This is seeking a technological solution to a social problem.
The proposed technological solution is interesting, complicated, and unlikely to ever be implemented. It’s not hard to see why the sorts of people who read LW want to talk about interesting and complicated things, especially interesting and complicated things that don’t require much boring stuff like research—but I highly doubt that anyone is going to sit down and do the work of implementing it or anything like it, and in the event that anyone ever does, it’ll likely take so long that many of the people who’d otherwise use LW or its replacement will lose interest in the interim, and it’ll likely be so confusing that many more people are turned off by the interface and never bother to participate.
If we want interesting, complicated questions that don’t require a whole lot of research, here’s one: what exactly is LW trying to do? Once this question has been answered, we can go out and research similar groups, find out which ones accomplished their goals (or goals similar to ours, etc.) and which ones didn’t, and try to determine the factors that separate successful groups from failed ones.
If we want uninteresting, uncomplicated questions that are likely to help us achieve our goals, here’s one: do we have any managers in the audience? People with successful business experience, muaybe in change management or something of that nature? I’m nowhere near old or experienced enough to nominate myself, or even to name the most relevant subdomains of management with any confidence, but I’ve still seen a lot of projects that failed due to nonmanagers’ false assumption that management is trivial, and a few projects in the exact same domain that succeeded due to bringing in one single competent manager.
As Anna Salamon set out, the goal is to create a commons of knowledge, such that a great many people have read the same stuff.
There’s already a lot of stuff from the post-LW fragmentation that a great many people have read. How about identifying and compiling that? And since many of these things will be spread out across Tumblr/Twitter/IRC/etc. exchanges rather than written up in one single post, we could seed the LW revival with explanations of them. This would also give us something more interesting and worthwhile to talk about than what sort of technological solution we’d like to see for the social problem that LW can’t find anything more interesting and worthwhile to talk about than what sort of technological solution we’d like to see for the social problem that LW can’t find anything interesting or worthwhile enough to get people posting here.
People have been building communities with canons since the compilation of the Torah.
LW, running on the same Reddit fork it’s on today, used to be a functional community with a canon. Then… well, then what? Interesting content moved offsite, probably because 1) people get less nervous about posting to Tumblr or Twitter than posting an article to LW 2) LW has content restrictions that elsewhere doesn’t. So people stopped paying attention to the site, so the community fragmented, the barrier to entry was lowered, and now the public face of rationalists is Weird Sun Twitter and Russian MRAs from 4chan who spend their days telling people to kill themselves on Tumblr. Oops!
(And SSC, which is a more active community than LW despite running on even worse software.)
(This is my first post so please kindly point me to my misconceptions if there are any)
This is seeking a technological solution to a social problem.
It is still strange to me that people say this as if it were a criticism.
It is not that strange when dealing with technological solutions to problems that we haven’t yet understood. You define your goal as creating a “commons of knowledge”. Consider a few points:
[1] There seems to be a confusion between information and knowledge. I know that the LW community is attempting to provide a rational methodology towards knowledge but I have not seen this been done in any way that is substantially different. It is discussion as always with more commitment towards rationality (which is great!).
[2] We do not have an efficent way of representing arguments. Argument mapping is an attempt to that direction. I personally tend to use a numbering convention inspired by Wittgenstein (I am using it here as an example). The bottom line is that discussions tend to be quite unordered and opinions tend to be conflated with truths (see [1]).
[3] From [1] and [2] as an outsider I do not understand what the root group represents. Are these the people that are more rational? Who has decided that?
So maybe that is what Plethora meant. I am myself really interested in this problem and have been thinking about it for some time. My recommendation would be to focus first in smaller issues such as how to represent an argument in a way that can extract a truth rating. But even that is too ambitious at the moment. How about a technological solution for representing arguments with clarity so that both sides:
can see what is being said in clearly labeled propositions.
can identify errors in logic and mark them down.
can weed out opinions from experimentally confirmed scientific facts.
can link to sources and have a way to recursively examine their ‘truth rating’ down to the most primary source.
These are just a few indicative challenges. There are also issues with methods for source verification exemplified by the ongoing scandals with data forging in psychology and neuroscience and the list goes on..
