I think I disagree with your conclusion here, although I’d agree with something in its vicinity.
One of the strengths of a larger community is the potential to explore multiple areas in moderate amounts of depth. We want to be able to have detailed conversations on each of: e.g. good epistemic habits; implications of AI; distributions of cost-effectiveness; personal productivity; technical AI safety; …
It asks too much for everyone to keep up with each of these conversations, particularly when each of them can spawn many detailed sub-conversations. But if they’re all located in the same place, it’s hard to browse through to find the parts that you’re actually trying to keep up with.
So I think that we want two things:
Separate conversational loci for each topic
A way of finding the best material to get up to speed on a given topic
For the first, I find myself thinking back to days of sub-forums on bulletin boards (lack of nested comments obviously a big problem there). That way you could have the different loci gathered together. For the second, I suspect careful curation is actually the right way to identify this content, but I’m not sure what the best way to set up infrastructure for this is.
It seems to me that for larger communities, there should be both: (a) a central core that everyone keeps up on, regardless of subtopical interest; and (b) topical centers that build in themselves, and that those contributing to that topical center are expected to be up on, but that members of other topical centers are not necessarily up on. (So that folks contributing to a given subtopical center should be expected to be keeping up with both that subtopic, and the central cannon.)
It seems to me that (a) probably should be located on LW or similar, and that, if/as the community grows, the number of posts within (a) can remain capped by some “keep up withable” number, with quality standards raising as needed.
Your (a) / (b) division basically makes sense to me.[*] I think we’re already at the point where we need this fracturing.
However, I don’t think that the LW format makes sense for (a). I’d probably prefer curated aggregation of good content for (a), with fairly clear lines about what’s in or out. It’s very unclear what the threshold for keeping up on LW should be.
Also, I quite like the idea of the topical centres being hosted in the same place as the core, so that they’re easy to find.
[*] A possible caveat is dealing with new community members nicely; I haven’t thought about this enough so I’m just dropping a flag here.
I quite like the idea of the topical centres being hosted in the same place as the core, so that they’re easy to find.
Also it makes it easy for mods to enforce the distinction. Instead of “I think this post and discussion is not suited for this place, could you delete it and take it elsewhere?” it can just be “This should actually be over in sub-forum X, so I’ve moved it there.”
In general if we don’t explicitly design institutions that will work well with a much larger community, we shouldn’t be surprised if things break down when the community grows.
I think I disagree with your conclusion here, although I’d agree with something in its vicinity.
One of the strengths of a larger community is the potential to explore multiple areas in moderate amounts of depth. We want to be able to have detailed conversations on each of: e.g. good epistemic habits; implications of AI; distributions of cost-effectiveness; personal productivity; technical AI safety; …
It asks too much for everyone to keep up with each of these conversations, particularly when each of them can spawn many detailed sub-conversations. But if they’re all located in the same place, it’s hard to browse through to find the parts that you’re actually trying to keep up with.
So I think that we want two things:
Separate conversational loci for each topic
A way of finding the best material to get up to speed on a given topic
For the first, I find myself thinking back to days of sub-forums on bulletin boards (lack of nested comments obviously a big problem there). That way you could have the different loci gathered together. For the second, I suspect careful curation is actually the right way to identify this content, but I’m not sure what the best way to set up infrastructure for this is.
It seems to me that for larger communities, there should be both: (a) a central core that everyone keeps up on, regardless of subtopical interest; and (b) topical centers that build in themselves, and that those contributing to that topical center are expected to be up on, but that members of other topical centers are not necessarily up on. (So that folks contributing to a given subtopical center should be expected to be keeping up with both that subtopic, and the central cannon.)
It seems to me that (a) probably should be located on LW or similar, and that, if/as the community grows, the number of posts within (a) can remain capped by some “keep up withable” number, with quality standards raising as needed.
Your (a) / (b) division basically makes sense to me.[*] I think we’re already at the point where we need this fracturing.
However, I don’t think that the LW format makes sense for (a). I’d probably prefer curated aggregation of good content for (a), with fairly clear lines about what’s in or out. It’s very unclear what the threshold for keeping up on LW should be.
Also, I quite like the idea of the topical centres being hosted in the same place as the core, so that they’re easy to find.
[*] A possible caveat is dealing with new community members nicely; I haven’t thought about this enough so I’m just dropping a flag here.
Also it makes it easy for mods to enforce the distinction. Instead of “I think this post and discussion is not suited for this place, could you delete it and take it elsewhere?” it can just be “This should actually be over in sub-forum X, so I’ve moved it there.”
In general if we don’t explicitly design institutions that will work well with a much larger community, we shouldn’t be surprised if things break down when the community grows.