New Singularity.org
Here is the welcome blog post for the new singularity.org.
There’s a bug on the media page, and another with blog comments, and these bugs will be fixed later today.
Here is the welcome blog post for the new singularity.org.
There’s a bug on the media page, and another with blog comments, and these bugs will be fixed later today.
The content seems more useful and directs me towards specific actions. And I particularly like the media page. (Hiding and showing the pictures is sort of gimmicky but for some reason I like the gimmick. Having the picture show up felt like a “pleasant” surprise)
But the vibe of the website feels less professional to me than the old website. Part of the issue is the gratuitous use of clip-art, part of it is font choice and color scheme. (Your logo doesn’t stand out very well against the dull blue background, and there are several different random fonts getting used, few of which seem to match the feel of either of the sleeker fonts used in “Singularity Institute” title.)
Yes, I have to say that the unprofessional vibe given off feels absolutely horrible to me. I’m surprised that the designers of the site appear to be the same as previously, since the previous style and vibe felt very good to me, and this feels so much like the opposite.
The current crop of clip-art would really need to go, I’d say. Nothing looks as hasty and unprofessional as stereotypical clip-art. You especially shouldn’t with your clip-art choices communicate that you’re a very formal, ordinary and uncreative men-in-suits organisation, since you’re really not (and if you were, who would think you competent or even sincere in undertaking such an unusual mission? Stereotypical and ordinary men-in-suits are the antithesis of creativity, exceptionality and thinking-something-that-isn’t-a-politically-correct-cliche).
The current site design could perhaps be made to rock if all the clip-art was changed out to a new theme that was creative and original (and you) and wouldn’t really look like clip-art. Some associated changes to color scheme and fonts might be required, but perhaps not a complete redesign.
Btw, am I hallucinating, or did you already change the colors slightly?
Anyway, I’d like to say that I currently like how the colors look. (Though doesn’t have much to do with the points that I was critical on.)
Thanks for your feedback. Just a small note: the graphics on the website were developed specifically for the website, and are thus not clip art.
Huh. Obviously Rain and I disagree here, but practically every image looked like something I’d seen before. (Hand holding globe, two hands shaking firmly, etc). My suspicion is that your graphic artist in many cases took existing clip art and modified it to match the style of the website. Which is better than just grabbing the closest clip-art you can find, but still: the whole reason clip-art is bad is not because it actually is clip-art, but because it looks like something you got off the shelf.
They might not actually be clip art, but they definitely look like clip art. Even the ones that are specific to the Singularity Institute have a generalized, vanilla feel to them.
If you want me to be entirely honest? Scrap that whole design and get a different company to design your website.
They didn’t look like clip art to me; they were too appropriate for the presented subjects.
Also, ’twould be odd for clip art factories to make clip art with the Singularity Institute logo in it. :)
To me, when I first saw them, they definitely looked like clip art, except that in some cases the SI logo had been edited in.
I wish I could upvote what Raemon said several times: “the whole reason clip-art is bad is not because it actually is clip-art, but because it looks like something you got off the shelf.”
The “What we do” page contains three short summarizing sentences, but no links to further information. A tiny bug: the second picture has alt text “photo_what_we_do_2″.
On the “Get involved” page, there are “read more” links, but the impulse is to click on the pictures. These should lead to the same places as “Read more”. Ditto for pictures at the bottom of “Media” and on the “About” page, and the picture through the “Read our blog” link in the header of all pages. There is also a phrase “Another important way you can help is by reading these important papers”. Too much “important” (I’d cut both).
Of the first three buttons in the menu, two are “Donate” and “Get involved”, with only mostly content-less “What we do” in between. This doesn’t seem optimal for new visitors, who first need to be convinced that what SingInst does is worthwhile (and what it is, exactly).
Is there a good reason for the auto-hiding of pictures on the “Media” page? (For example, it might really look worse if shown all at once...) It looks out-of-place, an unnecessary cog. Also, “no GD” at top-left corners of all pictures (what does this represent?) reads like “no good”, which is no good.
A lot of empty space on “Research” before the section “What to Read First”, due to vertical arrangement of paper categories.
The few-pages-long meaningful summary of SingInst’s mission was hard to find. I eventually found it by googling; on the site it turns out to be linked from the top of the “Research” page in a list together with outgoing links to other sites, so in my mind it got categorized as extra-content and as a result I didn’t notice it when looking for the introduction. Should probably be set apart somehow, with more words to draw attention to it.
