My friend kytael (not his real name, but his Less Wrong handle) has been on Less Wrong since 2010, has been a volunteer for the CFAR, and lived in the Bay Area for several months as part of the meatspace rationalist community there. For a couple of years, I was only a lurker on Less Wrong, and occasionally read some posts. I didn’t bother to read the Sequences, but I already studied cognitive science, and I attended lots of meetups where the Sequences were discussed, so I understand much of the canon material of Less Wrong rationality, even if I wouldn’t use the same words to describe the comments. It’s only in the last year, and a bit, that I got more involved in my local meetup, which motivated me to get involved in the site. I find myself agreeing with lots of the older Sequence posts, and the highest quality posters (lukeprog, Yvain, gwern, etc.) from a few years ago, but I too am deeply concerned about the decline of vitality on Less Wrong, as I have only started to get excited about it’s online aspects.
Anyway, when I too asked kytael:
What should the purpose of this site be? Is it supposed to be building a movement or filtering down the best knowledge?
(I asked him more, or less, the same question)
He replied: “I think the best way to view Less Wrong is as an archive.”
Since he was tapped into the Bay Area rationalist community, but was a user of Less Wrong from outside of it as well, he was in an especially good position to provide better hypotheses as to why use on this website has declined, due to his observation.
First of all, the most prominent figures of Less Wrong have spread their discussions across more websites than this one, where much discussion from those popular users who used to spend more time on Less Wrong now discuss things. Scott’s/Yvain’s Slate Star Codex is probably the best example of this, another being the Rationalist Masterlist. Following a plethora of blogs is much more difficult than just going through this one site, so for newer users to Less Wrong, or those of us who haven’t had the opportunity to know users of this site more personally, following all this discussion is difficult.
Second of all, the most popular, and common, users of Less Wrong have integrated publicly more, and now use social media. Ever since the inception of the CFAR workshops, users of Less Wrong have flocked to the Bay Area in throngs. They all became fast friends, because the atmosphere of CFAR workshops tends to do that (re: anecdata from my attendance there, and that of my friends). So, everyone connects via the private CFAR mailing lists, or Facebook, or Twitter, or they start businesses together, or form group homes in the Bay Area. Suddenly, once these people can integrate their favorite online community, and subculture, with the rest of their personal lives, there isn’t a need to only communicate with others via the lesswrong.com, the awkward blog/forum-site.
Finally, since the inception of Less Wrong, Eliezer Yudkowsky, and others, started Less Wrong having already reached the conclusion that the best, ‘most rational’ thing for them to do was to reduce existential risk. Eliezer Yudkowsky wrote the Sequences as an exercise for himself to re-invent clear thinking to the point where he would be strong enough to start tackling the issue of existential risk reduction, because he wasn’t yet prepared for it in 2009. Secondarily, he hoped the Sequences would serve as a way for others to catch up his speed, and approach his level of epistemology, or whatever. The instrumental goal of this intent was obviously to get more people to become awesome enough to tackle existential risk alongside him. That was five years ago. As a community goal, Less Wrong was founded as dedicated to ‘refining the art [and (cognitive) science of human rationality’. However, the personal goal for its founders from what was the SIAI, and is now the MIRI, is provide a platform, a springboard, for getting people to care about existential risk reduction. Now, as MIRI enters its phase of greatest growth, the vision of a practical ‘rationality dojo’ finally exists in the CFAR, and with increased mutual collaboration with the Future of Humanity Institute, the effective altruism community, and global catastrophic risk think tanks, those who were the heroes of Less Wrong use the website less as they’ve gotten busier, and their priorities have shifted.
They wanted to start a community around rationality, to improve their own lives, and those of others. Now they have it. So, those of us remaining can join these other communities, or try something new. The tools for those who want this website to flourish again remain here in the old posts: Eliezer, Luke, and Scott, among others, laid the groundwork for us to level up as they have. So, aside from everything else, a second generation, a revival of Less Wrong, where new topics that aren’t mind-killing, either, can be explored. If those caring among us do the hard work to become the new paragon users of Less Wrong, we can reverse its Eternal September.
After this primary exodus from Less Wrong, others occurred as well. I personally know one user who had some of the most upvoted, and some featured, posts on Less Wrong until he stopped using this website, and deleted his account. Now, he interacts with other rationalists via Twitter, and is more involved with the online Neoreaction community. It seems like a lot of Less Wrong users have joined that community. My friend mentioned that he’s read the Sequences, and feels like what he is thinking about is beyond the level of thinking occurring on Less Wrong, so he no longer found the site useful. Another example of a different community is MetaMed: Michael Vassar is probably quite busy with that, and brought a lot of users of Less Wrong with him in that business. They probably prioritize their long hours there, and their personal lives, over taking time to write blog posts here.
