Group rationality is a big one. It wouldn’t surprise me if rationalists are less good on average at co-ordinating than other group because rationalists tend to be more individualistic and have their own opinions of what needs to be done. As an example, how long did it take for us to produce a new LW forum despite half of the people here being programmers? And rationality still doesn’t have its own version of CEA.
I do agree with group rationality generally, and probably agree with LWers being self-selected for contrarian individualism. I don’t know that taking-so-long to rebuild the forum is that great example – it took someone deciding to make it their fulltime project and getting thousands of dollars in funding, which is roughly what such things normally take.
“It took someone deciding to make it their fulltime project and getting thousands of dollars in funding, which is roughly what such things normally take”—lots of open source projects get off the ground without money being involved
Are those comparable, though? My model of open source is that it prototypically looks like someone building something that’s useful for themselves, then other people also find it useful and help to work on it (with code, bug reports, feature requests). But that first step doesn’t really exist for LW2, because until you’re ready to migrate the whole site, the software has very little value to anyone.
Can you think of any open source projects where the first useful version seems comparable in effort to LW2, and that had no financial backing for the first useful version?
Edit: some plausible candidates come to mind, though I wouldn’t bet on any of them. Operating systems (e.g. Linux kernel, haiku, menuetOS); programming languages and compliers for them (e.g. gcc, Perl, python, Ruby); and database engines (e.g. postgres, mongo, neo4j).
(Notably, I’d exclude something like elm from the languages list because I think it was a masters or PhD project so funded by a university.)
I also think it’s just… actually rare and noteable when an open source project is able to succeed on this scale, rather than something you should expect to work out by default.
Group rationality is a big one. It wouldn’t surprise me if rationalists are less good on average at co-ordinating than other group because rationalists tend to be more individualistic and have their own opinions of what needs to be done. As an example, how long did it take for us to produce a new LW forum despite half of the people here being programmers? And rationality still doesn’t have its own version of CEA.
I do agree with group rationality generally, and probably agree with LWers being self-selected for contrarian individualism. I don’t know that taking-so-long to rebuild the forum is that great example – it took someone deciding to make it their fulltime project and getting thousands of dollars in funding, which is roughly what such things normally take.
“It took someone deciding to make it their fulltime project and getting thousands of dollars in funding, which is roughly what such things normally take”—lots of open source projects get off the ground without money being involved
Are those comparable, though? My model of open source is that it prototypically looks like someone building something that’s useful for themselves, then other people also find it useful and help to work on it (with code, bug reports, feature requests). But that first step doesn’t really exist for LW2, because until you’re ready to migrate the whole site, the software has very little value to anyone.
Can you think of any open source projects where the first useful version seems comparable in effort to LW2, and that had no financial backing for the first useful version?
Edit: some plausible candidates come to mind, though I wouldn’t bet on any of them. Operating systems (e.g. Linux kernel, haiku, menuetOS); programming languages and compliers for them (e.g. gcc, Perl, python, Ruby); and database engines (e.g. postgres, mongo, neo4j).
(Notably, I’d exclude something like elm from the languages list because I think it was a masters or PhD project so funded by a university.)
I also think it’s just… actually rare and noteable when an open source project is able to succeed on this scale, rather than something you should expect to work out by default.
What’s CEA?
The Centre for Effective Altruism, I believe.