaintances even if you don't have close friends.) The central example of an Anvil here is boolean though; if you have enough juice in your car battery to start the car you're fine and can charge it up more, but if you don't have enough juice then you need someone to jump you.

Darn. Seems like this particular bit of jargon is already taken. I haven't commonly heard this use of Anvil Problem, hence thinking the phrase was open, but oh well.

The "Anvil" part is pretty core to my mnemonic for it. Anyone have thoughts on whether something like Anvil Issues or Anvil Blockers would be workable?

Yep, and to spell out the general case: there are techniques you shouldn't use unless you're confident you can use them correctly, because they do not degrade gracefully. Often these techniques aren't taught unless the instructor is reasonably sure the student has the other pieces to use it well.

As a note of pedagogy I usually prefer when the teachers says something like "This is the basic way to do it, and we're going to practice this first. If you're unsure, do it this way. We might get into variations later."

Per request, I just added "LLM Frequency" and "LLM Use case" to the survey, under LessWrong Team Questions. I'll probably tweak the options and might move it to Bonus Questions later when I can sit down and take some time to think. Suggestions on the wording are welcome!