I agree with basically everything you said. My main worries for LW are insularity and new people having lower standards. (These worries are anticorrelated, and I’m not sure if this itself is a third problem or if it means they’re actually only one problem.) I think it’s reasonable to try to attract new people but then throw them at material that tries to inculcate high epistemic standards. Or maybe it’s even reasonable to try to design the mechanisms and incentives of LW to get the results you want.
In my experience a list of explicit norms isn’t usually that helpful to users themselves. But it can be helpful if moderators need to do a lot of moderation actions, and want to stay on the same page with each other and with the users. But hopefully we can avoid that being necessary for another order of magnitude?
I agree with basically everything you said. My main worries for LW are insularity and new people having lower standards. (These worries are anticorrelated, and I’m not sure if this itself is a third problem or if it means they’re actually only one problem.) I think it’s reasonable to try to attract new people but then throw them at material that tries to inculcate high epistemic standards. Or maybe it’s even reasonable to try to design the mechanisms and incentives of LW to get the results you want.
In my experience a list of explicit norms isn’t usually that helpful to users themselves. But it can be helpful if moderators need to do a lot of moderation actions, and want to stay on the same page with each other and with the users. But hopefully we can avoid that being necessary for another order of magnitude?