I’m not sure that all of this kind of wandering-away is something that could reasonably be prevented, though.
I think it’s a combination of:
Many of the Old Greats™ are moderately tapped out.
Many of the Old Greats™ have other, more appealing places to post, and there’s basically nothing LW could do to bait them back.
Gwern likes his own site. I don’t think his site was that attractive to him ten years ago.
Scott now has a Substack that gets him megabucks, and he’s much more of a conventional thinker now than he was ten years ago. For him, posting here basically means leaving money on the table.
Eliezer has his book that he’s finishing up. I’m not sure if he’s still posting a lot on Facebook.
I was going to say Roko has an active Twitter account, but apparently he’s nuked all his tweets. At any rate, he has a Substack (latest post: 12/12/2024), so he has an obvious other place to post things, and quite possibly a financial disincentive to POSSE them here. Plus, it’s not like his current publicly-stated political preferences are anywhere near the Bay Area Overton Window, so AFAICT he has a total lack of incentive to have people with Bay Area political preferences get better at systematized winning.
Now, you (i.e. anyone who might be reading this) might be wondering “well, where’re your current and future contributions, hotshot?”
A fair question!
I have roughly an order (or two) of magnitude fewer rationality-relevant ideas (compared to anything else) that I can post on the Internet. I have a “Rationalist-adjacent” folder in my Drafts folder, and it has 13 things in it. A few of them aren’t all that really rationalist-adjacent, a few of them I’m never going to publish because for reasons, and a few of them I can’t really get the politics out of, and I don’t want to be a political poster on the Internet.
So there are a couple good ones in there, but polishing any of them to the point where they’re explained at enough length to win someone over (as opposed to the people who will see a one-line summary of my idea and say “oh yeah, he’s right; I just never thought of it that way before”) sounds like pulling teeth (or maybe polishing turds) for not much extra benefit to me, or anyone else.
Sure, I could post on my Shortform, but I figure the odds of them getting picked up by a better writer who then polishes them into something good that advances the cause of rationality is…slim to none.
I’m not sure that all of this kind of wandering-away is something that could reasonably be prevented, though.
I think it’s a combination of:
Many of the Old Greats™ are moderately tapped out.
Many of the Old Greats™ have other, more appealing places to post, and there’s basically nothing LW could do to bait them back.
Gwern likes his own site. I don’t think his site was that attractive to him ten years ago.
Scott now has a Substack that gets him megabucks, and he’s much more of a conventional thinker now than he was ten years ago. For him, posting here basically means leaving money on the table.
Eliezer has his book that he’s finishing up. I’m not sure if he’s still posting a lot on Facebook.
I was going to say Roko has an active Twitter account, but apparently he’s nuked all his tweets. At any rate, he has a Substack (latest post: 12/12/2024), so he has an obvious other place to post things, and quite possibly a financial disincentive to POSSE them here. Plus, it’s not like his current publicly-stated political preferences are anywhere near the Bay Area Overton Window, so AFAICT he has a total lack of incentive to have people with Bay Area political preferences get better at systematized winning.
Now, you (i.e. anyone who might be reading this) might be wondering “well, where’re your current and future contributions, hotshot?”
A fair question!
I have roughly an order (or two) of magnitude fewer rationality-relevant ideas (compared to anything else) that I can post on the Internet. I have a “Rationalist-adjacent” folder in my Drafts folder, and it has 13 things in it. A few of them aren’t all that really rationalist-adjacent, a few of them I’m never going to publish because for reasons, and a few of them I can’t really get the politics out of, and I don’t want to be a political poster on the Internet.
So there are a couple good ones in there, but polishing any of them to the point where they’re explained at enough length to win someone over (as opposed to the people who will see a one-line summary of my idea and say “oh yeah, he’s right; I just never thought of it that way before”) sounds like pulling teeth (or maybe polishing turds) for not much extra benefit to me, or anyone else.
Sure, I could post on my Shortform, but I figure the odds of them getting picked up by a better writer who then polishes them into something good that advances the cause of rationality is…slim to none.