So, I have lots of thoughts and feelings about this topic. But I should note that I am someone who has stayed on LessWrong, and who reads a sizable portion of everything that’s posted here, and thus there’s some difference between me and people who left.
In order to just get this comment out there, I’m going to intermingle observations with prescriptions, and not try to arrange this comment intelligently.
Individual branding. There are lots of benefits to having your own site. Yvain can write about whatever topics he wants without any concern about whether or not other people will think the subject matter is appropriate—it’s his site, and so it’s what he’s interested in. As well, people will remember that they saw it on SSC, rather than on LW, and so they’ll be much more likely to remember it as a post of his.
This could be recreated on LW either by giving post authors more control over the page appearance for things they post (a different page header?), having author / commenter images, or by shifting the “recent on rationality blogs” from a sidebar to a section of similar standing to Main and Discussion. I must admit I haven’t used reddit much, but I’m of the impression that the standard use case is a link to content elsewhere, which can be up/downvoted, and comments on the Reddit link. I doubt it’d be very difficult to tie blogs and LW accounts, so that whenever Nate posts to Minding our way, the so8res LW account posts a link to it in the Rationality Links section, and then any upvotes on the link would translate to karma for the so8res LW account.
Gresham’s Law. It applies to social groups as easily as money. Jerks make a conversation less fun for people who are not jerks, so they participate less, so the conversation is even more dominated by jerks, and so on. (Compare to counterfeit money making all money less trusted and valuable, so known good money is hoarded, so the average value of traded money is assumed to be even lower.) There needs to be some counter-force that encourages pleasant interactions and discourages unpleasant interactions, or it seems like this will happen anywhere.
There are a couple of ways to make LW warmer and fuzzier. I don’t know how well I expect that to work, and I think that’s hard to square with a “truth uber alles” approach.
One is to have active moderators paying attention to people who seem like jerks, hopefully starting with modeling good approaches / pointing to NVC principles / discussing, and then moving to red text and karma penalties and banhammers. I think we can get some novel, interesting work out of this suggestion if it’s heavy on the “we want to teach NVC to troublesome posters” and light on the “let’s just ban the trolls and the problem is solved,” but I’m not currently opposed to banning people who aren’t “trolls” but are just aggressively unfun for others.
Another approach is to move from a “main” and “discussion” split, where the difference is “seriousness,” to something like a “sensitivity” and “specificity” split, where the former is for speculative / broad / hastily stated ideas and run under “yes, and” norms, where the likelihood is high that something is there, and the latter is for fully baked / precise ideas and run under “no, but” norms. When there’s something you want to hold up to high scrutiny, you put it in “specificity,” and things upvoted to the top in that feed will be high quality; when there’s something that you want to suggest but don’t necessarily want to defend, you put it in “sensitivity.”
Coordination problems. Part of the problem with a gradual, systematic shift is that no individual can stop it. If there are, say, eight high-profile interesting posters who gradually posted and checked LW less and less in a mutually reinforcing fashion, then just one of them coming back won’t do much. They’ll see that the other seven are still missing, and more importantly, the other seven won’t notice they’re back, because they don’t check LW much! But this is a coordination problem, and coordination problems can be solved. If those eight got together and decided “yes, we will recolonize LW,” then the activation barrier could be crossed and LW could flip from the low-energy local minimum to the high-energy local minimum. But in order for this to make sense, it needs to be a good idea to recolonize LW!
Other things. The rationalist community may be at a point where a community blog is not where the community really resides, or where it should reside. LW originally existed to create a connected community of people able to think clearly about the future, in order to provide sufficient attention and funding to MIRI and other institutions (both for-profit and non-profit) that do work in offices. And now MIRI has the attention and funding it needs, and there is a community of people able to think clearly about the future. One possibility is to just discard LW, as a booster rocket that served its purpose, and another possibility is to try to recreate it to better serve a interstitial, communal role.
But moving from “the place where any idea will be considered for epistemic rationality reasons” to “the common ground of many causes that benefit from clear thinking” seems even worse for “truth uber alles” than trying to be warm and fuzzy, because you need the weird stuff to be enough out of the way and minimized that people think it’s PR-positive to advertise there, rather than a liability.
But I should note that I am someone who has stayed on LessWrong, and who reads a sizable portion of everything that’s posted here, and thus there’s some difference between me and people who left.
Out of curiosity, why have you stayed, why do you read as much as you do, and how are you different?
Out of curiosity, why have you stayed, why do you read as much as you do, and how are you different?
