I strongly agree about the importance of play in idea generation. There’s a scale with yes, and at one end and well, actually at the other, and I try to stay close to the “yes, and” end all else equal. (Though if I see someone defecting on good conversation norms, I’m sometimes willing to defect in response.)
Re: trust, academia has a nice model here: collaborate with friends at your university, and eventually publish & make your ideas known to strangers at other universities. From an epistemic hygiene perspective, it feels right that ideas should receive criticism in proportion to their level of exposure. The more people exposed to an idea, the greater the harm if the idea is false. If critics don’t face a good set of incentives to debunk bad ideas, those circumstances can lead to an information cascade. (Example: Eliezer dashes off a post in an afternoon, it becomes part of the legendary Sequences with its legions of fanboys and fangirls, criticizing it is now a political act.) You write: “If anything, I think LessWrong folk are too eager to show off their willingness to dissent and upvote people just for being contrarian”. I suspect for most people, disapproval is stronger as a punishment signal than praise is as a reward signal. So maybe you can have your cake and eat it too: decrease the amount of praise given to contrarianism for contrarianism’s sake, while offering contrarians a credible guarantee that they won’t face much disapproval.
LW 1.0 took a step towards addressing this withdedicatedthreads. I think the frame could be even better though. Consider guest lectures, where someone from outside a university is offered status in exchange for cross-pollinating their ideas. I think the rationalist community could use something like guest lectures.
One idea is to provide integrated support for tagging posts with an epistemic status, and have the epistemic status control the degree of moderation. If a post’s epistemic status is set to “playing with ideas”, the risk of an inadvertent information cascade is lower, and a signal is sent that commenters should try to avoid ruining the good times.
I also like the idea a site-wide experiment where posts/comments are anonymized to non-moderator users until they hit some upvote threshold. Again, the goal is to promote creativity by decreasing downside risk. (I think this would work best as a site-wide experiment. If it’s an opt-in thing, opting in signals timidity.)
(As a quick note, for me personally, these features would move the needle less than restructuring incentives so people who come to a conversation quicker don’t have greater influence on it. I like to spend long periods of time offline, and when I come back it often feels like the conversation came and went without me. Mailing lists, wikis, and old-school “bump” style forum megathreads all solve this problem in various ways.)
I suspect in practice the epistemic status of a post is signaled less by what it says under “epistemic status” and more by facts about where it’s posted, who will see it, and how long it will remain accessible.
Sites acquire entrenched cultures. “The medium is the message” and the message of a LessWrong post is “behold my eternal contribution to the ivory halls of knowledge”.
A chat message will be seen only by people in the chat room, a tweet will be seen mostly by people who chose to follow you, but it’s much harder to characterize the audience of a LessWrong post or comment, so these will feel like they’re aimed at convincing or explaining to a general audience, even if they say they’re not.
In my experience, playing with ideas requires frequent low-stakes high-context back-and-forths, and this is in tension with each comment appearing in various feeds and remaining visible forever to everyone reading the original post, which might have become the standard reference for a concept. So I think LessWrong has always been much better for polished work than playing with ideas, and changing this would require a lot of tradeoffs that might not be worth it.
Periodically people post open threads (generally as a personal post) but they haven’t gotten much traction. (They seem to get less traction that other personal blogposts so I don’t think it’s just about that)
Someone posted an open thread two weeks ago and my subjective impression is that it disappeared from view almost immediately, other than generating a few comments I saw in Recent Comments that seemed to be, if you’ll pardon the bluntness, two people making basic mistakes. Starting from Community, right now, and repeatedly clicking “Load More,” I got to something that was posted three months ago and still can’t see this open thread. (I forgot to count how many times I clicked “Load More” but it’s enough times that I got bored and stopped, twice.) I’m not even sure if it’s visible from Community at all. If it is, the magical algorithm that sorts Community hates it.
If we want open threads to work they might need to be stickied, at least at first.
This is tangential, but re: clicking “Load More” a bunch of times: GreaterWrong has an archive browser where you can view posts by year, by month, and by day, as far back as you like.
FYI, my current (unofficial) thought process re: this is to move towards Personal Feeds being more established as a dominant way to engage with the site. (i.e. if you’re a new user, the structure of the site is such that most new content you create will probably be a personal feed comment, and only when you think you’ve got a moderately polished thing to say would you write a post)
I strongly agree about the importance of play in idea generation. There’s a scale with yes, and at one end and well, actually at the other, and I try to stay close to the “yes, and” end all else equal. (Though if I see someone defecting on good conversation norms, I’m sometimes willing to defect in response.)
