When I see discussions of community here on LessWrong (and especially comparisons to dojos) I imagine the implicit claim is “and this is how we build a rationality community, which is able to get its members to accomplish their goals”. In this circumstance, you may say “well many LessWrongians actually mostly just want community for community’s sake, so they lie in the second case”.
Yeah, my biggest issue with LessWrong (and the broader rationality community generally) is that there seems to me to be much more of a focus on growth and inclusion and togetherness (at the expense of quality) than, like, Actual Standards (that would require telling some people that they’re not pulling their weight and can’t be in the garden anymore).
^ That’s an exaggeration; one person can think the boundary ought to be at level X of effort/intensity/prowess/commitment/whatever, and another person can think it ought to be at 1.5X, and it’s not immediately obvious which of these people is correct. But I at least have found that engaging with nominal “rationalists” tends to drag me down rather than helping me accelerate up/forward.
In that case I think this should have been your response to Cole.
I’d be curious to hear what particular ways you think the rationalist community is prioritizing “growth and inclusion and togetherness (at the expense of quality)”, in part because I wonder whether you aren’t just looking at the parts of the rationality community which are already actually grayspaces. Eg public meetups, or LessWrong itself. And perhaps what you may actually want is more black-belt spaces around here.
Eg if your problem is with the userbase of LessWrong in particular, I think its hard to make a public forum have the level of isolation you’d need to make the user-base black-belt quality. Especially if you don’t have any objective (or trusted subjective) measures of what “black-belt quality” means. Therefore LessWrong can only ever be a grayspace.
I don’t think this argument is exactly true – we review and reject like 30 people a day from LW and accept 1-3, and most of the time we aren’t that optimistic about the 1-3, and it’s not that crazy that we switch to the world where we’re just actually pretty selective.
(I think you are nonetheless pointing at an important thing where, when you factor in a variety of goals / resources available, it probably makes more sense to think of LessWrong as a grayspace. Although I think Duncan also thinks, if it were trying on purpose to be a grayspace, there would be more active effort guiding people towards some particular way of thinking/conversing)
Also, Duncan’s written a fair amount about this both in blogposts and comment-back-and-forths and I’m feeling a bit of sadness of “this convo feels like by default it’s going to rehash the Duncan LW Concerns 101 conversation” instead of saying something new.
Seems false for LessWrong 1.0, I’ve read much of the comments on the old Eliezer posts, and they are far far worse than the present forum. I have less to say on early LessWrong 2.0.
I know you said you don’t have a strong view on the actual history, but the actual history does seem pretty central to your argument here. You are free to choose some other argument for your conclusion however.
No—I really did just mean it as an example scenario, and you can plug in ‘x forum’ for ‘lw’. It was a mistake to use something in my example so close to the object level thing being discussed, but I think the argument ‘[forums founded by small communities] can benefit from selection effects that make them something other than gray spaces’ goes through.
I’m objecting to the ‘only ever’ in your initial statement as too strong.
Maybe SL4, Extropians, or something else is better here (like my former-favorite internet music space, llllllll.co, where all the senior members have now moved to Discord).
I think if I’d used a different example you’d be (rightly) dinging me for relevance rather than accuracy, but I really did mean to say the maybe-irrelevant thing and then reached too far for an existence proof (or not far enough, depending on how you see it).
Yeah, my biggest issue with LessWrong (and the broader rationality community generally) is that there seems to me to be much more of a focus on growth and inclusion and togetherness (at the expense of quality) than, like, Actual Standards (that would require telling some people that they’re not pulling their weight and can’t be in the garden anymore).
^ That’s an exaggeration; one person can think the boundary ought to be at level X of effort/intensity/prowess/commitment/whatever, and another person can think it ought to be at 1.5X, and it’s not immediately obvious which of these people is correct. But I at least have found that engaging with nominal “rationalists” tends to drag me down rather than helping me accelerate up/forward.
In that case I think this should have been your response to Cole.
I’d be curious to hear what particular ways you think the rationalist community is prioritizing “growth and inclusion and togetherness (at the expense of quality)”, in part because I wonder whether you aren’t just looking at the parts of the rationality community which are already actually grayspaces. Eg public meetups, or LessWrong itself. And perhaps what you may actually want is more black-belt spaces around here.
Eg if your problem is with the userbase of LessWrong in particular, I think its hard to make a public forum have the level of isolation you’d need to make the user-base black-belt quality. Especially if you don’t have any objective (or trusted subjective) measures of what “black-belt quality” means. Therefore LessWrong can only ever be a grayspace.
I don’t think this argument is exactly true – we review and reject like 30 people a day from LW and accept 1-3, and most of the time we aren’t that optimistic about the 1-3, and it’s not that crazy that we switch to the world where we’re just actually pretty selective.
(I think you are nonetheless pointing at an important thing where, when you factor in a variety of goals / resources available, it probably makes more sense to think of LessWrong as a grayspace. Although I think Duncan also thinks, if it were trying on purpose to be a grayspace, there would be more active effort guiding people towards some particular way of thinking/conversing)
Also, Duncan’s written a fair amount about this both in blogposts and comment-back-and-forths and I’m feeling a bit of sadness of “this convo feels like by default it’s going to rehash the Duncan LW Concerns 101 conversation” instead of saying something new.
Some recap:
Concentration of Force
Duncan Sabien on Moderating LessWrong
Nit: selection effects can lead to a de facto black belt setting, as I think some would consider LW 1.0 or early LW 2.0.
As the paths here become broader, more numerous, it becomes a gray space.
[I don’t have a strong view on the Actual History; I just want to tell a plausible story pushing back against ‘can only ever be’.]
Seems false for LessWrong 1.0, I’ve read much of the comments on the old Eliezer posts, and they are far far worse than the present forum. I have less to say on early LessWrong 2.0.
I know you said you don’t have a strong view on the actual history, but the actual history does seem pretty central to your argument here. You are free to choose some other argument for your conclusion however.
No—I really did just mean it as an example scenario, and you can plug in ‘x forum’ for ‘lw’. It was a mistake to use something in my example so close to the object level thing being discussed, but I think the argument ‘[forums founded by small communities] can benefit from selection effects that make them something other than gray spaces’ goes through.
I’m objecting to the ‘only ever’ in your initial statement as too strong.
Maybe SL4, Extropians, or something else is better here (like my former-favorite internet music space, llllllll.co, where all the senior members have now moved to Discord).
I think if I’d used a different example you’d be (rightly) dinging me for relevance rather than accuracy, but I really did mean to say the maybe-irrelevant thing and then reached too far for an existence proof (or not far enough, depending on how you see it).
I agree that if nobody knows about your forum other than the black-belts, then your forum will be black-belt quality.