Their purposes. LW exists for talking. Github and Thingiverse exist for doing things. So it is no surprise that that is what happens. In more words:
LW (and before it, the part of OB that became LW) was founded by Eliezer for the purpose of teaching rationality. (And his purpose for having that purpose was growing or finding rationalists that might reach the minimum level required to do useful work on FAI.) In other words, it was founded as a place to talk about certain things.
Github is a place to publicly host code. It’s infrastructure for people who already have projects they want to work on. People go to github because of the projects they are working on, not because of github.
Thingiverse is the same thing for RepRap projects. (To be accurate, their mission statement isn’t limited to RepRap, but every project in the first few pages I browsed was a RepRap project.)
So if I wanted there to be a github for “the stuff that a lot of us wish we were doing but aren’t”, then the question I would ask would be “what infrastructure would support such projects?”, which would depend on “what sort of projects is this for?” That question has to come first. I’ve seen the reverse—“We’re smart! Let’s do something!”—several times before (outside of LW), and I’ve never seen it come to anything.
What are the projects that people would be doing, if they were doing them?
What infrastructure would support that general class of projects?
Personally I’m thinking of building a minimalist overlay that can be put on top of github and all the other content management websites. Then you can benefit from the help/interest from the normal community as well as the rationalist specific one.
The things is, content management websites tend to be agnostic to the purposefulness of the code/designs/words they host. So you get good feedback for doing things like making a laser cuttable settlers of catan board (yep I did this). So I would like to be able to take a lesswrongian attitude of evaluating whether this is the best use of my time to wherever I happen to be putting lots of effort* into making things on the web.
The closest thing is hackernews but that has a mercantile bent that is not suitable to all projects.
*Some stuff I make will be for the warm fuzzies, but other stuff should be hard nosed rationalist stuff.
Their purposes. LW exists for talking. Github and Thingiverse exist for doing things. So it is no surprise that that is what happens. In more words:
LW (and before it, the part of OB that became LW) was founded by Eliezer for the purpose of teaching rationality. (And his purpose for having that purpose was growing or finding rationalists that might reach the minimum level required to do useful work on FAI.) In other words, it was founded as a place to talk about certain things.
Github is a place to publicly host code. It’s infrastructure for people who already have projects they want to work on. People go to github because of the projects they are working on, not because of github.
Thingiverse is the same thing for RepRap projects. (To be accurate, their mission statement isn’t limited to RepRap, but every project in the first few pages I browsed was a RepRap project.)
So if I wanted there to be a github for “the stuff that a lot of us wish we were doing but aren’t”, then the question I would ask would be “what infrastructure would support such projects?”, which would depend on “what sort of projects is this for?” That question has to come first. I’ve seen the reverse—“We’re smart! Let’s do something!”—several times before (outside of LW), and I’ve never seen it come to anything.
What are the projects that people would be doing, if they were doing them?
What infrastructure would support that general class of projects?
Personally I’m thinking of building a minimalist overlay that can be put on top of github and all the other content management websites. Then you can benefit from the help/interest from the normal community as well as the rationalist specific one.
The things is, content management websites tend to be agnostic to the purposefulness of the code/designs/words they host. So you get good feedback for doing things like making a laser cuttable settlers of catan board (yep I did this). So I would like to be able to take a lesswrongian attitude of evaluating whether this is the best use of my time to wherever I happen to be putting lots of effort* into making things on the web.
The closest thing is hackernews but that has a mercantile bent that is not suitable to all projects.
*Some stuff I make will be for the warm fuzzies, but other stuff should be hard nosed rationalist stuff.