I suspect I find reading and posting on forums more intrinsically motivating than most people; this was one of my primary hobbies before LW, and it will likely be one of my primary hobbies after LW. LW was just the best forum I had found.
So, I have lots of thoughts and feelings about this topic. But I should note that I am someone who has stayed on LessWrong, and who reads a sizable portion of everything that’s posted here, and thus there’s some difference between me and people who left.
In order to just get this comment out there, I’m going to intermingle observations with prescriptions, and not try to arrange this comment intelligently.
Individual branding. There are lots of benefits to having your own site. Yvain can write about whatever topics he wants without any concern about whether or not other people will think the subject matter is appropriate—it’s his site, and so it’s what he’s interested in. As well, people will remember that they saw it on SSC, rather than on LW, and so they’ll be much more likely to remember it as a post of his.
This could be recreated on LW either by giving post authors more control over the page appearance for things they post (a different page header?), having author / commenter images, or by shifting the “recent on rationality blogs” from a sidebar to a section of similar standing to Main and Discussion. I must admit I haven’t used reddit much, but I’m of the impression that the standard use case is a link to content elsewhere, which can be up/downvoted, and comments on the Reddit link. I doubt it’d be very difficult to tie blogs and LW accounts, so that whenever Nate posts to Minding our way, the so8res LW account posts a link to it in the Rationality Links section, and then any upvotes on the link would translate to karma for the so8res LW account.
Gresham’s Law. It applies to social groups as easily as money. Jerks make a conversation less fun for people who are not jerks, so they participate less, so the conversation is even more dominated by jerks, and so on. (Compare to counterfeit money making all money less trusted and valuable, so known good money is hoarded, so the average value of traded money is assumed to be even lower.) There needs to be some counter-force that encourages pleasant interactions and discourages unpleasant interactions, or it seems like this will happen anywhere.
There are a couple of ways to make LW warmer and fuzzier. I don’t know how well I expect that to work, and I think that’s hard to square with a “truth uber alles” approach.
One is to have active moderators paying attention to people who seem like jerks, hopefully starting with modeling good approaches / pointing to NVC principles / discussing, and then moving to red text and karma penalties and banhammers. I think we can get some novel, interesting work out of this suggestion if it’s heavy on the “we want to teach NVC to troublesome posters” and light on the “let’s just ban the trolls and the problem is solved,” but I’m not currently opposed to banning people who aren’t “trolls” but are just aggressively unfun for others.
Another approach is to move from a “main” and “discussion” split, where the difference is “seriousness,” to something like a “sensitivity” and “specificity” split, where the former is for speculative / broad / hastily stated ideas and run under “yes, and” norms, where the likelihood is high that something is there, and the latter is for fully baked / precise ideas and run under “no, but” norms. When there’s something you want to hold up to high scrutiny, you put it in “specificity,” and things upvoted to the top in that feed will be high quality; when there’s something that you want to suggest but don’t necessarily want to defend, you put it in “sensitivity.”
Coordination problems. Part of the problem with a gradual, systematic shift is that no individual can stop it. If there are, say, eight high-profile interesting posters who gradually posted and checked LW less and less in a mutually reinforcing fashion, then just one of them coming back won’t do much. They’ll see that the other seven are still missing, and more importantly, the other seven won’t notice they’re back, because they don’t check LW much! But this is a coordination problem, and coordination problems can be solved. If those eight got together and decided “yes, we will recolonize LW,” then the activation barrier could be crossed and LW could flip from the low-energy local minimum to the high-energy local minimum. But in order for this to make sense, it needs to be a good idea to recolonize LW!
Other things. The rationalist community may be at a point where a community blog is not where the community really resides, or where it should reside. LW originally existed to create a connected community of people able to think clearly about the future, in order to provide sufficient attention and funding to MIRI and other institutions (both for-profit and non-profit) that do work in offices. And now MIRI has the attention and funding it needs, and there is a community of people able to think clearly about the future. One possibility is to just discard LW, as a booster rocket that served its purpose, and another possibility is to try to recreate it to better serve a interstitial, communal role.
But moving from “the place where any idea will be considered for epistemic rationality reasons” to “the common ground of many causes that benefit from clear thinking” seems even worse for “truth uber alles” than trying to be warm and fuzzy, because you need the weird stuff to be enough out of the way and minimized that people think it’s PR-positive to advertise there, rather than a liability.
Out of curiosity, why have you stayed, why do you read as much as you do, and how are you different?
I suspect I find reading and posting on forums more intrinsically motivating than most people; this was one of my primary hobbies before LW, and it will likely be one of my primary hobbies after LW. LW was just the best forum I had found.