Personally, my friends from the local Less Wrong meetup, and I, are starting our own outside projects, which also involve students from the local university, and the local transhumanist, and skeptic, communities as well. Send me a private message if you’re interested in what’s up with us.
Isn’t there something inherently self-destructive about a website that teaches “winning”? I mean, when people start winning in their lives, they probably spend less time debating online...
If someone starts a startup, they have less time to debate online. If someone joins a rationalist community in their area, they also spend less time online, because they spend more time in personal interactions. Even if you just decide to exercise 10 minutes every day, and you succeed, that’s 10 minutes less to spend online.
(I don’t consider myself very successful in real life, my ambitions are much higher than where I am now, and I still remain in the LW top contributor list only because my time spent on other websites dropped by an order of magnitude.)
Unless your (instrumental) goal is to write something online, as was Eliezer’s case. Which suggests that we should write about the things we care about (as long as they can be enjoyed by people who try to be rational). You know, something to protect, without the affective spirals.
So instead of trying to increase the debates on LW (which is a lost purpose per se, unless pleasant procrastination is the goal), the right question is: What is the thing you care about? Is there a topic so important to you, that you are willing to spend your time learning it and becoming stronger? (Is it compatible with rational thinking, or is it just a huge affective spiral?) If you have an important topic, and it can be approached rationally, then that’s exactly the thing you should write about… and LW is one of those places where you could publish it.
Maybe the thing stopping you is thinking “but this isn’t about rationality; it is about X”. Well, drop that thought. This is exactly the difference between the Sequences-era LessWrong and the new LessWrong. Eliezer wrote the meta stuff, and he himself admits that he “concentrated more heavily on epistemic rationality than instrumental rationality, in general” (because that was related to his main issue: programming the AI). You don’t have to write this stuff again. (Well, unless you feel extremely qualified to; but you probably don’t.) That was Eliezer’s calling; you write about your calling. It would perhaps be best for the community if you were an expert on overcoming akrasia, creating communities, teaching or testing rationality, and similar instrumental rationality topics; but if you are not an expert there, you don’t need to pretend. Write about the stuff you know. At least write the first article and see the reactions (worst case, you will republish it on your blog later).
For full disclosure, I don’t consider myself very successful in real life either, and my ambitions are also much higher than where I am now. This is a phenomenon that my friends from the Vancouver rationalist meetup have remarked upon. My hypothesis for this is that Less Wrong selects for a portion of people who are looking to jump-start their productivity to a new level of lifestyle, but mostly selects for intelligent but complacent nerds who want to learn to think about arguments better, and like reading blogs. Such behavioral tendencies don’t lend themselves to getting out an armchair more often.
Mr. Bur, I don’t know if you’re addressing myself specifically, or generally the users reading this thread, but, like Mr. Kennaway, I agree wholeheartedly. I personally don’t feel extremely qualified to rewrite the core of Less Wrong canon, or whatever. I want to write about the stuff I know, and it will probably be a couple of months before I start attempting to generate high-quality posts, as in the interim I will need to study better the topics which I care about, and which I perceive to not have been thoroughly covered by a better post on Less Wrong before. I believe the best posts in Discussion in recent months have been based on specific topics, like Brienne Strohl’s exploration of memory techniques, or the posts discussing the complicated issues of human health, and nutrition. With fortuitous coincidence, Robin Hanson has recently captured well what I believe you’re getting at.
My prior comment got a fair number of upvotes for the hypothesis about why there was an exodus from Less Wrong of the first generation of the most prominent contributors to Less Wrong. However, going forward, my impression of how remaining users of Less Wrong frame the purpose of using it is a combination of Mr. Bur’s comment above, and this one.
My hypothesis for this is that Less Wrong selects for a portion of people who are looking to jump-start their productivity to a new level of lifestyle, but mostly selects for intelligent but complacent nerds who want to learn to think about arguments better, and like reading blogs.
Any blog selects for people who like reading blogs. :D
LW is about… let’s make it a simple slogan… improving your life through better thinking in a community.
Which is like your hypothesis, with the detail that those nerds want to experience a supportive environment. Specifically, an environment that will support them in correct thinking (as opposed to: “you just have to think positively, imagine a lot of success, and the universe will send it to you” or: “don’t think about it too much, join this get-rich-quickly scheme”), and in their clumsy attempts at improving the productivity (neither: “just be yourself, relax, learn to accept your situation”, nor: “too much talk and no action, either show me some amazing results right now or shut up”).
I want to write about the stuff I know … I will need to study better the topics which I care about
Same here. I would like to write about education in general, and math education specifically. But to make it better than just random opinions, random memories, and random links to “Scenes From The Battleground”, I need to read some more materials and gather information.
