Since LW is going to get a lot of visitors someone should put an old post that would make an excellent first impression in a prominent position. I nominate How to Be Happy.
Maybe all of them together… because we have more than one topic here, and different people are interested in different things.
Something about AI math. Something about values. Something about improving your life. Something about helping others. Something about spreading rationality.
Re-reading that post, I came upon this entry, which seems particularly relevant:
We’re all living in a figment of Eliezer Yudkowsky’s imagination, which came into existence as he started contemplating the potential consequences of deleting a certain Less Wrong post.
Assuming we can trust the veracity of this “fact”, I think we have to begin to doubt Eliezer’s rationality. I mean, sure, the Streisand effect is a real thing, but causing Roko’s obscure thought experiment to become the subject of the #1 recently most read article on Slate, just by censoring it? Is that really realistic?
...
Seriously, did anyone actually see something like this coming?
I like this idea. Of course, right now the top thing on discussion is this thread, so here is probably as good a place as any to link the good stuff. One of my own personal favorites: Yvain’s Diseased Thinking. Or, more or less the same point in much more concise form: Eliezer’s Disguised Queries.
Since LW is going to get a lot of visitors someone should put an old post that would make an excellent first impression in a prominent position. I nominate How to Be Happy.
The problem isn’t that easy to solve. Consider that MIRI, then SIAI, already had a bad name before Roko’s post, and before I ever voiced any criticism. Consider this video from an actual AI conference, from March 2010, a few months before Roko’s post. Someone in the audience makes the following statement:
Whenever I hear the Singularity Institute talk I feel like they are a bunch of religious nutters...
Anyway, I must say, this display of egomania and unpleasantness on the part of SIAI folks makes me quite glad that SIAI doesn’t actually have a viable approach to creating AGI (so far, anyway…).
And this is Yudkowsky’s reply:
[...] Striving toward total rationality and total altruism comes easily to me. [...] I’ll try not to be an arrogant bastard, but I’m definitely arrogant. I’m incredibly brilliant and yes, I’m proud of it, and what’s more, I enjoy showing off and bragging about it. I don’t know if that’s who I aspire to be, but it’s surely who I am. I don’t demand that everyone acknowledge my incredible brilliance, but I’m not going to cut against the grain of my nature, either. The next time someone incredulously asks, “You think you’re so smart, huh?” I’m going to answer, “Hell yes, and I am pursuing a task appropriate to my talents.” If anyone thinks that a Friendly AI can be created by a moderately bright researcher, they have rocks in their head. This is a job for what I can only call Eliezer-class intelligence.
LessWrong would have to somehow distance itself from MIRI and Eliezer Yudkowsky.
LessWrong would have to somehow distance itself from MIRI and Eliezer Yudkowsky.
And become just another procrastination website.
Okay, there is still CFAR here. Oh wait, they also have Eliezer in the team! And they believe they can teach the rest of the world to become more rational. How profoundly un-humble or, may I say, cultish? Scratch the CFAR, too.
Actually, we should remove the whole Sequences. I mean, how could we credibly distance ourselves from Eliezer, if we leave hundreds of his articles as the core of this website? No one reads the Sequences anyway. Hell, these days no one even dares to say “Read the Sequences” anymore. Which is good, because telling people to read the Sequences has been criticized as cultish.
There are also some poisonous memes that make people think bad of us, so we should remove them from the website. Specifically: humans could be smarter than Einstein, machines could be smarter than humans, many worlds in quantum physics, atheism… I probably forgot some.
Oh, don’t forget to remove the “bragging threads”! Seriously, how immature.
What I meant by distancing LessWrong from Eliezer Yudkowsky is to become more focused on actually getting things done rather than rehashing Yudkowky’s cached thoughts.
LessWrong should finally start focusing on trying to solve concrete and specific technical problems collaboratively. Not unlike what the Polymath Project is doing.
To do so LessWrong has to squelch all the noise by stopping to care about getting more members and starting to strongly moderate non-technical off-topic posts.
I am not talking about censorship here. I am talking about something unproblematic. Since once the aim of LessWrong is clear, to tackle technical problems, moderation becomes an understandable necessity. And I’d be surprised if any moderation will be necessary once only highly technical problems are discussed.