I wasn’t sure there was a better arrangement. I do want to break up the papers into categories like that. Do you have any suggestions?
Also, the media page is fixed now.
Use horizontal arrangement, with pictures on the left and lists of papers on the right of the pictures, as some kind of bullet list instead of the horizontal line separators, and with fixed left margin/table column (so that the lists keep the left margin and don’t flow around the pictures). Stack the three categories one below another. Not sure how that’d look though, but the extra-space problem will go away.
Anyway, the issue is already mostly fixed with the papers placed at the bottom, and the summary link is visible now.
Fixed.
Fixed.
Broken upon moving to our server, waiting on designer to fix.
In my opinion, you guys should try to project a somewhat academic vibe: no personal stories, cite established researchers, qualify outlandish seeming claims with words like could and might, etc. Focus on communicating with the smartest laypeople (young and old) who come across the website in a straightforward, credible, and intelligent way. For a quick example, on this page, I would suggest “proving the safety of artificial minds” over “foundations of Friendly AI theory”.
A link on the homepage or tab in the navigation specifically targeted at academics would be cool. The research tab is a good start, but “Research” doesn’t say “click here if you’re an academic” the same way “For Academics” might. I’m suggesting that as soon as someone has clicked this hypothetical link, you start assuming they are a smart, skeptical CS professor who is trying to shoot you down and hasn’t read any of your stuff yet.
Who are the most important people you are hoping to influence with your website and how are you hoping to influence them?
What’s going on with this page? http://singularity.org/get-started/
I agree that you should cut down on the number of fonts.
Providing papers in HTML form in addition to PDF could cut down on friction associated with reading them.
Donate link should probably be on the far right, not the far left. Keep in mind people will probably be reading those links from left to right. So you should start with gentle introductory material, then technical stuff, then stuff related to how you can help.
More whitespace to the sides of main page text would look more professional I suspect. Something feels off about pages like this one (http://singularity.org/strategic-insight/) whose content is mainly text.
E.g. you could have a page called “An Academic Introduction to the Singularity” and start by quoting IJ good to clarify the meaning of “singularity”, then David Chalmers:
In general, IMO you should be quoting more high status people, to quickly demonstrate that the ideas you research are worth paying attention to. E.g. the video interview you used to have with Peter Norvig (and possibly others in that series of video interviews; why were those removed by the way?), Summit speakers, and the high status people Luke references on the Facing the Singularity homepage.
I agree: remove as many trivial inconveniences as possible.
The site is slow on my not-so-new PC with win32/WinXP/Chrome. When I wheel-scroll, there is a 300ms-ish delay before the page moves. This almost never happens for any site, so it stands out. On another newer PC (win32/Win7/Chrome), the blue background loads slowly in jumps (it’s a 1MB png file hosted on siai.helldesign.net).
And in browsers that unload images in tabs that aren’t focused (I know that Firefox nightly does this, not sure if has got into release versions yet), the background image takes up to a second to reappear when refocusing the tab (which is quite distracting).
Also, Google Pagespeed suggests some improvements: most seem to be solvable simply by installing a compression/caching plugin e.g. W3 Total Cache (this is what is being used on FacingTheSingularity.com). (Optimisations in page loading improve SEO.)
They’re running Apache, so another option would be to install Google’s mod_pagespeed which will automatically make a lot of speed optimizations.
(Disclaimer: I work on mod_pagespeed.)
This has been fixed, I think. Is it faster for you, now?
No, still slow in about the same way (could be better, but I don’t have a quantitative measure; definitely slower than LW, I’ve just compared).
“Donate” should not be the leftmost tab.
It should go
About
What We Do
Research
Media
Get Involved
Donate
I’ve come to agree. Done.
Good job!
It may just be me, but it seems a bit strange to have the donate tab be the first one. It feels like you’re trying to push me to donate, which is off-putting. I’d at least put it behind the “what we do” tab, or maybe further down.
Unlike Raemon, I like the color scheme (Facebook made blue cool again). However, for me the site appears lacking in usability.