Re: trust, academia has a nice model here: collaborate with friends at your university, and eventually publish & make your ideas known to strangers at other universities. From an epistemic hygiene perspective, it feels right that ideas should receive criticism in proportion to their level of exposure. The more people exposed to an idea, the greater the harm if the idea is false. If critics don’t face a good set of incentives to debunk bad ideas, those circumstances can lead to an information cascade. (Example: Eliezer dashes off a post in an afternoon, it becomes part of the legendary Sequences with its legions of fanboys and fangirls, criticizing it is now a political act.) You write: “If anything, I think LessWrong folk are too eager to show off their willingness to dissent and upvote people just for being contrarian”. I suspect for most people, disapproval is stronger as a punishment signal than praise is as a reward signal. So maybe you can have your cake and eat it too: decrease the amount of praise given to contrarianism for contrarianism’s sake, while offering contrarians a credible guarantee that they won’t face much disapproval.
LW 1.0 took a step towards addressing this with dedicated threads. I think the frame could be even better though. Consider guest lectures, where someone from outside a university is offered status in exchange for cross-pollinating their ideas. I think the rationalist community could use something like guest lectures.
One idea is to provide integrated support for tagging posts with an epistemic status, and have the epistemic status control the degree of moderation. If a post’s epistemic status is set to “playing with ideas”, the risk of an inadvertent information cascade is lower, and a signal is sent that commenters should try to avoid ruining the good times.
I also like the idea a site-wide experiment where posts/comments are anonymized to non-moderator users until they hit some upvote threshold. Again, the goal is to promote creativity by decreasing downside risk. (I think this would work best as a site-wide experiment. If it’s an opt-in thing, opting in signals timidity.)
(As a quick note, for me personally, these features would move the needle less than restructuring incentives so people who come to a conversation quicker don’t have greater influence on it. I like to spend long periods of time offline, and when I come back it often feels like the conversation came and went without me. Mailing lists, wikis, and old-school “bump” style forum megathreads all solve this problem in various ways.)
I suspect in practice the epistemic status of a post is signaled less by what it says under “epistemic status” and more by facts about where it’s posted, who will see it, and how long it will remain accessible.
Sites acquire entrenched cultures. “The medium is the message” and the message of a LessWrong post is “behold my eternal contribution to the ivory halls of knowledge”.
A chat message will be seen only by people in the chat room, a tweet will be seen mostly by people who chose to follow you, but it’s much harder to characterize the audience of a LessWrong post or comment, so these will feel like they’re aimed at convincing or explaining to a general audience, even if they say they’re not.
In my experience, playing with ideas requires frequent low-stakes high-context back-and-forths, and this is in tension with each comment appearing in various feeds and remaining visible forever to everyone reading the original post, which might have become the standard reference for a concept. So I think LessWrong has always been much better for polished work than playing with ideas, and changing this would require a lot of tradeoffs that might not be worth it.
Open threads on old LW were good for this, I wonder why we don’t have them here?
Periodically people post open threads (generally as a personal post) but they haven’t gotten much traction. (They seem to get less traction that other personal blogposts so I don’t think it’s just about that)
Someone posted an open thread two weeks ago and my subjective impression is that it disappeared from view almost immediately, other than generating a few comments I saw in Recent Comments that seemed to be, if you’ll pardon the bluntness, two people making basic mistakes. Starting from Community, right now, and repeatedly clicking “Load More,” I got to something that was posted three months ago and still can’t see this open thread. (I forgot to count how many times I clicked “Load More” but it’s enough times that I got bored and stopped, twice.) I’m not even sure if it’s visible from Community at all. If it is, the magical algorithm that sorts Community hates it.
If we want open threads to work they might need to be stickied, at least at first.
This is tangential, but re: clicking “Load More” a bunch of times: GreaterWrong has an archive browser where you can view posts by year, by month, and by day, as far back as you like.
FYI, my current (unofficial) thought process re: this is to move towards Personal Feeds being more established as a dominant way to engage with the site. (i.e. if you’re a new user, the structure of the site is such that most new content you create will probably be a personal feed comment, and only when you think you’ve got a moderately polished thing to say would you write a post)
However, this is all still very up in the air.