Good catch! My implicit question was about what ends up on the frontpage, i.e. some mix of version 1 and 3. A friend of mine answered the sociological side of that question to my satisfaction: Many of the most competent people already pivoted to governance/outreach. But they don’t have much use for in-group signalling, so they have quantitatively much less posts on the frontpage than others.
Frontpage is mostly what the admins and mods think is worth frontpaging, plus what users upvote. It’s also a positional good, there can only be so many things on the front page. This is a more specific and useful question though! Yeah, if the LW team frontpaged more AI governance and less of everything else, and the average user upvoted more AI governance and less of everything else, the frontpage would have more AI governance on it. I wouldn’t be a fan, but I’d understand the move that was the goal. My understanding is that’s not the goal.
Not having a use for in-group signaling seems accurate but maybe overly cynical or something? I think it’s that having lots of posts on LessWrong is not a constructive part of their plan. Look at Situational Awareness and ai-2027: great writing, great outreach, obviously applicable to governance. Would either of those have been better as LessWrong posts? I think no, they’re more impactful as freestanding websites with a short url and a convenient PDF button.
What’s the actual game plan, and what intervening steps benefit from the average LessWrong reader knowing the information you want to tell them or having a calling card that leads the right LessWrong readers to reach out to you? Look at the rash of posting around SB-1047, particularly the PauseAI leader’s post. There’s a game plan that benefited from a bunch of LessWrong readers knowing some extra information.
Good catch! My implicit question was about what ends up on the frontpage, i.e. some mix of version 1 and 3. A friend of mine answered the sociological side of that question to my satisfaction: Many of the most competent people already pivoted to governance/outreach. But they don’t have much use for in-group signalling, so they have quantitatively much less posts on the frontpage than others.
Frontpage is mostly what the admins and mods think is worth frontpaging, plus what users upvote. It’s also a positional good, there can only be so many things on the front page. This is a more specific and useful question though! Yeah, if the LW team frontpaged more AI governance and less of everything else, and the average user upvoted more AI governance and less of everything else, the frontpage would have more AI governance on it. I wouldn’t be a fan, but I’d understand the move that was the goal. My understanding is that’s not the goal.
Not having a use for in-group signaling seems accurate but maybe overly cynical or something? I think it’s that having lots of posts on LessWrong is not a constructive part of their plan. Look at Situational Awareness and ai-2027: great writing, great outreach, obviously applicable to governance. Would either of those have been better as LessWrong posts? I think no, they’re more impactful as freestanding websites with a short url and a convenient PDF button.
What’s the actual game plan, and what intervening steps benefit from the average LessWrong reader knowing the information you want to tell them or having a calling card that leads the right LessWrong readers to reach out to you? Look at the rash of posting around SB-1047, particularly the PauseAI leader’s post. There’s a game plan that benefited from a bunch of LessWrong readers knowing some extra information.