So instead of trying to increase the debates on LW (which is a lost purpose per se, unless pleasant procrastination is the goal), the right question is: What is the thing you care about? Is there a topic so important to you, that you are willing to spend your time learning it and becoming stronger? (Is it compatible with rational thinking, or is it just a huge affective spiral?) If you have an important topic, and it can be approached rationally, then that’s exactly the thing you should write about… and LW is one of those places where you could publish it.
Agreed wholeheartedly.
Isn’t there something inherently self-destructive about a website that teaches “winning”?
All purposes seek their own destruction. You achieve a goal and continue on to further things. Even purposes to provide an ongoing service will decay as the world changes around it and new methods must be found.
What is LessWrong to be? A thing that was, or a thing that still has a role? And if the latter, what is that role and who will drive it, given that the founders and several of the former leading lights have moved on to other loci of activity?
Creating rationalist communities—a work that has to be done offline, by different people at different places, but we can coordinate and share success stories here.
Rationality curriculum—I would love to read a progress report from CFAR. When they have some materials that other people can use, that’s again a work for everyone in their own city.
Other than that, I think we should try to apply rationality in things we care about, whatever that is. For example, I am interested in computer programming: I would like to know whether some programming languages are really better than others, or whether that’s just an affective death spiral. As a reader, I think that reading about most topics where the author knows what they talk about and tries to be rational, would be interesting.
I became part of much of the meatspace rationalist community before I started more frequently using Less Wrong, so I integrate my personal experience into how I comment on here. That’s not to mean that I use my personal anecdotes as evidence for advice for other users of this site; I know that would be stupid. However, if you check my user history on Less Wrong, you’ll notice that I primarily use Less Wrong myself as a source for advice for myself (and my friends, too, who don’t bother to post here, but I believe should). Anyway, Less Wrong has been surprisingly helpful, and insightful. This has been all since 2012-13, mostly, well after when it seems most of you consider Less Wrong to have started declining. So, I’m more optimistic about Less Wrong’s future, but my subjective frame of reference is having good experiences with it after it hits its historical peak of awesomeness. So, maybe the rest of you users here concerned (rightfully so, in my opinion) about the decline of discussion on Less Wrong have hopped on a hedonic treadmill that I haven’t hopped on yet. I believe the good news from this is that I feel excited, and invigorated, to boost Less Wrong Discussion in my spare time. I like these meta-posts focused on solving the Less Wrong decline/identity-crisis/whatever-this-problem-is, and I want to help. In the next week, I’ll curate another meta-post summarizing, and linking to, all the best posts in Discussion in the last year. Please reply to me if this idea seems bad, or unnecessary, to stop me from wasting my time writing it up, if you believe that’s the case.
My friend kytael (not his real name, but his Less Wrong handle) has been on Less Wrong since 2010, has been a volunteer for the CFAR, and lived in the Bay Area for several months as part of the meatspace rationalist community there. For a couple of years, I was only a lurker on Less Wrong, and occasionally read some posts. I didn’t bother to read the Sequences, but I already studied cognitive science, and I attended lots of meetups where the Sequences were discussed, so I understand much of the canon material of Less Wrong rationality, even if I wouldn’t use the same words to describe the comments. It’s only in the last year, and a bit, that I got more involved in my local meetup, which motivated me to get involved in the site. I find myself agreeing with lots of the older Sequence posts, and the highest quality posters (lukeprog, Yvain, gwern, etc.) from a few years ago, but I too am deeply concerned about the decline of vitality on Less Wrong, as I have only started to get excited about it’s online aspects.
Anyway, when I too asked kytael:
(I asked him more, or less, the same question)
He replied: “I think the best way to view Less Wrong is as an archive.”
Since he was tapped into the Bay Area rationalist community, but was a user of Less Wrong from outside of it as well, he was in an especially good position to provide better hypotheses as to why use on this website has declined, due to his observation.
First of all, the most prominent figures of Less Wrong have spread their discussions across more websites than this one, where much discussion from those popular users who used to spend more time on Less Wrong now discuss things. Scott’s/Yvain’s Slate Star Codex is probably the best example of this, another being the Rationalist Masterlist. Following a plethora of blogs is much more difficult than just going through this one site, so for newer users to Less Wrong, or those of us who haven’t had the opportunity to know users of this site more personally, following all this discussion is difficult.
