I think these concerns are good if we expect the director(s) (/ the process of determining LessWrong’s agenda) to not be especially good. If we do expect them the director(s) to be good, then they should be able to take your concerns into account—include plenty of community feedback, deliberately err on the side of making goals inclusive, etc. -- and still produce better results, I think.
If you (as an individual or as a community) don’t have coherent goals, then exclusionary behavior will still emerge by accident; and it’s harder to learn from emergent mistakes (‘each individual in our group did things that would be good in some contexts, or good from their perspective, but the aggregate behavior ended up having bad effects in some vague fashion’) than from more ‘agenty’ mistakes (‘we tried to work together to achieve an explicitly specified goal, and the goal didn’t end up achieved’).
If you do have written-out goals, then you can more easily discuss whether those goals are the right ones—you can even make one of your goals ‘spend a lot of time questioning these goals, and experiment with pursuing alternative goals’—and you can, if you want, deliberately optimize for inclusiveness (or for some deeper problem closer to people’s True Rejections). That creates some accountability when you aren’t sufficiently inclusive, makes it easier to operationalize exactly what we mean by ‘let’s be more inclusive’, and makes it clearer to outside observers that at least we want to be doing the right thing.
(This is all just an example of why I think having explicit common goals at all is a good idea; I don’t know how much we do want to become more inclusive on various axes.)
You make a good point, and I am very tempted to agree with you. You are certainly correct in that even a completely non-centralized community with no stated goals can be exclusionary. And I can see “community goals” serving a positive role, guiding collective behavior towards communal improvement, whether that comes in the form of non-exclusiveness or other values.
With that said, I find myself strangely disquieted by the idea of Less Wrong being actively directed, especially by a singular individual. I’m not sure what my intuition is stuck on, but I do feel that it might be important. My best interpretation right now is that having an actively directed community may lend itself to catastrophic failure (in the same way that having a dictatorship lends itself to catastrophic failure).
If there is a single person or group of people directing the community, I can imagine them making decisions which anger the rest of the community, making people take sides or split from the group. I’ve seen that happen in forums where the moderators did something controversial, leading to considerable (albeit usually localized) disruption. If the community is directed democratically, I again see people being partisan and taking sides, leading to (potentially vicious) internal politics; and politics is both a mind killer and a major driver of divisiveness (which is typically bad for the community).
Now, to be entirely fair, these are somewhat “worst case” scenarios, and I don’t know how likely they are. However, I am having trouble thinking of any successful online communities which have taken this route. That may just be a failure of imagination, or it could be that something like this hasn’t been tried yet, but it is somewhat alarming. That is largely why I urge caution in the instance.
“With that said, I find myself strangely disquieted by the idea of Less Wrong being actively directed, especially by a singular individual.”—the proposal wasn’t that a single individual would choose the direction, but that there would be a group.
I think these concerns are good if we expect the director(s) (/ the process of determining LessWrong’s agenda) to not be especially good. If we do expect them the director(s) to be good, then they should be able to take your concerns into account—include plenty of community feedback, deliberately err on the side of making goals inclusive, etc. -- and still produce better results, I think.
If you (as an individual or as a community) don’t have coherent goals, then exclusionary behavior will still emerge by accident; and it’s harder to learn from emergent mistakes (‘each individual in our group did things that would be good in some contexts, or good from their perspective, but the aggregate behavior ended up having bad effects in some vague fashion’) than from more ‘agenty’ mistakes (‘we tried to work together to achieve an explicitly specified goal, and the goal didn’t end up achieved’).
If you do have written-out goals, then you can more easily discuss whether those goals are the right ones—you can even make one of your goals ‘spend a lot of time questioning these goals, and experiment with pursuing alternative goals’—and you can, if you want, deliberately optimize for inclusiveness (or for some deeper problem closer to people’s True Rejections). That creates some accountability when you aren’t sufficiently inclusive, makes it easier to operationalize exactly what we mean by ‘let’s be more inclusive’, and makes it clearer to outside observers that at least we want to be doing the right thing.
(This is all just an example of why I think having explicit common goals at all is a good idea; I don’t know how much we do want to become more inclusive on various axes.)
You make a good point, and I am very tempted to agree with you. You are certainly correct in that even a completely non-centralized community with no stated goals can be exclusionary. And I can see “community goals” serving a positive role, guiding collective behavior towards communal improvement, whether that comes in the form of non-exclusiveness or other values.
With that said, I find myself strangely disquieted by the idea of Less Wrong being actively directed, especially by a singular individual. I’m not sure what my intuition is stuck on, but I do feel that it might be important. My best interpretation right now is that having an actively directed community may lend itself to catastrophic failure (in the same way that having a dictatorship lends itself to catastrophic failure).
If there is a single person or group of people directing the community, I can imagine them making decisions which anger the rest of the community, making people take sides or split from the group. I’ve seen that happen in forums where the moderators did something controversial, leading to considerable (albeit usually localized) disruption. If the community is directed democratically, I again see people being partisan and taking sides, leading to (potentially vicious) internal politics; and politics is both a mind killer and a major driver of divisiveness (which is typically bad for the community).
Now, to be entirely fair, these are somewhat “worst case” scenarios, and I don’t know how likely they are. However, I am having trouble thinking of any successful online communities which have taken this route. That may just be a failure of imagination, or it could be that something like this hasn’t been tried yet, but it is somewhat alarming. That is largely why I urge caution in the instance.
“With that said, I find myself strangely disquieted by the idea of Less Wrong being actively directed, especially by a singular individual.”—the proposal wasn’t that a single individual would choose the direction, but that there would be a group.
Do you think the words ”...Less Wrong being actively directed, especially by a committee” would cause less apprehension? X-)
Maybe. It’s hard to say.