For example, I expected on the front page (or any other page) a number of terminal links you want people to click, say, in a column along the right side. By terminal I mean links to papers, ideas, examples, conclusions, not other collections of links. Each such terminal link should be a summary of what’s inside. An extreme example of this approach (which works well in news media) is The Register.
There is also very little use of mouseover menu expansion (“what would happen if I clicked on...?” without actually clicking). While it can be distracting and annoying when done badly, it’s practically expected from a modern site.
The use of PDFs as the only document format, to me, greatly detracts from usability, because it is harder to navigate than HTML, slower to download and in some cases (e.g. mobile) requires a separate application. PDF should be an option for those who like pretty formatting for printing and reading offline.
I presume that it is only “unusually functional” for those who use Adobe Reader.
I hope you are doing some A/B testing with this page. If not, you ought to.
For the record, I don’t object to the colors that were chosen, just the way they’re currently used in some places.
I like it. It’s an attractive site with good calls to action and up-front display of content such as papers and articles, along with a much better domain name.
The minor changes mentioned in other comments (double use of the word ‘important’, the text ‘no GD’ on images, and I also get slow scrolling on my 2011 Macbook Air with Chrome) should be easy to make to sand off the rough edges.
Thanks for putting it together and finally getting it out.
Ugly as HELL [1]. I have not actually read any of the text, I will simply list elements I dislike, in the order I saw them. My opinion matters little, I suggest you get some critique from Hacker News [2].
logo does not stand out
grey buttons have a weird volume, I think the white border causes this
RSS logo stands out more than SI logo, I have not seen RSS logos used to denote a blog in years
text in search box has a weird white glow, glass effect is ugly, magnifying glass icon is aliased, it changing to orange on hover makes it look like you just learned about complementary colors.
text in slideshow is aliased (Win7, Chrome latest)
grey android thing in second slideshow panel is creepy
big light blue clipart-thingies look childish
font on http://singularity.org/what-we-do/ is weird, the letter c looks like e
meaningless math symbols in the background make me cringe
My impressions the moment I saw the main page: old, cheap, childish, scammy. I would prefer clean, if not minimalist.
[1] http://helldesign.net/ everything they do is ugly, their own website included
[2] http://news.ycombinator.com/ they won’t like it
Assuming you’re soliciting comments on the design...
A few things on the front page: What’s the “Go to next page” for? There are links all over the page, what could “next” page possibly mean?
What’s the text box on the left? If I type random text into it and hit return, I get two error messages to the effect that I’m STOOPID because I did something WRONG. It appears that what was expected was an email address, but the text around it doesn’t suggest that very well. And second most prominent thing on the front page is not the place to put a sign-up for a mailing list.
“Singularity Institute produces breakthrough research on emerging technologies.” That (a) needs a “the”, and (b) communicates nothing. The mission statement on the “next” page says only “the Singularity Institute exists to ensure that the creation of smarter-than-human intelligence benefits society” and a bunch more links. This is making a lot of work for the reader trying to find out what you actually do. The “research summary” link goes to a paper that is not a research summary.
Will fix, thanks.
“Other publications” link shouldn’t be as prominent on Research page as it currently is: it’s more like “Obsolete publications”, which I think should also be noted on the page itself. Translations of papers should go to their own page.
I like the shade of blue. The site has a lot of the information I want, and reasonable information I wouldn’t have thought of including.
Now for the complaints....
“Read our blog” is too similar to the background. If you’re going to have an RSS icon, clicking on it should give access to an RSS feed. Just plain “Blog” is probably better. I’d sooner see it on the top bar.
These days, top bar topics tend to have drop down menus, and I think they make finding out what’s on a site more convenient.
Media page: Do not put text across people’s faces.
It would be nice to have all the singularity summit videos available, with listings for speakers and topics.
I don’t know whether I’m typical in this, but I’m not fond of images that change automaically (like at the top of the videos page). I find that they offer a lot of distraction for little information.
“Logistics” is a vague name for a conference announcement. How about “Calendar”?
Should “research in human rationality” include something about using rationality to improve one’s life?
I’m uncertain about the big icons on the get-involved and about pages. For me they have a slight vibe of “we don’t trust people to pay attention to the text”, but for all I know, that’s reasonable. What’s your line of thought?
“Reviewing and Proof-reading SI publications” should have a link to the publications. “Assist wuth publicly listed challenge grants” should have a link to where they’re listed.