Doing this will make people hold LessWrong in high esteem. Because nothing is as effective at proving that you are smart and rational than getting things done.
ETA How about trying to solve the Pascal’s mugging problem? It’s highly specific, technical, and does pertain rationality.
I guess I agree with you on some more meta level. LessWrong as it is now, is not optimal. (Yeah, it is very cheap to say this; the problem is coming to a solution and an agreement about how specifically would the optimal version look like.) LessWrong as it is now is a result of a historical process, and technical limitations given by almost unmaintainability of Reddit code. If we tried to design it from the scratch, we would certainly invent something different, with the experience we have now.
But I guess a part of the problem is general for web discussions, and seems to me somehow analogical to Gresham’s law: “lower-quality content drives out higher-quality content”. Specifically, people say they prefer higher-quality content, but they also want quantity on demand. However high quality there would be on a website, if people come a week later and find no new content, they will complain. But if there is a new content every week, people will learn to visit the site more often, and then they will complain about not having new content every day. There will never be enough. And the supply of the high-quality content is limited. If the choice is given to readers, at some point they will express preference for more content, even if it means somewhat lower quality. And then again, and again, until the quality drops down dramatically, but each single step felt like a reasonable trade-off.
There is also a systematic bias, that people who spend more time procrastinating online have more voice in online debates… for the obvious reasons. So the community consensus for “how much new content per day or per week do we actually need?” will be mostly given by the greatest online procrastinators, which means the answer will pretty much always be “more!”
So it would seem the solution for keeping the quality level is to remain very selective in accepting new content, even when it is met with disapproval of majority of the community. Which will provide not just anger, but also hundreds of rationalizations. (If we don’t have in average three new articles in Discussion every day, it means LessWrong is dying, and something must be done! Let’s post all Open Thread comments as separate articles.) But there is another problem...
It’s not just about readers, but also about writers. Writers want readers. Also, new writers are born from (a small minority of) readers. When the readers move to a different place, the old writers will start feeling lonely. And the new writers, they will publish even their high-quality content at the new place, because now this is their place. The tribe has moved elsewhere.
Something similar to what you want already exists. It’s here: the MIRI blog. But there is no debate there, because the tribe is not there: it’s at LessWrong. -- Okay, this is probably not exactly what you wanted. But my point is: Imagine that tomorrow, LW will split into two website: LW1 will contain exactly what you want, and LW2 will contain everything else. At the first moment, you will be satisfied. Most of readers will move to LW2, because there will be more content and more debate. They will check LW1 homepage once in a day, then once in a week, then once in a few months. And then, gradually, even the LW1 writers will slowly switch to publishing on LW2… because that’s where most of the readers will be; and the authors want to have readers. And after some time, the LW1 will be practically dead, and LW2 will be exactly what Less Wrong is now, and with the same complaints.
What if we link LW1 and LW2 together, so that everyone who has a user account on LW2 will automatically have a user account on LW1, and also LW2 homepage will display new articles on LW1 and vice versa. That will keep the lower-quality debate on LW2 and yet every new content on LW1 will immediately attract all LW2 readers. Writing for LW1 will have the same audience as LW2, just higher status! Isn’t that a best-of-both-worlds solution?
Unfortunately, I have just reinvented “Main” and “Discussion”. Which, as we already know, is not satisfying.
At this moment, I simply don’t know what to do anymore. I mean, I could try to come up with some plausible-sounding ideas, but I don’t trust them anymore.
It seems to me that what XiXiDu wants are not just any high quality posts and the classification of Lesswrong posts into high and low quality buckets fails to capture what he/she tried to convey.
It seems to me that XiXiDu talked about the lack of problem solving posts, the typical titles of which could be something like “Problem 123: Let’s brainstorm for possible angles how to attack it” or “Problem 456: Let’s try an unexpected approach 789 and see if it leads somewhere” (not unlike the aforementioned Polymath Project or maybe even Mathoverflow). Currently neither “Main” (which is mostly about presenting arguments that are already polished), nor “Discussion” (which is a mish mash of mostly links, open threads and posts, that are considered too short to be posted in Main) contains many posts of such type.
