Best of LessWrong: Jan 10 - Jan 17

I’m an infovore. The failure mode for an infovore is spending too much time reading and not enough time doing. I was bit especially hard by this a few days ago—I hadn’t caught up on LW posts in while and had 100+ in my RSS reader. I wanted to read them all but I knew I shouldn’t.

I had the same issue with Hacker News for many years. I broke the cycle by signing for for a daily "best of HN" feed, however even this proved to be too much content. I replaced it with a weekly best of digest and that’s been working well for me—the digest includes the top 50 posts by votes, so that’s the maximum number of enticing nuggets of content I can click.

LW doesn’t have this, so I made it. Here are last week’s top posts (Jan 10 00:00 EST—Jan 17 23:59 EST, with a one day lag so Sunday posts have more time to be seen):

• Pseudorandomness contest: prizes, results, and analysis 109 points by UnexpectedValues | 13 comments

• Covid 1/​14: To Launch a Thousand Shipments 104 points by Zvi | 33 comments

• Avoid Unnecessarily Political Examples 100 points by Raemon | 31 comments

• A vastly faster vaccine rollout 85 points by KatjaGrace | 38 comments

• RationalWiki on face masks 70 points by Viliam | 28 comments

• What is going on in the world? 63 points by KatjaGrace | 38 comments

• Review of Soft Takeoff Can Still Lead to DSA 62 points by Daniel Kokotajlo | 10 comments

• Why I’m excited about Debate 58 points by Richard_Ngo | 12 comments

• Group house norms really do seem toxic to many people. 52 points by deluks917 | 28 comments

• Voting Phase for 2019 Review 49 points by Raemon | 6 comments

• Transparency and AGI safety 49 points by jylin04 | 12 comments

• The impact merge 46 points by Joe Carlsmith | 10 comments

• The Great Karma Reckoning 45 points by habryka | 14 comments

• Discussion on the choice of concepts 41 points by KatjaGrace | 4 comments

• Why Productivity Systems Don’t Stick 39 points by Matt Goldenberg | 14 comments

• D&D.Sci II: The Sorceror’s Personal Shopper 38 points by abstractapplic | 27 comments

• Review of ‘Debate on Instrumental Convergence between LeCun, Russell, Bengio, Zador, and More’ 37 points by TurnTrout | 1 comments

• Neurocryopreservation vs whole-body preservation 36 points by mingyuan | 10 comments

• Thoughts on Iason Gabriel’s Artificial Intelligence, Values, and Alignment 34 points by alexflint | 14 comments

• CollAction history and lessons learned 32 points by Ron | 2 comments