I think it might be helpful to set a numerical cutoff and perhaps an editorial policy (EG so that terribly edited content or pure links don’t hit the front page) and then stick to that policy. Before seeing what you did here, I briefly thought that this sort of action would be good for the recent vegetarianism discussion, simply because it had more than 20 upvotes and raised apparently legitimate issues about socially calibrating oneself on pragmatic moral issues that require abstract thinking.
Of course, that discussion implicitly criticized SIAI as visible non-vegetarians. The implicit potential danger of promoting this but not that is that this can be seen as consistent with promoting things that build SIAI and LW organizationally and thus clearly benefits yourself as the founder. Some readers might infer the existence of such a policy and think it is off mission relative to the “refining the fine art of human rationality” tagline.
The lack of one intervention can give lie to an explanation for an second intervention if the explanation would justify things that weren’t done, like the way North Korea clearly had WMDs (and no oil reserves) but wasn’t invaded, but the details of why it “didn’t count” were never spelled out in plain english by policy makers, leaving people free to speculate.
Honestly, I think organizational development is instrumentally critical to the tagline mission, because institutions and F2F stuff can do a lot more a lot faster than mere blog posts, and there is all kinds of good literature to this effect. But these sorts of issues can be very tricky to get right if the inferential distance between the readership and the mods gets too large. The connection between institutional growth and front line effort isn’t always obvious to everyone.
Having a bright line editorial policy that can be seen to promote content that doesn’t obviously build the organization is probably useful for visibly signaling good faith from above. Another approach might be to directly explain part of the rational basis for pursuing certain kinds of institutional growth, so that instead of justifying this with “34 votes” you could have justified this with “34 votes and efficaciously pro-social”.
(Also, on a general note, the front page is pretty awesome right now, with more solid content and less meetup stuff than has been normal for a while. If someone is doing something to consciously bring about this state of affairs, they deserve credit.)
I think it might be helpful to set a numerical cutoff and perhaps an editorial policy (EG so that terribly edited content or pure links don’t hit the front page) and then stick to that policy. Before seeing what you did here, I briefly thought that this sort of action would be good for the recent vegetarianism discussion, simply because it had more than 20 upvotes and raised apparently legitimate issues about socially calibrating oneself on pragmatic moral issues that require abstract thinking.
Of course, that discussion implicitly criticized SIAI as visible non-vegetarians. The implicit potential danger of promoting this but not that is that this can be seen as consistent with promoting things that build SIAI and LW organizationally and thus clearly benefits yourself as the founder. Some readers might infer the existence of such a policy and think it is off mission relative to the “refining the fine art of human rationality” tagline.
The lack of one intervention can give lie to an explanation for an second intervention if the explanation would justify things that weren’t done, like the way North Korea clearly had WMDs (and no oil reserves) but wasn’t invaded, but the details of why it “didn’t count” were never spelled out in plain english by policy makers, leaving people free to speculate.
Honestly, I think organizational development is instrumentally critical to the tagline mission, because institutions and F2F stuff can do a lot more a lot faster than mere blog posts, and there is all kinds of good literature to this effect. But these sorts of issues can be very tricky to get right if the inferential distance between the readership and the mods gets too large. The connection between institutional growth and front line effort isn’t always obvious to everyone.
Having a bright line editorial policy that can be seen to promote content that doesn’t obviously build the organization is probably useful for visibly signaling good faith from above. Another approach might be to directly explain part of the rational basis for pursuing certain kinds of institutional growth, so that instead of justifying this with “34 votes” you could have justified this with “34 votes and efficaciously pro-social”.
(Also, on a general note, the front page is pretty awesome right now, with more solid content and less meetup stuff than has been normal for a while. If someone is doing something to consciously bring about this state of affairs, they deserve credit.)