This is seeking a technological solution to a social problem.
The proposed technological solution is interesting, complicated, and unlikely to ever be implemented. It’s not hard to see why the sorts of people who read LW want to talk about interesting and complicated things, especially interesting and complicated things that don’t require much boring stuff like research—but I highly doubt that anyone is going to sit down and do the work of implementing it or anything like it, and in the event that anyone ever does, it’ll likely take so long that many of the people who’d otherwise use LW or its replacement will lose interest in the interim, and it’ll likely be so confusing that many more people are turned off by the interface and never bother to participate.
If we want interesting, complicated questions that don’t require a whole lot of research, here’s one: what exactly is LW trying to do? Once this question has been answered, we can go out and research similar groups, find out which ones accomplished their goals (or goals similar to ours, etc.) and which ones didn’t, and try to determine the factors that separate successful groups from failed ones.
If we want uninteresting, uncomplicated questions that are likely to help us achieve our goals, here’s one: do we have any managers in the audience? People with successful business experience, muaybe in change management or something of that nature? I’m nowhere near old or experienced enough to nominate myself, or even to name the most relevant subdomains of management with any confidence, but I’ve still seen a lot of projects that failed due to nonmanagers’ false assumption that management is trivial, and a few projects in the exact same domain that succeeded due to bringing in one single competent manager.
There’s already a lot of stuff from the post-LW fragmentation that a great many people have read. How about identifying and compiling that? And since many of these things will be spread out across Tumblr/Twitter/IRC/etc. exchanges rather than written up in one single post, we could seed the LW revival with explanations of them. This would also give us something more interesting and worthwhile to talk about than what sort of technological solution we’d like to see for the social problem that LW can’t find anything more interesting and worthwhile to talk about than what sort of technological solution we’d like to see for the social problem that LW can’t find anything interesting or worthwhile enough to get people posting here.
It is still strange to me that people say this as if it were a criticism.
People have been building communities with canons since the compilation of the Torah.
LW, running on the same Reddit fork it’s on today, used to be a functional community with a canon. Then… well, then what? Interesting content moved offsite, probably because 1) people get less nervous about posting to Tumblr or Twitter than posting an article to LW 2) LW has content restrictions that elsewhere doesn’t. So people stopped paying attention to the site, so the community fragmented, the barrier to entry was lowered, and now the public face of rationalists is Weird Sun Twitter and Russian MRAs from 4chan who spend their days telling people to kill themselves on Tumblr. Oops!
(And SSC, which is a more active community than LW despite running on even worse software.)
(This is my first post so please kindly point me to my misconceptions if there are any)
It is not that strange when dealing with technological solutions to problems that we haven’t yet understood. You define your goal as creating a “commons of knowledge”. Consider a few points:
[1] There seems to be a confusion between information and knowledge. I know that the LW community is attempting to provide a rational methodology towards knowledge but I have not seen this been done in any way that is substantially different. It is discussion as always with more commitment towards rationality (which is great!).
[2] We do not have an efficent way of representing arguments. Argument mapping is an attempt to that direction. I personally tend to use a numbering convention inspired by Wittgenstein (I am using it here as an example). The bottom line is that discussions tend to be quite unordered and opinions tend to be conflated with truths (see [1]).
[3] From [1] and [2] as an outsider I do not understand what the root group represents. Are these the people that are more rational? Who has decided that?
So maybe that is what Plethora meant. I am myself really interested in this problem and have been thinking about it for some time. My recommendation would be to focus first in smaller issues such as how to represent an argument in a way that can extract a truth rating. But even that is too ambitious at the moment. How about a technological solution for representing arguments with clarity so that both sides:
can see what is being said in clearly labeled propositions.
can identify errors in logic and mark them down.
can weed out opinions from experimentally confirmed scientific facts.
can link to sources and have a way to recursively examine their ‘truth rating’ down to the most primary source.
These are just a few indicative challenges. There are also issues with methods for source verification exemplified by the ongoing scandals with data forging in psychology and neuroscience and the list goes on..
I would like to vote up this recommendation:
This is an un-explored area, and seems to me like it would have a higher ROI than a deep dive into variations on voting/rating/reputation systems.