I prefer black text on white background (instead of #4A535D text on #F6F8FC background), because it is easier to read. Especially when the text is long (Singularity FAQ), lower contrast makes eyes more tired.
A thousand times yes.
http://contrastrebellion.com/
How ’bout now?
Much better!
on the about page “Meet the Team” links to http://singularity.org/visiting-fellows/ instead of http://singularity.org/team/
Works for me...
My guess is that it’s currently broken for some browsers but not others.
I’m using Firefox (Windows), and currently ALL the links on http://singularity.org/about/ take me to http://singularity.org/visiting-fellows/
Was working fine earlier, though.
(And actually, the six links in the Donate-WhatWeDo-etc bar are exceptions in that they work on that page also. But all the others take me to see the Visiting Fellows, including the link to the blog, to Facebook, to Less Wrong...)
How ’bout now? (May need to load then refresh once.)
Works.
Now it works for me too.
The link “applications for new Visiting Fellows” on http://singularity.org/visiting-fellows/ just redirects back to the same page. Also, Thomas Colthurst’s entry has overflowing italics.
Fixed.
Thomas Colthurst still has everything after “Barons” italicised.
There appears to be a 404 at http://singularity.org/techsummaries/brain-computer-interfaces/
Fixed.
The website left me a positive impression. From my cursory exploration, the only thing that stood out negatively was the existence of the subsection of Life Stories inside Media; I think this subsection will need to be handled with care.
I’ve come to agree. I removed Life Stories now.
Web of Trust, a browser app designed to build a website security rating and trustworthiness oriented community, is warning me that singularity.org has untrustworthy attributes. I don’t find it particularly likely that singularity.org is trying something malicious, but whatever the circumstances have been, I would like to know why this has occurred, or at least to point it out. Could be a false positive on WoT’s part, or something else (I know almost nothing about web security).
If it is simply a case of WoT failing to be thorough enough in how it weighs ratings and avoiding false positives, then perhaps someone could recommend something else? I like the idea of WoT and would like to either help improve it or find a better service. EDIT: It has more ratings now and WoT no longer warns about it.
WoT appears to rely on users rating the website, and singularity.org would probably be a website that very few WoT users have rated (since it is a fairly niche website), so each rating has a large influence on the overall rating.
And the one comment is complaining about “Mass mailing of non-thematic Forums” (according to google translate), so that person possibly rated it low because they were annoyed by SI.
I see. I rated it highly to try and counter it. Perhaps if a few other LWers did this it would shift the rating sufficiently. And as for me, I will not assume reliability in user-rated systems.
I am not fond of the blue, nor of the (what looks like) clip art on the Donate page, Get Involved page, Media page...etc. To me, personally, the site lights up the part of my brain that screams “SCAM! SCAM!” Probably because it looks like it was made by one of those pre-made websites where the owner fills in the content (I’m not actually sure what they’re called.)
I suggest developing an idea of what you want people to feel when they see the site, then base your design around that.
I agree with the “scam” sentiment: for me, this picture is a little too staged, at a glance, the stuff on the whiteboard doesn’t look like work-in-progress, rather it looks the junk that ends up in stock photos, and the body language of Luke and Louie(?) pattern-matches to people in stock photos too.
(That said, on closer inspection, it’s clear that it is actually decision theoretic stuff. edit: Not that the layman, or even most tech-heads interested in “the singularity”, would know this.)
NEW GAME: name the the equations and diagrams in the photo on the Donate page.
Correct answers win karma, I predict.
For all x, if x is a comment in response to Luke’s ‘NEW GAME’ comment and it contains the correct answer, then x will have positive karma at the prediction closing time.
It turns out that correct answers don’t win as much karma as predictions that correct answers will win karma.
It is somewhat puzzling to me that my PredictionBook evangelizing is well received here, but the fraction of LessWrongers that actually use PredictionBook is vanishingly small. Frankly, it is a scandal to Less Wrong that its high-karma members don’t bother to publicly record their own predictions and yet continue to expect others to believe in the efficacy of the techniques taught in its core texts, like The Sequences.
If you want us to believe your beliefs pay rent, why not show us the receipts?
