As someone who had some involvement in the design of the alignment forum, and the systems you are describing, this post has given me a lot to think about. I think it is clear that the current system is not working. However, one point you made seems rather opposed to my picture, and worth discussing more:
The AF being closed to the public is bad for the quality of AF discourse.
The reason, in my mind, for the current system is because it’s difficult to know who is and is not suitable for membership. Therefore, we have a very opaque and unpredictable membership standard, “by necessity”. In an attempt to compensate, we try to make membership matter as little as possible, IE we hope non-members will feel comfortable posting on LessWrong and then have their posts get promoted. Obviously this is not working very well at all, but that was my hope: (A) keep membership standards very high and therefore opaque, (B) make membership matter as little as possible.
Why do I think standards should be very high?
My model is that if the alignment forum were open to the public, there would be a lot more very low-quality posts and (especially) comments. I could be wrong here—standards of comments on lesswrong are pretty good—but I worry about what happens if it’s fine for a while and then (perhaps gradually) there starts to be a need to close access down more to maintain quality. Opening things up seems a lot easier than closing them down again, because at that point there would be a need to make tough decisions.
So I’m left wondering what to do. Can we keep standards high, while also making them transparent? I don’t know. But it does seem like something needs to change.
After reading more of the discussion on this post, I think my reply here was conflating different notions of “open” in a way which has been pointed out already in comments.
I’m currently fairly swayed that the alignment forum should be more “open” in the sense Peter intends:
Per my definition of closed, no academic discussion is closed, because anyone in theory can get a paper accepted to a journal/conference, attend the related meaning, and participate in the discourse. I am not actually talking about visibility to the broader public, but rather the access of any individual to the discourse, which feels more important to me.
However, I am not sure how to accomplish this. (Specifically, I am not sure how to accomplish this without too much added work, and maintaining other properties we want the forum to have.)
As someone who had some involvement in the design of the alignment forum, and the systems you are describing, this post has given me a lot to think about. I think it is clear that the current system is not working. However, one point you made seems rather opposed to my picture, and worth discussing more:
The reason, in my mind, for the current system is because it’s difficult to know who is and is not suitable for membership. Therefore, we have a very opaque and unpredictable membership standard, “by necessity”. In an attempt to compensate, we try to make membership matter as little as possible, IE we hope non-members will feel comfortable posting on LessWrong and then have their posts get promoted. Obviously this is not working very well at all, but that was my hope: (A) keep membership standards very high and therefore opaque, (B) make membership matter as little as possible.
Why do I think standards should be very high?
My model is that if the alignment forum were open to the public, there would be a lot more very low-quality posts and (especially) comments. I could be wrong here—standards of comments on lesswrong are pretty good—but I worry about what happens if it’s fine for a while and then (perhaps gradually) there starts to be a need to close access down more to maintain quality. Opening things up seems a lot easier than closing them down again, because at that point there would be a need to make tough decisions.
So I’m left wondering what to do. Can we keep standards high, while also making them transparent? I don’t know. But it does seem like something needs to change.
After reading more of the discussion on this post, I think my reply here was conflating different notions of “open” in a way which has been pointed out already in comments.
I’m currently fairly swayed that the alignment forum should be more “open” in the sense Peter intends:
However, I am not sure how to accomplish this. (Specifically, I am not sure how to accomplish this without too much added work, and maintaining other properties we want the forum to have.)