Yeah, all of these feel pretty different to me than promoting IABIED.
A bunch of them are about events or content that many LW users will be interested in just by virtue of being LW users (e.g. the review, fundraiser, BoLW results, and LessOnline). I feel similarly about the highlighting of content posted to LW, especially given that that’s a central thing that a forum should do. I think the HPMOR wrap parties and ACX meetups feel slightly worse to me, but not too bad given that they’re just advertising meet-ups.
Why promoting IABIED feels pretty bad to me:
It’s a commercial product—this feels to me like typical advertising that cheapens LW’s brand. (Even though I think it’s very unlikely that Eliezer and Nate paid you to run the frontpage promo or that your motivation was to make them money.)
The book has a very clear thesis that it seems like you’re endorsing as “the official LW position.” Advertising e.g. HPMOR would also feel weird to me, but substantially less so, since HPMOR is more about rationality more generally and overlaps strongly with the sequences, which is centrally LW content. In other words, it feels like you’re implicitly declaring “P(doom) is high” to be a core tenet of LW discourse in the same way that e.g. truth-seeking is.
A bunch of them are about events or content that many LW users will be interested in just by virtue of being LW users (e.g. the review, fundraiser, BoLW results, and LessOnline). I feel similarly about the highlighting of content posted to LW, especially given that that’s a central thing that a forum should do. I think the HPMOR wrap parties and ACX meetups feel slightly worse to me, but not too bad given that they’re just advertising meet-ups.
I would feel quite sad if we culturally weren’t able to promote off-site content. Like, not all the best content in the world is on LW, indeed most of it is somewhere else, and the right sidebar is the place I intentionally carved out to link and promote content that doesn’t fit into existing LW content ontologies, and doesn’t exist e.g. as LW posts.
It seems clear that if any similar author was publishing something I would want to promote it as well. If someone was similarly respected by relevant people, if they published something off-site, whether it’s a fancy beige-standalone-website, or a book, or a movie, or an audiobook, or a video game, if it seems like the kind of thing that LW readers are obviously interested in reading, and I can stand behind quality wise, then it would seem IMO worse for me culturally to have a prohibitions against promoting it just because it isn’t on-site (not obviously, there are benefits to everything promoted going through the same mechanisms of evaluation and voting and annual review, but overall, all things considered, it seems worse to me).
It’s a commercial product—this feels to me like typical advertising that cheapens LW’s brand. (Even though I think it’s very unlikely that Eliezer and Nate paid you to run the frontpage promo or that your motivation was to make them money.)
Yeah, I feel quite unhappy about this too, but I also felt like we broke that Schelling fence with both the LessOnline tickets and the LW fundraiser (which I was both quite sad about). I really would like LW to not feel like a place that is selling you something, or is Out To Get You, and also additional marginal things in that space are costly (and is where a lot of my sadness for this is concentrated in). I really wish the book was just a goddamn freely available website like AI 2027, though I also am in favor of people publishing ideas in a large variety of mediums.
(We did also sell our own books using a really very big frontpage banner, though somehow that feels different because it’s a collection of freely available LW essays, and you can just read them on the website, though we did put a big “buy” button at the top of the site)
The book has a very clear thesis that it seems like you’re endorsing as “the official LW position.” Advertising e.g. HPMOR would also feel weird to me, but substantially less so, since HPMOR is more about rationality more generally and overlaps strongly with the sequences, which is centrally LW content. In other words, it feels like you’re implicitly declaring “P(doom) is high” to be a core tenet of LW discourse in the same way that e.g. truth-seeking is.
I don’t really buy this part. We frequently spotlight and curate posts and content with similarly strong theses that I disagree with in lots of different ways, and I don’t think anyone thinks we endorse that as the “official LW position”.
I agree the promotions for that have been less intense, but I mostly hope to change that going forward in the future. Most of the spotlights we have on the frontpage every day have some kind of strong thesis.
FWIW I also feel a bit bad about it being both commercial and also not literally a LW thing. (Both or neither seems less bad.) However, in this particular case, I don’t actually feel that bad about it—because this is a site founded by Yudkowsky! So it kind of is a LW thing.
We frequently spotlight and curate posts and content with similarly strong theses that I disagree with in lots of different ways, and I don’t think anyone thinks we endorse that as the “official LW position”.
Curating and promoting well-executed LW content—including content that argues for specific theses—feels totally fine to me. (Though I think it would be bad if it were the case that content that argues for favored theses was held to a lower standard.) I guess I view promoting “best of [forum]” content to be a central thing that a forum should do.
It seems like you don’t like this way of drawing boundaries and just want to promote the best content without prejudice for whether it was posted to LW. Maybe if LW had a track record of doing this such that I understood that promoting IABIED as part of a general ethos for content promotion, then I wouldn’t have reacted as strongly. But from my perspective this is one of the first times that you’ve promoted non-LW content, so my guess was that the book was being promoted as an exception to typical norms because you felt it was urgent to promote the book’s message, which felt soldier-mindsetty to me.
(I’d probably feel similarly about an AI 2027 promo, as much as I think they did great work.)
I think you could mitigate this by establishing a stronger track record of promoting excellent off-LW content that is less controversial (e.g. not a commercial product or doesn’t have as strong or divisive a thesis). E.g. you could highlight the void (and not just the LW x-post of it).
I also felt like we broke that Schelling fence with both the LessOnline tickets and the LW fundraiser (which I was both quite sad about).
Even with the norm having already been broken, I think promoting commercial content still carries an additional cost. (Seems like you might agree, but worth stating explicitly.)
