“That’s what happens to a field when it unbinds itself from the experimental evidence”—so the million dollar question for Less Wrong is: what experimental evidence can this community bind itself to, to avoid the same outcome?
The most obvious thing to bind it to is whether A) people who post on LessWrong keep coming back, and B) how big of assholes LessWrong community members have a reputation for being.
I would say we’re doing great on A but SBF has made B go very poorly for the moment.
“That’s what happens to a field when it unbinds itself from the experimental evidence”—so the million dollar question for Less Wrong is: what experimental evidence can this community bind itself to, to avoid the same outcome?
Well, yes, that is the fairly heavy subtext here.
The most obvious thing to bind it to is whether A) people who post on LessWrong keep coming back, and B) how big of assholes LessWrong community members have a reputation for being.
I would say we’re doing great on A but SBF has made B go very poorly for the moment.