Article Prerequisite: Self-Improvement or Shiny Distraction: Why Less Wrong is anti-Instrumental Rationality
Introduction
The goal of this post is to explore the idea of rationality training, feedback and ideas are greatly appreciated.
Less Wrong’s stated mission is to help people become more rational, and it has made progress toward that goal. Members read and discuss useful ideas on the internet, get instant feedback because of the voting system, and schedule meetups with other members. Less Wrong also helps attract more people to rationality.
Less Wrong helps with sharing ideas, but it fails to help people put elements of epistemic and instrumental rationality into practice. This is a serious problem, but it would be hard to fix without altering the core functionality of Less Wrong.
Having separate websites for reading and discussing ideas and then actually using those ideas would improve the real world performance of the Less Wrong community while maintaining the idea discussion, "marketing", and other benefits of the Less Wrong website.
How to create a useful website for self improvement
- Knowledge Management
When reading blogs, people only see recent posts and those posts are not significantly revised. A wiki would allow for the creation of a large body of organized knowledge that is frequently revised. Each wiki post would have a description, benefits of the topic described, resources to learn the topic, user submitted resources to learn the topic, and reviews of each resource. Posts would be organized hierarchically and voted on for usefulness to help readers effectively improve what they are looking for. Users could share self-improvement plans to help others improve effectiveness in general or in a specific topic as quickly as possible.
- Effective Learning
Resources to learn topics should be arranged or written for effective skill acquisition, and there may be different resource categories like exercises for deliberate practice or active recall questions for spaced repetition.
- Quality Contributors
Contributors would, at the very least, need to be familiar with how to write articles that supported the skill acquisition process agreed upon by the entire community. Required writing and research skills would produce higher quality work. I am not sure if being a rationalist would improve the quality of articles.
Problems
- Difficult requirements
The number of prerequisites necessary to contribute to and use the wiki would really lower the amount of people who will be able to benefit from the wiki. It’s a trade off between effectiveness and popularity. What elements should be included to maximize the effectiveness of the website?
- Interest
There has to be enough interest in the website, or else a different project should be started instead. How many people in the Less Wrong community, and the world at large, would be interested in self improvement and rationality?
- Increasing the effectiveness of non altruistic people
How much of the target audience wants to improve the world? If most do not, then the wiki would essentially be a net negative on the world. What should the criteria be to view and contribute to the wiki? Perhaps only Less Wrong members should be able to view and edit the wiki, and contributors must read a quick start guide and pass a quick test before being allowed to post.
Uhm, how about making a LW discussion: "Submit your self-improvement materials, discuss them and vote for them" and then maybe posting the results on LW wiki?
Almost zero overhead and the community is already here.
Comment
It seems like people find discussions more rewarding than posting to a wiki. There could be weekly discussions on the many aspects of self improvement, and then those ideas could be posted on a wiki for organization and further updates.
Do you think using a separate wiki is a good idea? It seems like the LW wiki is not being used for collecting self-improvement articles, and a new wiki with a separate purpose, community, and article format might be better. After all, the current wiki is organized only for rationality articles, and changing the layout and article format might cause some conflict and confusion.
You might be interested in CFAR, which is focused explicitly on the project of rationality skill acquisition.
LW seems to be particularly focused on people reading through old posts, and there are significant link trails, and so on. It’s not clear to me that LW has the problem that people only see recent posts.
LW might have the problem that old posts are not significantly revised. This doesn’t seem to be the case with collection threads, or example threads; my 4 examples of VoI spawned gwern’s 8 examples of VoI, and a similar post with more examples would be likely to get upvotes now. In cases where an explanation of something could be better, it seems more likely that there should be two versions of something, to capture two audiences with systematic differences between them, rather than that one version should be improved to please everyone. If there’s a sequence or a post that you think could be rewritten to reach another audience more effectively, try rewriting that post, and be explicit about it. I suspect that would get upvoted.
We do have a wiki, linked on the sidebar. At present, the wiki mostly has summaries of sequences and posts, rather than separate full explanations of those ideas. I think that if the wiki were fleshed out a bit, it might see more use- but it’s not clear to me that the wiki is actually a better system than the community blog structure of LW.
Comment
Should I have titled the post Instrumental Rationality Wiki that also has a Page on Rationality? Perhaps the name "Effective Rationality Training Online" does not lead people to think about self-improvement, just making good decisions type rationality.
The problem with CFAR is that there is just so much knowledge out there it cannot be shared in several days. It’s an excellent starting point, but there is just so much more material out there and so many individual circumstances that it would be impossible to provide consistent high impact knowledge without a community knowledge base like the one I am proposing. The training could be in person though. Also, CFAR costs thousands of dollars and is hard to access if you do not have the time or are not living close to a workshop.
Regarding reading old posts, some of them are organized in sequences, but most of the articles out there would be very hard to find and use in daily life. I’m sure there are many bits of knowledge that would be useful to me right now, but I cannot find them because they are not organized.
It does not seem like the wiki is currently being used for organizing self-improvement articles. Should I make an announcement telling everyone to do that, or just make a separate wiki? It seems like a separate site with its own purpose, community, rules, organization, and article format would be better than using the LW wiki.
Comment
I get the impression that non-workshop methods of education, including online classes, are under development, but I don’t have a good sense of what they’ve done already / want to do.
One example that I just thought of, which you may be interested in but not have seen yet, is the (not very accurately named) skill of the week posts.
No. You personally should make a page about self-improvement articles, and add links to it. In general, and on the internet in particular, implementations are far more valuable than ideas.
Comment
I expect there’s quite a pool people on this site who’d volunteer to beta test such online classes, but I’ll go ahead and offer my services in this regard.
I might suggest as possible models khanacademy.org and lumosity.com. Lumosity is a collection of games which claim to provide brain training which can improve mental capacities. Khanacademy is a site for people to learn mathematics and other subjects. The useful features each contains are in lumosity’s case games arranged around topic areas that can help people develop skills, and in khanacademy’s case short, ten-minute videos with small easily digested pieces of information and a skill tree with links to materials where you can master skills topic by topic before moving on to more complicated skills.
You underrate the amount of people who read blog posts to which they arrive through search engines.
I think something similar is the main reason why Citizendium failed to be an effective competitor to Wikipedia. Barriers to entry.
This assumes that your project won’t have a significant effect on the people who participate in it. That’s a very bad assumption to make if you want to start a community around self-improvement.
Comment
Thanks for your feedback, leaving the wiki open seems like the best choice.
It’s true, people do arrive at past posts, but if I wanted to find really high impact knowledge for improving myself shared on Less Wrong I could not do it. I don’t know what I would find before I arrived there.
I don’t understand this claim. Most of the good things in the world were not built by effective altruists.
Comment
Thanks, meaning to improve the world is closer to what I meant to say.
"Contributors would, at the very least, need to be familiar with how to write articles using a skill acquisition process agreed upon by the entire community."
Are you talking about a process for acquiring rationality skills or writing skills? Requiring an entire community to agree on how to write something seems to indicate the whole community would be qualified to do the writing...
Bureaucracies are really bad about actually getting anything done. Beware of that.
Comment
Thank you, I meant the process for acquiring skills. Post edited.