So I don’t know about anyone else, but as far as I can tell my own personal true rejection is: It’s just too hard to remember to click over to predictionbook.com and actually type something in when I make a prediction. I’ve tried the things that seem obvious to help with this, but the small inconvenience has so far been too much
PredictionBook is a horrible piece of software that had major features that didn’t even properly work until a couple weeks ago. Is it any surprise it isn’t well-received when it sucks so badly?
The email has worked longer than it has not worked and is, in fact, currently working. There were no discernible differences in usage of it...
PB has very consistently not been popular on LW. “Major features not working” is not peoples’ true rejection of it.
I really don’t think this is correct. The first e-mail I ever received from them was last week. It also sent the exact same e-mail twice. Therefore I still claim that their e-mail system doesn’t work.
In addition to that, the UI is awful, the site is often quite slow, and their statistics package is quite rudimentary. There is no filtering mechanism for determining which predictions are “serious”—the result is that many people post public predictions that should be private, but aren’t.
Eh. Gmail collapses the duplicates for me, so I barely noticed. And you are being notified...
(Also, you’ve only used PB since last June or so, while it’s been running since October 2009.)
It seems pretty straightforward to me.
That was much improved after Trike did the SQL profiling.
Yes, because varying proper scoring rules are why no one is using it?
This only affects Happenstance, not recording your own predictions.
All of these are annoying to various extents, but do they really explain the near-zero uptake?
This particular shame based instance of evangelism isn’t well received.
Eliezer frequently makes predictions and even bets. Luke makes predictions from time to time as well. Not sure about Yvain. Your complaint seems to be that they don’t happen to personally use your preferred website.
As far as I’m concerned you would have struggled to have come up with a more powerful way to persuade us to not use prediction book.
Frequently? The http://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Bets_registry lists just 3 bets by Eliezer (full disclaimer: 1 involving me), which even dating just from 2008 (the first listed one) represents less than 1 a year.
(If we want to bring in the AI box experiments as involving money and so being bets, it’s still less than 1 a year since that pushes the interval back to the early 2000s while only adding in like 4 bets.)
Translation from human: “I can think of multiple instances without trying hard.”
Terrorists frequently attack us.
Seems like a reasonable claim. Certainly compared to how often they attack us.
Perhaps. We’ll see.
Maybe I am being too tough on them, but I don’t think so. Yes, Eliezer makes bets now and then; Luke has even used PredictionBook before (he currently has 2 public predictions on his userpage). On the other hand, what would you think of a martial artist who claimed to have techniques superior to those used by the pros (Bayes versus Science), yet refused to spar publicly (let alone fight) more than a few times a year?
Upon reconsideration, I now see that I was following a poor strategy of increasing PredictionBook usage. I won’t retract my comment, but I probably won’t make one like that again.
If Luke, Yvain or Eliezer claimed that they were superior at achieving predictionbook status than others and refused to demonstrate then I would see your point. As it happens nothing they have said indicates that they ought to be able to dominate on predictionbook (although I would expect them to be better than average).
I also note that predictionbook represents a lost purpose. If you orient your thinking and what predictions you make according to what will make you most impressive on predicitonbook you will not necessarily think the best thoughts or subject your belief’s actual weak points to testing. This means I’d say it is more useful for those whose status is not tied up with their performance.
Thankyou.
Bayes’ rule
The possible futures decision tree
Something to do with the normal distribution, top left in blue
AIXI, in red between your hands?
Correct!
Correct!
Not specific enough, I’m afraid.
Yes!
Looks like no-one else is going to answer—what is the thing top left in blue?
If my memory serves, there is a perception-action loop diagram shown quite prominently in it.
Correct! (That specific one was copied from Shane Legg’s dissertation.)
But to the common observer, it doesn’t look that way. The whole thing has an artificial feel. I was going to make a quick sketch of what I think would be a better idea, but found something better that is already in use. Try to implement something like this.
Replace the educational promotion-type information with excerpts or short summaries from research papers. Especially things that will raise interest in the topic, with “read more” links that link to more of that research paper. Pictures should have warm colors and look natural, not staged.
Highlight Singularity Summits, with videos and/or pictures (preferably both) to show that you’re actually doing something. Put a lot of focus on how active the community is (not by typing “our community is active!” but by having pictures of rationality camps, singularity summits, and your members discussing things.) Again, emphasis on warm colors. this is good, this is not. They are wearing the same shirt. They are staging “Hmm!” faces. It doesn’t read well.
