LW is likely currently on something like a Pareto frontier of several values, where it is difficult to promote one value better without sacrificing others. I think that this is true, and also think that this is probably what OP believes.
The above post renders one axis of that frontier particularly emotionally salient, then expresses willingness to sacrifice other axes for it.
I appreciate that the post explicitly points out that is willing to sacrifice these other axes. It nevertheless skims a little bit over what precisely might be sacrificed.
Let’s name some things that might be sacrificed:
(1) LW is a place newcomers to rationality can come to ask questions, make posts, and participate in discussion, hopefully without enormous barrier to entry. Trivial inconveniences to this can have outsized effects.
(2) LW is a kind of bulletin board and coordination center for things of general interest to an actual historical communities. Trivial inconveniences to sharing such information can once again have an outsized effect.
(3) LW is a place to just generally post things of interest, including fiction, showerthoughts, and so on, to the kind of person who is interested in rationality, AI, cryonics, and so on.
All of these are also actual values. They impact things in the world.
Some of these could also have essays written about them, that would render them particularly salient, just like the above essay.
But the actual question here is not one of sacred values—communities with rationality are great! -- but one of tradeoffs. I don’t think I understand those tradeoffs even the slightest bit better after reading the above.
I don’t think you’ve made a convincing case that LW is on a Pareto frontier of these values, and I don’t know what such a case would look like, either. I’ve personally made several suggestions here in the comments (for LW feature improvements) that would make some things better without necessarily making anybody worse off. Feature suggestions would take resources to implement, but as far as I can tell the LW team has sufficient resources to act on whatever it considers its highest-EV actions.
As for the rest of your post: I appreciate that you mention other values to consider, and that you don’t want them to be traded off for one another. In particular, I strongly agree that I do not want to increase barriers to entry for newcomers.
But I strongly disapprove of your imputing motives into the OP that aren’t explicitly there, or that aren’t there without ridiculous numbers of caveats (like the suggestions OP himself flagged as “terrible ideas”).
OP even ends with a disclaimer that “this essay is not as good as I wished it would be”. In contrast, this entire section of yours reads to me as remarkably uncharitable and in bad faith:
The above post renders one axis of that frontier particularly emotionally salient, then expresses willingness to sacrifice other axes for it.
I appreciate that the post explicitly points out that is willing to sacrifice these other axes. It nevertheless (as is common for this genre of rhetoric, which wants you to care deeply about one axis) skims a little bit over what precisely might be sacrificed.
...
Some of these could also have essays written about them, that would render them particularly salient, just like the above essay. You could try to create a mood of desperate urgency where sacrificing other values to accomplish them seems necessary.
But the actual question here is not one of sacred values—communities with rationality are great! --
If you want to suggest that OP is part of a “genre of rhetoric”: make the case that it is, name it explicitly. Make your own words vulnerable, put your own neck out there.
Instead of making your own object-level arguments, you’re imputing bad motives into the OP, insinuating things without pointing to specific quotes, and suggesting that arguments for your case could be made, but that you won’t make the effort to make them.
Circling back to the object level of the essay, namely improving the culture here: As I mention in my comment on the Karma system, which I’ve explicitly singled out in my suggestions for improvement: Your comment is half decent, half terrible, but the only way I have to interact with it is to assign it a single scalar (upvote or downvote). So I choose to strong-downvote it but leave this comment for clarity.
I meant a relative Pareto frontier, vis-a-vis the LW team’s knowledge and resources. I think your posts on how to expand the frontier are absolutely great, and I think they (might) add to the available area within the frontier.
“If you want to suggest that OP is part of a “genre of rhetoric”: make the case that it is, name it explicitly.”
I mean, most of OP is about evoking emotion about community standards; deliberately evoking emotions is a standard part of rhetoric. (I don’t know what genre—ethos if you want to invoke Aristotle—but I don’t think it particularly matters.) OP explicitly says that he would like LW to be smaller—i.e., sacrifice other values, for the value he’s just evoked emotion about. I take this to just be a description of how the essay works, not a pejorative imputation of motives.
