If it's worth saying, but not worth its own post (even in Discussion), then it goes here.
Notes for future OT posters:
1. Please add the 'open_thread' tag.
2. Check if there is an active Open Thread before posting a new one. (Immediately before; refresh the list-of-threads page before posting.)
3. Open Threads should be posted in Discussion, and not Main.
4. Open Threads should start on Monday, and end on Sunday.
I'm looking for some "next book" recommendations on typography and graphically displaying quantitative data.
I want to present quantitative arguments and technical concepts in an attractive manner via the web. I'm an experienced web developer about to embark on a Masters in computational statistics, so the "technical" side is covered. I'm solid enough on this to be able to direct my own development and pick what to study next.
I'm less hot on the graphical/design side. As part of my stats-heavy undergrad degree, I've had what I presume to be a fairly standard "don't use 3D pie charts" intro to quantitative data visualisation. I'm also reasonably well-introduced to web design fundamentals (colour spaces, visual composition, page layouts, etc.). That's where I'm starting out from.
I've read Butterick's Practical Typography, which I found quite informative and interesting. I'd now like a second resource on typography, ideally geared towards web usage.
I've also read Edward Tufte's Visual Display of Quantitative Information, which was also quite informative, but felt a bit dated. I can see why it's considered a classic, but I'd like to read something on a similar topic, only written this century, and maybe with a more technological focus.
Please offer me specific recommendations addressing the two above areas (typography and data visualisation), or if you're sufficiently advanced, please coherently extrapolate my volition and suggest how I can more broadly level up in this cluster of skills.
With your background in web development have you read things like Krug's Don't Make Me Think and William's The Non-Designer's Design Book? These are focused more on the design aspect of web however they contain some good underlying principles for data visualization as well.
Tufte's book are all great for underlying principles even though, as you noted, they aren't focused on modern technologies. Beautiful Evidence from 2006 has some updated thoughts but he still borrows heavily from his earlier books.
For general multimedia concepts, Mayer's Multimedia Learning is good from a human learning perspective (my background).
I found Data Points: Visualization That Means Something to be a good modern guide.
From my perspective, I am glad you are looking down the road and recognizing that after the data are analyzed the analysis must be communicated.
My job (not at the WSJ!) gave me The Wall Street Journal Guide to Information Graphics: The Dos and Don'ts of Presenting Data, Facts, and Figures in my new hire bundle, and I love it!
Learn the library ggplot2. It is worth learning the language R just to use this library (though there is a port in progress for python/pandas). Even if you cannot incorporate the library into your workflow, its very good defaults show you what you should be doing with more work in other libraries.
It is named after a book, the Grammar of Graphics, that I have not read.
I don't know if I'm that enthusiastic about ggplot2. It is certainly a competent library and it produces pretty plots. However it has a pronounced "my way or the highway" streak which sometimes gets in the way. I like nice defaults, I don't like it when a library enforces its opinions on me (see e.g. this noting that Hadley is the ggplot2 author).
In my view, you're asking the wrong question. The major contributors are doing great; they have attracted their own audiences. A better question might be: how can LW grow promising new posters in to future major contributors (who may later migrate off the platform)?
I had some ideas that don't require changing the LW source that I'll now create polls for:
Should Less Wrong encourage readers to write appreciative private messages for posts that they like?
[pollid:976]
Should we add something to the FAQ about how having people tear your ideas apart is normal and expected behavior and not necessarily a sign that you're doing anything wrong?
[pollid:977]
Should we add something to the FAQ encouraging people to use smiley faces when they write critical comments? (Smiley faces take up very little space, so don't affect the signal-to-noise-ratio much, and help reinforce the idea that criticism is normal and expected. The FAQ could explain this.)
[pollid:978]
We could start testing these ideas informally ASAP, make a FAQ change if polls are bullish on the ideas, and then announce them more broadly in a Discussion post if they seem to be working well. To keep track of how the ideas seem to be working out, people could post their experiences with them in this subthread.
I think that while appreciative messages are (I imagine) pleasant to get, I don't think they are the highest form of praise that a poster can get. I imagine that if I wrote a LW post, the highest form of praise to me would be comments that take the ideas expressed in a post (provided they are actually interesting) and develop them further, perhaps create new ideas that would build upon them. I imagine that seeing other people synthesizing their ideas with your ideas would be perhaps the best praise a poster could get.
While comments that nitpick the edge cases of the ideas expressed in a post obviously have their value, often they barely touch the main thesis of the post. An author might find it annoying having to respond to people who mostly nitpick his/her offhand remarks, instead of engaging with the main ideas of the post which the author finds the most interesting (that's why he/she wrote it). The situation when you write a comment and somehow your offhand remark becomes the main target of responses (whereas nobody comments on the main idea you've tried say) is quite common.