One solution might be a reputation net—people who liked this also liked that. With luck, there’d be a cluster of people who want the same sort of thing you do.
Since LW is going to get a lot of visitors someone should put an old post that would make an excellent first impression in a prominent position. I nominate How to Be Happy.
If an AI article is used, I nominate sorting pebbles into correct heaps.
Or perhaps a publicity boost would be better utilized by directing traffic to effective altruism information, e.g. at givewell or 80000 hours.
Maybe all of them together… because we have more than one topic here, and different people are interested in different things.
Something about AI math. Something about values. Something about improving your life. Something about helping others. Something about spreading rationality.
Let’s check featured articles on the main page on 19 July 2014....and...there we go.
“Eliezer Yudkowsky Facts” as a featured article. Wow, that’s certainly one way to react to this kind of criticism.
(I approve.)
Re-reading that post, I came upon this entry, which seems particularly relevant:
Assuming we can trust the veracity of this “fact”, I think we have to begin to doubt Eliezer’s rationality. I mean, sure, the Streisand effect is a real thing, but causing Roko’s obscure thought experiment to become the subject of the #1 recently most read article on Slate, just by censoring it? Is that really realistic?
...
Seriously, did anyone actually see something like this coming?
I like this idea. Of course, right now the top thing on discussion is this thread, so here is probably as good a place as any to link the good stuff. One of my own personal favorites: Yvain’s Diseased Thinking. Or, more or less the same point in much more concise form: Eliezer’s Disguised Queries.
Also, the top-ranked posts page, which I’m not sure is linked anywhere obvious.
The problem isn’t that easy to solve. Consider that MIRI, then SIAI, already had a bad name before Roko’s post, and before I ever voiced any criticism. Consider this video from an actual AI conference, from March 2010, a few months before Roko’s post. Someone in the audience makes the following statement:
Or consider the following comment by Ben Goertzel from 2004:
And this is Yudkowsky’s reply:
LessWrong would have to somehow distance itself from MIRI and Eliezer Yudkowsky.
And become just another procrastination website.
Okay, there is still CFAR here. Oh wait, they also have Eliezer in the team! And they believe they can teach the rest of the world to become more rational. How profoundly un-humble or, may I say, cultish? Scratch the CFAR, too.
While we are at it, let’s remove the articles “Tsuyoku Naritai!”, “Tsuyoku vs. the Egalitarian Instinct” and “A Sense That More Is Possible”. They contain the same arrogant ideas, and encourage the readers to think likewise. We don’t want more people trying to become awesome, or even worse, succeeding at that.
Actually, we should remove the whole Sequences. I mean, how could we credibly distance ourselves from Eliezer, if we leave hundreds of his articles as the core of this website? No one reads the Sequences anyway. Hell, these days no one even dares to say “Read the Sequences” anymore. Which is good, because telling people to read the Sequences has been criticized as cultish.
There are also some poisonous memes that make people think bad of us, so we should remove them from the website. Specifically: humans could be smarter than Einstein, machines could be smarter than humans, many worlds in quantum physics, atheism… I probably forgot some.
Oh, don’t forget to remove the “bragging threads”! Seriously, how immature.
Become?
What I meant by distancing LessWrong from Eliezer Yudkowsky is to become more focused on actually getting things done rather than rehashing Yudkowky’s cached thoughts.
LessWrong should finally start focusing on trying to solve concrete and specific technical problems collaboratively. Not unlike what the Polymath Project is doing.
To do so LessWrong has to squelch all the noise by stopping to care about getting more members and starting to strongly moderate non-technical off-topic posts.
I am not talking about censorship here. I am talking about something unproblematic. Since once the aim of LessWrong is clear, to tackle technical problems, moderation becomes an understandable necessity. And I’d be surprised if any moderation will be necessary once only highly technical problems are discussed.
Doing this will make people hold LessWrong in high esteem. Because nothing is as effective at proving that you are smart and rational than getting things done.
ETA How about trying to solve the Pascal’s mugging problem? It’s highly specific, technical, and does pertain rationality.