I could definitely have done better, and I too went through several drafts, and the one I posted was probably posted because I was tired of editing rather than because it was best. I have removed the sentences in the above that seem most pejorative.
LW is likely currently on something like a Pareto frontier of several values, where it is difficult to promote one value better without sacrificing others. I think that this is true, and also think that this is probably what OP believes.
The above post renders one axis of that frontier particularly emotionally salient, then expresses willingness to sacrifice other axes for it.
I appreciate that the post explicitly points out that is willing to sacrifice these other axes. It nevertheless skims a little bit over what precisely might be sacrificed.
Let’s name some things that might be sacrificed:
(1) LW is a place newcomers to rationality can come to ask questions, make posts, and participate in discussion, hopefully without enormous barrier to entry. Trivial inconveniences to this can have outsized effects.
(2) LW is a kind of bulletin board and coordination center for things of general interest to an actual historical communities. Trivial inconveniences to sharing such information can once again have an outsized effect.
(3) LW is a place to just generally post things of interest, including fiction, showerthoughts, and so on, to the kind of person who is interested in rationality, AI, cryonics, and so on.
All of these are also actual values. They impact things in the world.
Some of these could also have essays written about them, that would render them particularly salient, just like the above essay.
But the actual question here is not one of sacred values—communities with rationality are great! -- but one of tradeoffs. I don’t think I understand those tradeoffs even the slightest bit better after reading the above.
I don’t think you’ve made a convincing case that LW is on a Pareto frontier of these values, and I don’t know what such a case would look like, either. I’ve personally made several suggestions here in the comments (for LW feature improvements) that would make some things better without necessarily making anybody worse off. Feature suggestions would take resources to implement, but as far as I can tell the LW team has sufficient resources to act on whatever it considers its highest-EV actions.
As for the rest of your post: I appreciate that you mention other values to consider, and that you don’t want them to be traded off for one another. In particular, I strongly agree that I do not want to increase barriers to entry for newcomers.
But I strongly disapprove of your imputing motives into the OP that aren’t explicitly there, or that aren’t there without ridiculous numbers of caveats (like the suggestions OP himself flagged as “terrible ideas”).
OP even ends with a disclaimer that “this essay is not as good as I wished it would be”. In contrast, this entire section of yours reads to me as remarkably uncharitable and in bad faith:
If you want to suggest that OP is part of a “genre of rhetoric”: make the case that it is, name it explicitly. Make your own words vulnerable, put your own neck out there.
Instead of making your own object-level arguments, you’re imputing bad motives into the OP, insinuating things without pointing to specific quotes, and suggesting that arguments for your case could be made, but that you won’t make the effort to make them.
You even end on an applause light ffs.
Circling back to the object level of the essay, namely improving the culture here: As I mention in my comment on the Karma system, which I’ve explicitly singled out in my suggestions for improvement: Your comment is half decent, half terrible, but the only way I have to interact with it is to assign it a single scalar (upvote or downvote). So I choose to strong-downvote it but leave this comment for clarity.
I meant a relative Pareto frontier, vis-a-vis the LW team’s knowledge and resources. I think your posts on how to expand the frontier are absolutely great, and I think they (might) add to the available area within the frontier.
“If you want to suggest that OP is part of a “genre of rhetoric”: make the case that it is, name it explicitly.”
I mean, most of OP is about evoking emotion about community standards; deliberately evoking emotions is a standard part of rhetoric. (I don’t know what genre—ethos if you want to invoke Aristotle—but I don’t think it particularly matters.) OP explicitly says that he would like LW to be smaller—i.e., sacrifice other values, for the value he’s just evoked emotion about. I take this to just be a description of how the essay works, not a pejorative imputation of motives.
I could definitely have done better, and I too went through several drafts, and the one I posted was probably posted because I was tired of editing rather than because it was best. I have removed the sentences in the above that seem most pejorative.