I am not saying that we should discourage people from commenting on remarks that are not central to the post or comment. I am trying to say that arguing about the main thesis is probably much more pleasant than arguing about offhand remarks, and, as I have said before, seeing other people take your ideas and develop them further is even more pleasant. Of course, only if those ideas are actually any good. That said, even if the idea is flawed, perhaps there is a grain of truth that can be salvaged? For example, maybe the idea works under some kind of very specific conditions? I think that most people would be more likely to post if they knew that even commenters discovered flaws in their ideas, the same commenters would be willing to help to identify whether something can be done to fix those flaws.
(This comments only covers LW posts (and comments) where posters present their own ideas. Not all posts are like that, e.g. many summarize arguments, articles and books by others)
As I often say, I haven't been here long, but I notice a sort of political-esque conflict between empirical clusters of people that I privately refer to as the Nice People and the Forthright People. The Nice People think that being nice is pragmatic. The Forthright People think that too much niceness decreases the signal-to-noise ratio and also that there's a slippery slope towards vacuous niceness that no longer serves its former pragmatic functions. A lot of it has to do with personality. Not everyone fits neatly, and there are Moderate People, but many fit pretty well.
I also notice policy preferences among these groups. The Nice don't mind discussion of object-level things that people have been drawn towards as the result of purportedly rational thinking and deciding. The Forthright often prefer technical topics and more meta-level discussion of how to be rational, and many harken back to the Golden Age when LW was, as far as I can tell, basically a way to crowdsource hyperintelligent nerds (in the non-disparaging sense) to work past inadequate mainstream decision theories, and also to do cognitive-scientific philosophizing as opposed to the ceiling-gazing sort. The Nice think that new LW members should be welcomed with open arms and that this helps advance the Cause. The Forthright often profess that the Eternal September is long past and that new members that cannot tolerate their Forthrightness are only reducing the discussion quality further.
The current LW is a not-so-useful (certainly not useless, as far as I'm concerned) compromise between the two extremes. The Nice think that the Forthright are often rude and pedantic (often being from academia, as the Forthright are), and prefer not to post here. The Forthright think that the discussion quality has fallen too far, such that the content stream is too difficult to follow time-efficiently, and that to do so would have little value, and prefer not to post here.
I know that you specifically spoke out against subreddits, but I think subreddits would help. Last time I checked, the post was called Hold Off On Proposing Solutions, not Hold Off On Implementing Solutions Indefinitely. (Excuse my Forthrightness!) Tags are good for getting fed the right content, but subreddits encourage subcultures, and subcultures already exist on LW. If you posted in a more technical subreddit, you could expect more Forthright behavior, but also super-high discussion quality. Forthrightness really isn't so bad in a semi-academic context; it's the outside-LW norm. If you posted in a sub-reddit for object-level lifestyle stuff, or miscellaneous stuff, you could expect more Nice behavior; that's also the outside-LW norm. This might actually be a case of LW collectively overestimating how atypical it is, which is, so ironically, very typical.
I recently wrote this, which would probably have been of interest to LW. But when I considered submitting it, my brain objected that someone would make a comment like "you shouldn't have picked a name that already redirects to something else on wikipedia", and... I just didn't feel like bothering with that kind of trivia. (I know I'm allowed to ignore comments like that, but I still didn't feel like bothering.)
I don't know if that was fair or accurate of my brain, but Scott has also said that the comments on LW discourage him from posting, so it seems relevant to bring up.
The HN comments, and the comments on the post itself, weren't all interesting, but they weren't that particular kind of boring.
Every so often in the EA community, someone will ask what EA volunteer activities one can do in ones spare time in lieu of earning to give. Brian Tomasik makes an interesting case for reading social science papers and contributing what you learn to Wikipedia.
On the topic of popularization, I think the ratio of idealistic people interested in alleviating global poverty to people who are aware of the concept of meta-charities that determine the optimal way to do so is shockingly low.
That seems like one of those "low hanging fruits" - dropping it into casual conversations, mentioning it in high visibility comment threads, and on. There's really no excuse for Kony to be more well known than Givewell.
People actually interested in alleviating global poverty, or people who are interested in signaling to themselves and their social circle that they are caring and have appropriate attitudes?
By the way, saving lives (which Givewell focuses on) and "alleviating global poverty" are two very different goals.
By the way, saving lives (which Givewell focuses on) and "alleviating global poverty" are two very different goals.
I don't think that it's fair to say that GiveWell only focuses on lives saved. Their reports about charities are long. It's just that they focus on the number of "saving lives" when they boil down the justification to short paragraphs.
