It seems weird to me to talk about reddit as a bad example. Look at /r/ChangeMyView, /r/AskScience, /r/SpaceX, etc, not the joke subs that aren’t even trying for epistemic honesty. /r/SpaceX is basically a giant mechanism that takes thousands of nerds and geeks in on one end, and slowly converts them into dozens of rocket scientists, and spits them out the other side. For example, this is from yesterday. Even the majority that never buy a textbook or take a class learn a lot.
I think this is largely because Reddit is one of the best available architectures for sorting out the gems from the rest, when there is a critical mass of people who want gems. If you want more gems, you need to put more dirt through the filter.
The failure to this rule is the default subreddits, because everyone can vote, and not just those with high standards. An ideal solution would be to ask people to predict whether something will get, say, a 1-5 star rating by mods/curators, as a means of signal boosting. If you take a weighted average of these predictions based on each person’s historical accuracy, you can just use that as a rating, and spare the mods from having to review almost everything.
Really, I like extending this to multiple axes, rather than just lumping everything into one. For example, some topics are only new to new people, and such threads can be good places to link to older discussions and maybe even build on them. However, older members may have little interest, and may not want to have to engage with commenters who aren’t familiar with older discussions. Arbital seems to be moving in this direction, just by having more coherent chains of prerequisite concepts, rather than whatever couple links the author thought to include in an essay.
That is a great point!!! Can we turn it into actionable advice for “creating better LW”?
Maybe there is a chance to create a vivid (LW-style) rationalist community on Reddit. We just have to find out what is the secret that makes the three subreddits you mentioned different from the rest of Reddit, and make it work for a LW-style forum.
I noticed CMV has about 30 moderators, AskScience has several hundreds, and SpaceX has nine. I don’t know what is the average, but at this moment I have an impression that a large-ish number of active moderators is a must.
Another ingredient is probably that these sites seem to have clear rules on what is okay; what should one optimize for. In CMV, it’s replies that “change OP’s mind”; in AskScience it’s replies compatible with respected science. -- I am afraid we couldn’t have a similarly clear rule for “x-rationality”.
EDIT:
I like the anti-advice page for CMV. (And I find it quite amusing that a lot of them pretty much describe how RationalWiki works.) I posted that link on LW.
It seems weird to me to talk about reddit as a bad example. Look at /r/ChangeMyView, /r/AskScience, /r/SpaceX, etc, not the joke subs that aren’t even trying for epistemic honesty. /r/SpaceX is basically a giant mechanism that takes thousands of nerds and geeks in on one end, and slowly converts them into dozens of rocket scientists, and spits them out the other side. For example, this is from yesterday. Even the majority that never buy a textbook or take a class learn a lot.
I think this is largely because Reddit is one of the best available architectures for sorting out the gems from the rest, when there is a critical mass of people who want gems. If you want more gems, you need to put more dirt through the filter.
The failure to this rule is the default subreddits, because everyone can vote, and not just those with high standards. An ideal solution would be to ask people to predict whether something will get, say, a 1-5 star rating by mods/curators, as a means of signal boosting. If you take a weighted average of these predictions based on each person’s historical accuracy, you can just use that as a rating, and spare the mods from having to review almost everything.
Really, I like extending this to multiple axes, rather than just lumping everything into one. For example, some topics are only new to new people, and such threads can be good places to link to older discussions and maybe even build on them. However, older members may have little interest, and may not want to have to engage with commenters who aren’t familiar with older discussions. Arbital seems to be moving in this direction, just by having more coherent chains of prerequisite concepts, rather than whatever couple links the author thought to include in an essay.
Just some musings.
That is a great point!!! Can we turn it into actionable advice for “creating better LW”?
Maybe there is a chance to create a vivid (LW-style) rationalist community on Reddit. We just have to find out what is the secret that makes the three subreddits you mentioned different from the rest of Reddit, and make it work for a LW-style forum.
I noticed CMV has about 30 moderators, AskScience has several hundreds, and SpaceX has nine. I don’t know what is the average, but at this moment I have an impression that a large-ish number of active moderators is a must.
Another ingredient is probably that these sites seem to have clear rules on what is okay; what should one optimize for. In CMV, it’s replies that “change OP’s mind”; in AskScience it’s replies compatible with respected science. -- I am afraid we couldn’t have a similarly clear rule for “x-rationality”.
EDIT:
I like the anti-advice page for CMV. (And I find it quite amusing that a lot of them pretty much describe how RationalWiki works.) I posted that link on LW.