“Was very bad for people not near any in-person community or involved with any of the LW diaspora online”—I feel that there were sufficient people with an interest in improving LW that it was a failure that we didn’t find a way to achieve this/that it took so long. I don’t dispute that there are many people who would have had sufficient in person community that trying to fix LW might not have been relevant to their goals.
I will note that the-thing-that-worked was approximately 2 people making this their full-time job for a year. This is a level of commitment that I think goes beyond “if we’d just tried a bit harder and/or if there had been a clear source of responsibility, we could have fixed this.”
(I think a less-ambitious version of the revitalize plan was possible, but still would have been something like 8-person-months-worth-of-work, and by the time you’re willing to do that, you might as well get more ambitious)
Yeah, I don’t think this attempt “succeeded” because of nobody feeling responsible, and more that everyone who did feel responsible was extremely busy, and nobody else who had the skills and resources was available.
Resources and people are very scarce and generally taking the initative on projects like this means giving up a large amount of job security and salary and related things, and I nobody else comes to mind who would have been happy to run the LessWrong project who could have done it much earlier (the primary failure of rationality I see is me working about three quarters of a year too long at CEA and wish I instead had started working on Arbital and LessWrong three quarters of a year earlier). And there is also no simple community institution that I know of that we could have built that would have significantly reduced the cost to whoever wanted to make this project happen, without detracting significantly from other comparably impactful projects (i.e. CFAR or MIRI).
Also, most people greatly underestimated how much work would it take.
There were at least five situations when someone said “okay, let me look at this, we only need to make a few small changes in the Reddit codebase, how difficult could that be?” and a few weeks later they admitted that they are running out of time and energy and they barely scratched the surface. And a few weeks later a new person came and said “okay, now let me look at this, because changing a few little things in the Reddit codebase cannot be that difficult...”
In other words, it was difficult to coordinate on doing a large project, because it was difficult to even believe that a large project was actually necessary.
(It went against common knowledge: “Don’t reinvent the wheel.” Reddit is a large modern debate site; how likely it is that their software is difficult to maintain, and cannot resist a single dedicated attacker?)
Less Wrong, as a community, has an unusually high percentage of programmers. My intuition is that sufficient status incentives could have solved this problem and/or a kickstarter could have funded development work. We could have offered a student an internship over the summer.
I think it should have been solvable in 2 or 3 months worth of development. The difficulty was that you simply needed to pick the right features to add. Challenging, but not impossible.
“Was very bad for people not near any in-person community or involved with any of the LW diaspora online”—I feel that there were sufficient people with an interest in improving LW that it was a failure that we didn’t find a way to achieve this/that it took so long. I don’t dispute that there are many people who would have had sufficient in person community that trying to fix LW might not have been relevant to their goals.
It seems to me to have been a mix of nobody feeling responsible and tragedy of the commons.
I will note that the-thing-that-worked was approximately 2 people making this their full-time job for a year. This is a level of commitment that I think goes beyond “if we’d just tried a bit harder and/or if there had been a clear source of responsibility, we could have fixed this.”
(I think a less-ambitious version of the revitalize plan was possible, but still would have been something like 8-person-months-worth-of-work, and by the time you’re willing to do that, you might as well get more ambitious)
Yeah, I don’t think this attempt “succeeded” because of nobody feeling responsible, and more that everyone who did feel responsible was extremely busy, and nobody else who had the skills and resources was available.
Resources and people are very scarce and generally taking the initative on projects like this means giving up a large amount of job security and salary and related things, and I nobody else comes to mind who would have been happy to run the LessWrong project who could have done it much earlier (the primary failure of rationality I see is me working about three quarters of a year too long at CEA and wish I instead had started working on Arbital and LessWrong three quarters of a year earlier). And there is also no simple community institution that I know of that we could have built that would have significantly reduced the cost to whoever wanted to make this project happen, without detracting significantly from other comparably impactful projects (i.e. CFAR or MIRI).
Also, most people greatly underestimated how much work would it take.
There were at least five situations when someone said “okay, let me look at this, we only need to make a few small changes in the Reddit codebase, how difficult could that be?” and a few weeks later they admitted that they are running out of time and energy and they barely scratched the surface. And a few weeks later a new person came and said “okay, now let me look at this, because changing a few little things in the Reddit codebase cannot be that difficult...”
In other words, it was difficult to coordinate on doing a large project, because it was difficult to even believe that a large project was actually necessary.
(It went against common knowledge: “Don’t reinvent the wheel.” Reddit is a large modern debate site; how likely it is that their software is difficult to maintain, and cannot resist a single dedicated attacker?)
Less Wrong, as a community, has an unusually high percentage of programmers. My intuition is that sufficient status incentives could have solved this problem and/or a kickstarter could have funded development work. We could have offered a student an internship over the summer.
I think it should have been solvable in 2 or 3 months worth of development. The difficulty was that you simply needed to pick the right features to add. Challenging, but not impossible.