Increase the contrast of the type.
Get rid of the faux-reflective surfaces. It, again, reads as amateurish.
edit forgot to add: Videos and other rich media should have links from the front page. The two videos from the singularity summit took too long to find.
There’s a spelling error on the first section of the Research page:
“If you’re new to the entire topic, see the 5-page Reducing Long-Term Catastrohpic Risks from Artificial Intelligence.”
It should be Catastrophic.
Fixed.
This link on the research page: Complex Value Systems are Required to Realize Valuable Futures.
Is broken.
Fixed.
I like the new site; looks very good, and seems to guide me to interesting places nicely.
A few nitpicks though:
Many of the reference sections have URLs that aren’t links.
The summary is fairly hidden: it’s 2 clicks from the front page (
Get Started→research summary). If this is meant to be a bit of an introduction, it might be nice to be more obvious. The “Recommend readings” section could be better formatted, so that the text is more obviously separated from the references. (And, the in-text citations aren’t hyperlinks.)The
keep up with the latest developments herebox on the front page should be have some indication that it is an email field.Having an “Up” link, or some sort of breadcrumbs would be nice: gives the user a sense of position, which is especially important for someone entering via a search engine, or external link to a deep page. (Especially from each tech summary up to the tech summary intro, since these are pages that people are relatively likely to link to/find via a search engine.)
The Media and updates looks a little bit like a blog archive with some external coverage mixed in: it might be nice if internal and external links were more distinct. (Not sure the best way to do this: maybe entirely separate sections, or just within each month. Maybe even just have the external links bolded, or marked by a little icon.) (And also, not a big problem at all, but the blog links are inconsistent: some point to
singinst.org/blog/..., some tosingularity.org/....)And some broken links/HTML:
“What is the Singularity?” link on Our Mission has eaten extra HTML and so 404′s (it’s actually completely hiding the link to the FAQ.)
“Complex Value Systems are Required to Realize Valuable Futures” link on the Research page
The summary appears to have had some encoding issues (or something):
??throughout the page.The whole of Get Involved is a link to Opportunities.
(Some of these might be browser specific bugs: I’m using Firefox nightly on linux.)
Fixing in progress.
Fixing in progress.
Fixed.
Fixing in progress.
Fixed.
Fixed.
Fixing in progress.
I don’t understand.
This problem appears to be specific to Firefox (I tested in Chrome, and the problem isn’t there).
Some of the links have expanded and overlay the whole page, so any click anywhere* within the page is a click on that link. Specifically, links with the
coverallclass in the right hand column cover the entire page (which actually means the page always directs to the link corresponding to the very last box i.e. Visiting Fellows for “About” and Opportunities for “Get Involved”).The problem is due to the fact that boxes in the left hand column have some extra CSS that includes
position: relative, while those on the right don’t. Adding this fixes the problem.*Except on the links in the title bar and footer.
The same thing as I described in my previous comment as the situation for http://singularity.org/about/ (except that the destination page is different).
I see a lot of mistakes pointed out here, but also a lot of claims about preferences, many contradictory. Are there any plans to A/B test stuff or at least something more rigorous than ‘I agree with X, that blue is too dark’?
Probably not; too expensive.
Oh; I didn’t know your web guys charge extra for that. Never mind then.
BTW everyone, this is the coolest A/B testing tool evar:
http://genetify.com/demo/
(Or it certainly looks like it, I haven’t actually used it.)
From the description, it reads like an ad hoc unmaintained multi-armed bandit.
You make that sound like it’s a bad thing. Are you sure humans are better at multi-armed bandit problems than algorithms?
I’m pretty sure they’re not, which is why I am questioning your enthusiasm for such an ad hoc library.
Broken link at http://singularity.org/transparency/ Additional Reports Strategic Plan (August 2011)
Fixed.
Is the site down now? Is there a separate site to monitor its uptime status?
I agree completely with this comment from David Pearce (crossposted from facebook so LWers can see it):
There’s an error in one of the homepage messages: under “Our Mission” it reads “smarter-then-human” instead of “smarter-than-human”.
“Smarter-then-human” would be the sentient computer programs in late Heinlein.
Fixed.
Like the direction it’s going, well done! Also agree with some of the improvements suggested on this thread.