I agree that adding content to Wikipedia is worthwhile.
In addition to Wikipedia I think that StackExchange pages can often be very worthwhile.
Often when I come across an interesting claim on the internet where I don't know whether it's true, I post it on Skeptics.StackExchange or a subject specific site in the StackExchange network.
Do you mean whether it should be posted to Discussion or Main?
You can post it to Discussion. It might get promoted to Main. I'm not sure who makes those decisions.
You can post it to Main, and take your chances on it being downvoted.
You can post a link to it, and see if you get advice on where you should post it.
A comment about some more deep learning feats:
Interestingly, they initialise the visual learning model using the ImageNet images. Was it 3 years ago that was considered a pretty much intractable problem, and now the fact a CNN can work on it well enough to be useful isn't even worth a complete sentence.
(Background on ImageNet recent progress: http://lesswrong.com/lw/lj1/open_thread_jan_12_jan_18_2015/bvc9 )
In thinking/talking to people, it's too hard to be comprehensive, so I usually simplify things. The problem is that I feel pressure to be consistent with what I said, even though I know it's a simplification.
This sorta seems like an obvious thing to say, but I get the sense that making it explicit is useful. I notice this to be a moderate-big problem in myself, so I vow to be much much much better at this from now on (I'm annoyed that I fell victim to it at all).
Clicking on the tag "open thread" on this post only shows open threads from 2011 and earlier, at "http://lesswrong.com/tag/open_thread/". If I manually enter "http://lesswrong.com/r/discussion/tag/open_thread/", then I get the missing open threads. The problem appears to be that "http://lesswrong.com/tag/whatever/" only shows things posted to Main. "http://lesswrong.com/r/all/tag/open_thread/" seems to behave the same as "http://lesswrong.com/tag/open_thread/", i.e. it only shows things posted to Main, despite the "/r/all". Going to "article navigation → by tag" also goes to an open thread from 2011, so it seems to also ignore things posted to Discussion.
If using multiple screens at work made you more productive, care to give an example or two what do you put on one and the other and how they interact? Perhaps also negatives, in what situations that doesn't help?
Hypothesis: they only work with transformation type work e.g. translation where you read a document in one and translate in another, or read a spec in one and write code to implement it in another or at any rate the output you generate is strongly dependent on an input that you need to keep referring to.
I actually borrowed a TV as a second screen because I need to re-create the layouts of document reports from an old accounting software in a new. So it is handy to have the example on the TV while I work on the new one. Of course a printout on a music-stand would work just as well...
At work:
Software development: text editors (or IDE) on one screen, terminal/command-prompt window(s) for building, running tests, etc., on another.
Exploratory work in MATLAB: editor(s) and MATLAB figure windows (plots, images, ...) on one screen, MATLAB command window on another.
I use virtual desktops as well as multiple monitors, so things like email and web browser are over in another universe and less distracting. (This does have the downside that when I'm, say, replying to something on Less Wrong, my work is over in another universe and less distracting.) So are other things (e.g., documents being written, to-do lists, etc.).
Of course things may get moved around; e.g., if I'm writing a document based on some technical exploration then I may want a word processor coexisting with MATLAB and a web browser.
At home: email on one monitor, web browser on another. (And all kinds of other things on other virtual desktops.)
It looks like someone downvoted about 5 of my old comments in the last ~10 hours. (Not recent ones that are still under any kind of discussion, I think. I can't tell which old ones.)
I mention this just in case others are seeing the same; I suspect Eugine_Nier/Azathoth123 has another account and is up to his old mass-downvoting tricks again. (I actually have a suspicion which account, too, but nowhere near enough evidence to be making accusations.)
Some unrefined thoughts on why rationalists don't win + a good story.
Why don't rationalists win?
1) As far as being happy goes, the determinants of that are things like optimism, genetics, good relationships, sense of fulfillment etc. All things you could easily get without being rational, and that rationality doesn't seem too correlated with (there's probably even a weak-moderate negative correlation).
2) As far as being right goes (epistemic rationality), well people usually are wrong a lot. But people have an incredible ability to compartmentalize, and people often exhibit a surprising degree of rationality in their domain of expertise. And also, you could often do a solid job of being right without much rationality - heuristics go a long way.
Story:
So then - why rationality?
All things you could easily get without being rational, and that rationality doesn't seem too correlated with (there's probably even a weak-moderate negative correlation).
I should note that none of this is desirable, and that someone who's a perfect rationalist would probably do quite well in all of these areas. But I think that Reason as a memetic immune disorder applies here. It seems that the amount of rationality that is commonly attained often acts as an immune disorder in these situations.
What changes would LW require to make itself attractive again to the major contributors who left and now have their own blogs?