I guess I agree with you on some more meta level. LessWrong as it is now, is not optimal. (Yeah, it is very cheap to say this; the problem is coming to a solution and an agreement about how specifically would the optimal version look like.) LessWrong as it is now is a result of a historical process, and technical limitations given by almost unmaintainability of Reddit code. If we tried to design it from the scratch, we would certainly invent something different, with the experience we have now.
But I guess a part of the problem is general for web discussions, and seems to me somehow analogical to Gresham’s law: “lower-quality content drives out higher-quality content”. Specifically, people say they prefer higher-quality content, but they also want quantity on demand. However high quality there would be on a website, if people come a week later and find no new content, they will complain. But if there is a new content every week, people will learn to visit the site more often, and then they will complain about not having new content every day. There will never be enough. And the supply of the high-quality content is limited. If the choice is given to readers, at some point they will express preference for more content, even if it means somewhat lower quality. And then again, and again, until the quality drops down dramatically, but each single step felt like a reasonable trade-off.
There is also a systematic bias, that people who spend more time procrastinating online have more voice in online debates… for the obvious reasons. So the community consensus for “how much new content per day or per week do we actually need?” will be mostly given by the greatest online procrastinators, which means the answer will pretty much always be “more!”
So it would seem the solution for keeping the quality level is to remain very selective in accepting new content, even when it is met with disapproval of majority of the community. Which will provide not just anger, but also hundreds of rationalizations. (If we don’t have in average three new articles in Discussion every day, it means LessWrong is dying, and something must be done! Let’s post all Open Thread comments as separate articles.) But there is another problem...
It’s not just about readers, but also about writers. Writers want readers. Also, new writers are born from (a small minority of) readers. When the readers move to a different place, the old writers will start feeling lonely. And the new writers, they will publish even their high-quality content at the new place, because now this is their place. The tribe has moved elsewhere.
Something similar to what you want already exists. It’s here: the MIRI blog. But there is no debate there, because the tribe is not there: it’s at LessWrong. -- Okay, this is probably not exactly what you wanted. But my point is: Imagine that tomorrow, LW will split into two website: LW1 will contain exactly what you want, and LW2 will contain everything else. At the first moment, you will be satisfied. Most of readers will move to LW2, because there will be more content and more debate. They will check LW1 homepage once in a day, then once in a week, then once in a few months. And then, gradually, even the LW1 writers will slowly switch to publishing on LW2… because that’s where most of the readers will be; and the authors want to have readers. And after some time, the LW1 will be practically dead, and LW2 will be exactly what Less Wrong is now, and with the same complaints.
What if we link LW1 and LW2 together, so that everyone who has a user account on LW2 will automatically have a user account on LW1, and also LW2 homepage will display new articles on LW1 and vice versa. That will keep the lower-quality debate on LW2 and yet every new content on LW1 will immediately attract all LW2 readers. Writing for LW1 will have the same audience as LW2, just higher status! Isn’t that a best-of-both-worlds solution?
Unfortunately, I have just reinvented “Main” and “Discussion”. Which, as we already know, is not satisfying.
At this moment, I simply don’t know what to do anymore. I mean, I could try to come up with some plausible-sounding ideas, but I don’t trust them anymore.
It seems to me that what XiXiDu wants are not just any high quality posts and the classification of Lesswrong posts into high and low quality buckets fails to capture what he/she tried to convey. It seems to me that XiXiDu talked about the lack of problem solving posts, the typical titles of which could be something like “Problem 123: Let’s brainstorm for possible angles how to attack it” or “Problem 456: Let’s try an unexpected approach 789 and see if it leads somewhere” (not unlike the aforementioned Polymath Project or maybe even Mathoverflow). Currently neither “Main” (which is mostly about presenting arguments that are already polished), nor “Discussion” (which is a mish mash of mostly links, open threads and posts, that are considered too short to be posted in Main) contains many posts of such type.
One solution might be a reputation net—people who liked this also liked that. With luck, there’d be a cluster of people who want the same sort of thing you do.
Why don’t we?
The Useful Idea of Truth