The purpose of this site is to help building a rationalist community, and helping individuals to fulfill their potential in that domain.
We have a lot of discussions going on, and a lot of material is being, and going to be, generated. At some point it may become difficult for any single individual to follow all of it. Even taking the karma system into account, interesting contributions may be missed by any particular individual. Furthermore, the sum of what would be elaborated upon here would not be as concise or even easily available as it could be wished to be.
To the point : would it be a good idea to try to summarize the most important, relevant ideas upon which we will be building our edifice ? So that a future student of rationality can come upon a concise, easy to digest introduction to our results and ideas, so that less active members can still manage to follow this ongoing process too ?
If so, how would we proceed ? What is being discussed here may not have the quality we'd expect of, say, a scientific publication, though I think that such a quality would be necessary, if even sufficient, for what would eventually become our own corpus of knowledge. How would we elaborate, layer upon layer of work and discussions ? A starting point would be to refer to, or summarize the relevant, existing scientific results that we would lay our base upon. We'd then move on to summarizing our most important achievements, however that word is to be taken, seamlessly upon that foundation.
Any thought on how or whether to organize this?
You may not be a statistically significant sample :)
I for one do all my personal projects in Python, so I would prefer it to most of the languages you mentioned. Python is totally awesome :D
This week I forked the lesswrong codebase, installed all the needed dependencies and tried to get it to run. I still haven't succeeded (it seems it can't find psycopg een though I installed it, this morning before going to work I was fiddling around with PYTHONPATH). I will get it working in the near future and start working on it.
(pjeby, another commenter here, is a major Python guru, though I don't know if he plans to contribute)