As the admin of the effective altruism forum, it seems potentially useful to chip in here, or at least to let everyone know that I’m aware of and interested in this kind of conversation, since it seems like mostly everything that needs to has already been said.
The statement of the problem—online rationalist discourse is more fractured than is optimal—seems plausible to me.
I think that SSC and Scott’s blogging persona is becoming quite a bit bigger than LessWrong curently is—it’s got to the stage where he’s writing articles that are getting thousands of shares, republished in the New Statesman, etc. I think SSC’s solo blogging is striking a winning formula and shouldn’t be changed.
For the EA Forum, the risk has always been that it would merely fracture existing discussion rather than generating anew any of its own. People usually think enough about how their project could become a new competing standard because they have a big glorious vision of how it would be. The people who are enthusiastic enough to start a project tend to be way out on the bell curve in terms of estimating how successful it is likely to be, so it can be unthinkable that it would end up as ‘just another project’ like the others (e.g. Standards: https://xkcd.com/927/). I thought about this a lot when starting the forum, and despite the fact that significant effort has been put into promoting it to a clear existing target community, this is still a plausible objection to the forum.
That’s why I’m sceptical of the idea of creating new centres of gravity on subreddits. If the EA Forum is only uniting somewhat more than it’s fracturing, then it’s unlikely that a subreddit would do so. Why would a subreddit fare so much better at centralising discussion than LessWrong, the userbase that it’s directly trying to cannibalise, and which has been a supremely popular blog over multiple years? It’s so unlikely that it’s simply not going to happen.
As for the forum, it’s been growing slowly yet persistently, the output of content is going well, and the discourse is more constructive and action-oriented than one might have hoped for. Overall, I think it’s having a centralising effect on EA discussion moreso than a fracturing one, and a constructive effect on EA activity moreso than just addicting people to nonproductive discussion. Since the growth is good so far, the hope is that as it continues, it will attract more members from outside of existing communities. If the growth trajectory starts to reverse itself, then we’d have to revisit some of these questions, but essentially, so far, so good. Incremental updates are to be made, but not any complete overhaul.
LessWrong also has significant value as it is.
So what does that leave? My initial thoughts would be:
A handful of LessWrongers read the EA Forum and vice versa, but most don’t, and most are interested in, and not actively repulsed by the other group’s writing, to the extent that they make an effort to relate to it. So maybe we should feel less inhibited about posting articles from either source to the other, e.g. in comments where relevant, so that people can feel happy that they’re seeing more of the whole picture.
Maybe we should make a smart automatic feed for rationality and EA stuff, usingthisalgorithm but training it on the LW diaspora. This algorithm looks very effective, and wouldn’t create new problems by decentralising comments.
An embarassing number of people run personal blogs to some extent because of vanity, when the value of doing so (number of people who engage with them, community-building effect) is less. As discussed, it’s kind-of like a prisoners dilemma, for which the default solution should be to try to establish a social norm to ensure cooperation. Some articles could be written in this vein and promoted to encourage centralisation of discussion.
The overall mass of people thinking about Rationality, x-risk and effective altruism seems to be growing, though, which is good news, so this kind of discussion is not a crisis talk. Still, it does seem like an important discussion to have. Happy as always for comments and criticism.
The statement of the problem—online rationalist discourse is more fractured than is optimal—seems plausible to me.
I wonder if we should be distinguishing between essays and discussions here.
The subreddit might end up fracturing discussions by adding a new place to comment, but unifying essays by adding a place to find them without needing to subscribe to everybody’s personal blog.
Hey all,
As the admin of the effective altruism forum, it seems potentially useful to chip in here, or at least to let everyone know that I’m aware of and interested in this kind of conversation, since it seems like mostly everything that needs to has already been said.
The statement of the problem—online rationalist discourse is more fractured than is optimal—seems plausible to me.
I think that SSC and Scott’s blogging persona is becoming quite a bit bigger than LessWrong curently is—it’s got to the stage where he’s writing articles that are getting thousands of shares, republished in the New Statesman, etc. I think SSC’s solo blogging is striking a winning formula and shouldn’t be changed.
For the EA Forum, the risk has always been that it would merely fracture existing discussion rather than generating anew any of its own. People usually think enough about how their project could become a new competing standard because they have a big glorious vision of how it would be. The people who are enthusiastic enough to start a project tend to be way out on the bell curve in terms of estimating how successful it is likely to be, so it can be unthinkable that it would end up as ‘just another project’ like the others (e.g. Standards: https://xkcd.com/927/). I thought about this a lot when starting the forum, and despite the fact that significant effort has been put into promoting it to a clear existing target community, this is still a plausible objection to the forum.
That’s why I’m sceptical of the idea of creating new centres of gravity on subreddits. If the EA Forum is only uniting somewhat more than it’s fracturing, then it’s unlikely that a subreddit would do so. Why would a subreddit fare so much better at centralising discussion than LessWrong, the userbase that it’s directly trying to cannibalise, and which has been a supremely popular blog over multiple years? It’s so unlikely that it’s simply not going to happen.
As for the forum, it’s been growing slowly yet persistently, the output of content is going well, and the discourse is more constructive and action-oriented than one might have hoped for. Overall, I think it’s having a centralising effect on EA discussion moreso than a fracturing one, and a constructive effect on EA activity moreso than just addicting people to nonproductive discussion. Since the growth is good so far, the hope is that as it continues, it will attract more members from outside of existing communities. If the growth trajectory starts to reverse itself, then we’d have to revisit some of these questions, but essentially, so far, so good. Incremental updates are to be made, but not any complete overhaul.
LessWrong also has significant value as it is.
So what does that leave? My initial thoughts would be:
A handful of LessWrongers read the EA Forum and vice versa, but most don’t, and most are interested in, and not actively repulsed by the other group’s writing, to the extent that they make an effort to relate to it. So maybe we should feel less inhibited about posting articles from either source to the other, e.g. in comments where relevant, so that people can feel happy that they’re seeing more of the whole picture.
Maybe we should make a smart automatic feed for rationality and EA stuff, using this algorithm but training it on the LW diaspora. This algorithm looks very effective, and wouldn’t create new problems by decentralising comments.
An embarassing number of people run personal blogs to some extent because of vanity, when the value of doing so (number of people who engage with them, community-building effect) is less. As discussed, it’s kind-of like a prisoners dilemma, for which the default solution should be to try to establish a social norm to ensure cooperation. Some articles could be written in this vein and promoted to encourage centralisation of discussion.
The overall mass of people thinking about Rationality, x-risk and effective altruism seems to be growing, though, which is good news, so this kind of discussion is not a crisis talk. Still, it does seem like an important discussion to have. Happy as always for comments and criticism.
I wonder if we should be distinguishing between essays and discussions here.
The subreddit might end up fracturing discussions by adding a new place to comment, but unifying essays by adding a place to find them without needing to subscribe to everybody’s personal blog.