I think you could mitigate this by establishing a stronger track record of promoting excellent off-LW content that is less controversial (e.g. not a commercial product or doesn’t have as strong or divisive a thesis). E.g. you could highlight the void (and not just the LW x-post of it).
I think this is kind of fair, but also, I don’t super feel like I want LW to draw that harsh lines here. Ideally we would do more curation of off-site content, and pull off-site content more into the conversation, instead of putting up higher barriers we need to pass to do things with external content.
I do also really think we’ve been planning to do a bunch of this for a while, and mostly been bottlenecked on design capacity, and my guess is within a year we’ll have established more of a track record here that will make you feel more comfortable with our judgement. I think it’s reasonable to have at least some distrust here.
Even with the norm having already been broken, I think promoting commercial content still carries an additional cost. (Seems like you might agree, but worth stating explicitly.)
Yeah, all of these feel pretty different to me than promoting IABIED.
A bunch of them are about events or content that many LW users will be interested in just by virtue of being LW users (e.g. the review, fundraiser, BoLW results, and LessOnline). I feel similarly about the highlighting of content posted to LW, especially given that that’s a central thing that a forum should do. I think the HPMOR wrap parties and ACX meetups feel slightly worse to me, but not too bad given that they’re just advertising meet-ups.
Why promoting IABIED feels pretty bad to me:
It’s a commercial product—this feels to me like typical advertising that cheapens LW’s brand. (Even though I think it’s very unlikely that Eliezer and Nate paid you to run the frontpage promo or that your motivation was to make them money.)
The book has a very clear thesis that it seems like you’re endorsing as “the official LW position.” Advertising e.g. HPMOR would also feel weird to me, but substantially less so, since HPMOR is more about rationality more generally and overlaps strongly with the sequences, which is centrally LW content. In other words, it feels like you’re implicitly declaring “P(doom) is high” to be a core tenet of LW discourse in the same way that e.g. truth-seeking is.
I would feel quite sad if we culturally weren’t able to promote off-site content. Like, not all the best content in the world is on LW, indeed most of it is somewhere else, and the right sidebar is the place I intentionally carved out to link and promote content that doesn’t fit into existing LW content ontologies, and doesn’t exist e.g. as LW posts.
It seems clear that if any similar author was publishing something I would want to promote it as well. If someone was similarly respected by relevant people, if they published something off-site, whether it’s a fancy beige-standalone-website, or a book, or a movie, or an audiobook, or a video game, if it seems like the kind of thing that LW readers are obviously interested in reading, and I can stand behind quality wise, then it would seem IMO worse for me culturally to have a prohibitions against promoting it just because it isn’t on-site (not obviously, there are benefits to everything promoted going through the same mechanisms of evaluation and voting and annual review, but overall, all things considered, it seems worse to me).
Yeah, I feel quite unhappy about this too, but I also felt like we broke that Schelling fence with both the LessOnline tickets and the LW fundraiser (which I was both quite sad about). I really would like LW to not feel like a place that is selling you something, or is Out To Get You, and also additional marginal things in that space are costly (and is where a lot of my sadness for this is concentrated in). I really wish the book was just a goddamn freely available website like AI 2027, though I also am in favor of people publishing ideas in a large variety of mediums.
(We did also sell our own books using a really very big frontpage banner, though somehow that feels different because it’s a collection of freely available LW essays, and you can just read them on the website, though we did put a big “buy” button at the top of the site)
I don’t really buy this part. We frequently spotlight and curate posts and content with similarly strong theses that I disagree with in lots of different ways, and I don’t think anyone thinks we endorse that as the “official LW position”.
I agree the promotions for that have been less intense, but I mostly hope to change that going forward in the future. Most of the spotlights we have on the frontpage every day have some kind of strong thesis.
FWIW I also feel a bit bad about it being both commercial and also not literally a LW thing. (Both or neither seems less bad.) However, in this particular case, I don’t actually feel that bad about it—because this is a site founded by Yudkowsky! So it kind of is a LW thing.
Curating and promoting well-executed LW content—including content that argues for specific theses—feels totally fine to me. (Though I think it would be bad if it were the case that content that argues for favored theses was held to a lower standard.) I guess I view promoting “best of [forum]” content to be a central thing that a forum should do.
It seems like you don’t like this way of drawing boundaries and just want to promote the best content without prejudice for whether it was posted to LW. Maybe if LW had a track record of doing this such that I understood that promoting IABIED as part of a general ethos for content promotion, then I wouldn’t have reacted as strongly. But from my perspective this is one of the first times that you’ve promoted non-LW content, so my guess was that the book was being promoted as an exception to typical norms because you felt it was urgent to promote the book’s message, which felt soldier-mindsetty to me.
(I’d probably feel similarly about an AI 2027 promo, as much as I think they did great work.)
I think you could mitigate this by establishing a stronger track record of promoting excellent off-LW content that is less controversial (e.g. not a commercial product or doesn’t have as strong or divisive a thesis). E.g. you could highlight the void (and not just the LW x-post of it).
Even with the norm having already been broken, I think promoting commercial content still carries an additional cost. (Seems like you might agree, but worth stating explicitly.)
I think this is kind of fair, but also, I don’t super feel like I want LW to draw that harsh lines here. Ideally we would do more curation of off-site content, and pull off-site content more into the conversation, instead of putting up higher barriers we need to pass to do things with external content.
I do also really think we’ve been planning to do a bunch of this for a while, and mostly been bottlenecked on design capacity, and my guess is within a year we’ll have established more of a track record here that will make you feel more comfortable with our judgement. I think it’s reasonable to have at least some distrust here.
Yep, agree.