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Resources

This page is for collecting articles, blog posts, videos, links and other things which are interesting reading in relation to FortForecast.

Contents

Books

Superforecasting: The Art and Science of Prediction (archived) (Philip E. Tetlock, Dan Gardner)
Thinking, Fast and Slow (archived) (Daniel Kahneman)
Rationality: From AI to Zombies (archived) (Eliezer Yudkowsky)
The Righteous Mind (archived) (Jonathon Haidt)

Intellectual Aggregation

The Polymath Project: Lessons from a Successful Online Collaboration in Mathematics (archived)
Solving problems through blogs and wikis - lessons from Polymath (archived)
Gin, Television, and Social Surplus (archived) (Clay Shirky)
The vast cognitive surplus (currently sunk into television-watching) that is potentially available for more productive endeavors.
Fan Is A Tool Using Animal (archived) (Maciej)
Blogging Doubts (archived) (Robin Hanson)
Mass publishing might give you more readership than academic journals, but academic journals are well indexed and archived for a community of people who have a norm of checking prior work when examining a subject, which gives them a distinct advantage and more chances for an academic paper to have influence.

Coordinating Effort

EPGP wiki article (archived)
Explanation of the EPGP loot distribution system used by some WoW guilds.
EPGP web system explanation (archived)
An online system implementing EPGP explains itself.
Spreadsheet demonstrating the system in the context of WoW loot (archived)

Community Building and Management

The Craft And The Community (archived) (Eliezer Yudkowsky)
Well-Kept Gardens Die By Pacifism (archived) (Eliezer Yudkowsky)
Good online communities die primarily by refusing to defend themselves [from trolls, etc.]
(not included in Rationality: A-Z version of the Sequences).
Start With Value (archived) (John David Pressman)
Online communities spring up around things which are valuable outside of the social network itself. For example, SlateStarCodex attracts people of like mind together but is not itself a forum of people.
A Group Is Its Own Worst Enemy (archived) (Clay Shirky)
Motivation, Governance, and the Viability of Hybrid Forms in Open Source Software Development (archived) (Sonali K. Shah)
What motivations do open source contributors have, what are some of the concerns that arise in a 'gated source' development model, how does leadership effect contributions to collective code projects?
How To Save The World (archived) (Aaron Swartz)
Aaron Swartz describes an activist dream team group for real change, interestingly enough some of his proposals have actually been built in the form of things like Legalist (archived).
BBS The Documentary Part 6/8: HPAC (archived) (Jason Scott)
In this portion of Jason Scott's documentary on Bulletin Board Systems phreakers discuss how they would handle recruitment and access control on their boards.
Valve Employee Handbook (archived)
How the flat organization structure works at Valve, what they look for in a hire, stack ranking, etc.
Geeks, Mops and Sociopaths in subculture evolution (archived) (David Chapman)
Internet communities: Otters vs. Possums (archived) (aellagirl)
Mythic Values and Folk Values (archived)
Every community has two sets of values and behaviors, one belonging to the heroes and leaders of that community, and another belonging to the average member of that community. The overlap between these are often slim enough that someone trying to score points on the folk values will never 'graduate' to the mythic values even if that's their goal.
‘Systems engineering’ and ‘systems management’ — ideas from the Apollo programme for a ‘systems politics’ (PDF) (archived) (Dominic Cummings)
Designing For Evil (archived) (Jeff Atwood)
Waking Up With Sam Harris #71 - What is Technology Doing to Us? (with Tristan Harris) (archived)
Tristan Harris talks about how smartphones are locked into a struggle for the users attention and the tragedy of the commons makes most peoples phones very unpleasant. He proposes a system where people figure out how much time they want to be spending with certain applications and the phone monitors their use so it can review that use with the phone owner. Also talks about a regret-minimization based marketplace, etc.
How To Ask Questions The Smart Way (archived) (Eric Raymond)
How to ask questions of people about technical subjects (or any subject really) in a way that doesn't waste their time.
On FAQ and Effort (archived) (The Grey Tribe)
I had a couple drinks and woke up with 1,000 nerds (archived) (Paul Ford)
How a guy accidentally tapped into a wellspring of desire for an online community based around a shared workspace.

On LessWrong

The history (and fall) of LessWrong (archived) (Scott Alexander)
What happened to Lesswrong? When (and more importantly why) did the spread out to other blogs happen?
The Craft is Not The Community (archived) (Sarah Constantin)
The embarrassing ineffectiveness of the Bay Area 'rationalist' community
What Is Rationalist Berkley’s Community Culture? (archived)
A LessWrong person responds to Sarah's post with horror since the Bay Area has been stealing members of other local communities
Vaniver's LessWrong 2.0 initiative (archived) (Vaniver)
On the importance of Less Wrong, or another single conversational locus (archived) (Anna Salamon)
Anna describes why she and the rest of CFAR are supporting LessWrong 2.0.
Further discussion of CFAR’s focus on AI safety, and the good things folks wanted from “cause neutrality” (archived) (Anna Salamon)
Anna discusses why CFAR decided to change its mission to explicitly focus on AI safety.
The Craft & The Community - A Post-Mortem & Resurrection (archived) (Bendini)
Bendini's epic takedown of the current Bay Area 'rationality' community, divides causes of failure into categories and analyzes them.