LW, along with Astral Codex Ten, are the best places on the internet. Lately LW tops the charts for me, perhaps because I’ve made it through Scott’s canon but not LW’s. As a result, my experience on LW is more about the content than the meta and community. Just coming here, I don’t stumble across much evidence of conflict within this community—I only learned about it after friending various rationalists on FB such as Duncan (which btw I really like having rationalists in my FB feed, which does give me a sense of community and belongingness… perhaps there is something to having multiple forums).
On the slight negative side, I have long believed LW to be an AI doom echo chamber. This is partly due to my fibrotic intuitions, persisting despite reading Superintelligence and having friends in AI safety research, and only breaking free after ChatGPT. But part of it I still believe is true. The reasons include hero worship (as mentioned already on this thread), the community’s epistemic landscape (as in, it is harder and riskier to defend a position of low vs high p(doom)), and perhaps even some hegemony of language.
In terms of the app: it is nice. From my own experiences building apps with social components, I would have never guessed that a separate “karma vote” and “agreement vote” would work. Only on LW!
LW, along with Astral Codex Ten, are the best places on the internet. Lately LW tops the charts for me, perhaps because I’ve made it through Scott’s canon but not LW’s. As a result, my experience on LW is more about the content than the meta and community. Just coming here, I don’t stumble across much evidence of conflict within this community—I only learned about it after friending various rationalists on FB such as Duncan (which btw I really like having rationalists in my FB feed, which does give me a sense of community and belongingness… perhaps there is something to having multiple forums).
On the slight negative side, I have long believed LW to be an AI doom echo chamber. This is partly due to my fibrotic intuitions, persisting despite reading Superintelligence and having friends in AI safety research, and only breaking free after ChatGPT. But part of it I still believe is true. The reasons include hero worship (as mentioned already on this thread), the community’s epistemic landscape (as in, it is harder and riskier to defend a position of low vs high p(doom)), and perhaps even some hegemony of language.
In terms of the app: it is nice. From my own experiences building apps with social components, I would have never guessed that a separate “karma vote” and “agreement vote” would work. Only on LW!