Right now I feel like LW has too much "meandering around meta-community-stuff" and not enough "actually go out into the world, try to think about object level things, and then do stuff with that thinking stuff."

I'm not actually very good at the latter, but want to practice.

But, there's a bunch of ideas I have percolating that I do think are pretty decent things worth pursuing on the meta-community-front, and the only thing wrong with them is that if I follow the incentive gradient that attracts them, I'll never get around the to object-thinking-stuff I want to do.

But, wanted to at least get them out of my head. Post stubs for the future:

  • Benign and Malignant Demon Threads (i.e. how to tell when an internet discussion is about to go bad, and what to do)

  • Hard and Soft Mythology: HPMOR, Steerswoman, and Hatchet as "rationality" stories, and the strengths of each.

  • The Archipelago Model of Community Standards (many people agree the rationality community needs higher standards. They don't necessarily agree on what those standards should be. Different people want/need different things. One problem is confusion (or inevitable strife) over who owns which space. I think people should stake out spaces that they own and pro-actively foster whatever higher-standards they want there. Inspired by Scott Alexander's Archipelago post)

  • Relatedly, What Standards Do I Personally Want to Raise, in myself and hopefully the people I interact with?

  • Social Reality and Pressure Against Thinking Clearly (I mostly want other people who understand it better to write it, although by now I do have some ideas [fake-edit: this isn't quite the thing I was pointing towards but is one of the things)

  • Lessons From the Steampunk World (What living on a boat for a week taught me about physicality and problem solving)

  • Building the Agency Pipeline (It seems like people need 1-on-1 conversations with people who are further along their path to help give them confidence/ambition to continue, but the people further along the path are often busy, and trying to make it too legible who is more and less available to help people midway-through-the-agency-pipeline comes with weird knock-on effects)

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5 comments, sorted by Click to highlight new comments since: Today at 9:19 AM

Time to Get Gone for a bit, I think. Ciao.

Small piece of formatting feedback: I find whole paragraphs of italic text hard to read, and in this case I don't see a major need for it, so it might be the correct call to make the italic text after the headings normal.

I am doing this temporarily until bold font is slightly thicker so it noticeably stands out. :)

(Although I did just realize I could make the title section bold and italic instead of making the whole rest of the thing italic, which would probably be a step up in legibility)

[fake edit: just tried it, didn't help. For example of what I'm talking about, see the Hard And Soft Mythology title+followup, where I don't use italics in the followup. The bold kinda stands out because in that section I use a colon to separate them, but not really enough IMO]

(I much prefer the formatting in the Hard and Soft Mythology section, which is what actually made me notice this at all)

I personally would be particularly interested in the Standards, Social Reality, and Agency Pipeline posts.