Yeah, it’s both important to me that the people I see doing the most valuable work on rationality and existential risk feel comfortable posting to the platform, and that we can continue replacing the people we will inevitably lose because of natural turnover with people of equal or better quality.
This has definitely not been the case over the previous 3 years of LessWrong, and so to fix that we will require some changes. My diagnosis of why that happened is partially that the nature of how people use the internet changed (with the onset of social networks and more competition due to better overall technology), partially because the people who were doing good work on the problems changed, and partially because we simply didn’t have a system that could productively fight against the forces of entropy for too long, and so a lot of the best people left.
I agree that it is hard to deal with large numbers of people joining at the same time, which is why I am indeed not super interested in discontinuous growth and am not pushing for anything in that direction. I do still think we are under the number of people who can productively talk to each other, and that at this point in time further-sustained, slow growth is valuable and net-positive.
Right now I think we are growing, though people have definitely been leaving over the last few years. I also think Eliezer has not had amazing experiences with the new LW, and there are some other people who showed up and would probably leave again if things don’t change in some way. On net I think we are strongly in the green, but I still think we are missing out on some really good and core people.
I’m thinking of it as “we’re growing, but on credit.” People are trying it out because they’ve heard enough interesting things to give it a go again, but it hasn’t hit something like genuine profitability.
If people are leaving as we speak, then scaling it to the size it already is may indeed require change.
Yeah, it’s both important to me that the people I see doing the most valuable work on rationality and existential risk feel comfortable posting to the platform, and that we can continue replacing the people we will inevitably lose because of natural turnover with people of equal or better quality.
This has definitely not been the case over the previous 3 years of LessWrong, and so to fix that we will require some changes. My diagnosis of why that happened is partially that the nature of how people use the internet changed (with the onset of social networks and more competition due to better overall technology), partially because the people who were doing good work on the problems changed, and partially because we simply didn’t have a system that could productively fight against the forces of entropy for too long, and so a lot of the best people left.
I agree that it is hard to deal with large numbers of people joining at the same time, which is why I am indeed not super interested in discontinuous growth and am not pushing for anything in that direction. I do still think we are under the number of people who can productively talk to each other, and that at this point in time further-sustained, slow growth is valuable and net-positive.
Do you think that people are leaving at more than a reasonable rate of natural attrition? If so, why?
Right now I think we are growing, though people have definitely been leaving over the last few years. I also think Eliezer has not had amazing experiences with the new LW, and there are some other people who showed up and would probably leave again if things don’t change in some way. On net I think we are strongly in the green, but I still think we are missing out on some really good and core people.
I’m thinking of it as “we’re growing, but on credit.” People are trying it out because they’ve heard enough interesting things to give it a go again, but it hasn’t hit something like genuine profitability.