Second of all, the most popular, and common, users of Less Wrong have integrated publicly more, and now use social media. Ever since the inception of the CFAR workshops, users of Less Wrong have flocked to the Bay Area in throngs. They all became fast friends, because the atmosphere of CFAR workshops tends to do that (re: anecdata from my attendance there, and that of my friends). So, everyone connects via the private CFAR mailing lists, or Facebook, or Twitter, or they start businesses together, or form group homes in the Bay Area. Suddenly, once these people can integrate their favorite online community, and subculture, with the rest of their personal lives, there isn’t a need to only communicate with others via the lesswrong.com, the awkward blog/forum-site.
Finally, since the inception of Less Wrong, Eliezer Yudkowsky, and others, started Less Wrong having already reached the conclusion that the best, ‘most rational’ thing for them to do was to reduce existential risk. Eliezer Yudkowsky wrote the Sequences as an exercise for himself to re-invent clear thinking to the point where he would be strong enough to start tackling the issue of existential risk reduction, because he wasn’t yet prepared for it in 2009. Secondarily, he hoped the Sequences would serve as a way for others to catch up his speed, and approach his level of epistemology, or whatever. The instrumental goal of this intent was obviously to get more people to become awesome enough to tackle existential risk alongside him. That was five years ago. As a community goal, Less Wrong was founded as dedicated to ‘refining the art [and (cognitive) science of human rationality’. However, the personal goal for its founders from what was the SIAI, and is now the MIRI, is provide a platform, a springboard, for getting people to care about existential risk reduction. Now, as MIRI enters its phase of greatest growth, the vision of a practical ‘rationality dojo’ finally exists in the CFAR, and with increased mutual collaboration with the Future of Humanity Institute, the effective altruism community, and global catastrophic risk think tanks, those who were the heroes of Less Wrong use the website less as they’ve gotten busier, and their priorities have shifted.
They wanted to start a community around rationality, to improve their own lives, and those of others. Now they have it. So, those of us remaining can join these other communities, or try something new. The tools for those who want this website to flourish again remain here in the old posts: Eliezer, Luke, and Scott, among others, laid the groundwork for us to level up as they have. So, aside from everything else, a second generation, a revival of Less Wrong, where new topics that aren’t mind-killing, either, can be explored. If those caring among us do the hard work to become the new paragon users of Less Wrong, we can reverse its Eternal September.
After this primary exodus from Less Wrong, others occurred as well. I personally know one user who had some of the most upvoted, and some featured, posts on Less Wrong until he stopped using this website, and deleted his account. Now, he interacts with other rationalists via Twitter, and is more involved with the online Neoreaction community. It seems like a lot of Less Wrong users have joined that community. My friend mentioned that he’s read the Sequences, and feels like what he is thinking about is beyond the level of thinking occurring on Less Wrong, so he no longer found the site useful. Another example of a different community is MetaMed: Michael Vassar is probably quite busy with that, and brought a lot of users of Less Wrong with him in that business. They probably prioritize their long hours there, and their personal lives, over taking time to write blog posts here.
Personally, my friends from the local Less Wrong meetup, and I, are starting our own outside projects, which also involve students from the local university, and the local transhumanist, and skeptic, communities as well. Send me a private message if you’re interested in what’s up with us.
Isn’t there something inherently self-destructive about a website that teaches “winning”? I mean, when people start winning in their lives, they probably spend less time debating online...
If someone starts a startup, they have less time to debate online. If someone joins a rationalist community in their area, they also spend less time online, because they spend more time in personal interactions. Even if you just decide to exercise 10 minutes every day, and you succeed, that’s 10 minutes less to spend online.
(I don’t consider myself very successful in real life, my ambitions are much higher than where I am now, and I still remain in the LW top contributor list only because my time spent on other websites dropped by an order of magnitude.)
Unless your (instrumental) goal is to write something online, as was Eliezer’s case. Which suggests that we should write about the things we care about (as long as they can be enjoyed by people who try to be rational). You know, something to protect, without the affective spirals.
So instead of trying to increase the debates on LW (which is a lost purpose per se, unless pleasant procrastination is the goal), the right question is: What is the thing you care about? Is there a topic so important to you, that you are willing to spend your time learning it and becoming stronger? (Is it compatible with rational thinking, or is it just a huge affective spiral?) If you have an important topic, and it can be approached rationally, then that’s exactly the thing you should write about… and LW is one of those places where you could publish it.
Maybe the thing stopping you is thinking “but this isn’t about rationality; it is about X”. Well, drop that thought. This is exactly the difference between the Sequences-era LessWrong and the new LessWrong. Eliezer wrote the meta stuff, and he himself admits that he “concentrated more heavily on epistemic rationality than instrumental rationality, in general” (because that was related to his main issue: programming the AI). You don’t have to write this stuff again. (Well, unless you feel extremely qualified to; but you probably don’t.) That was Eliezer’s calling; you write about your calling. It would perhaps be best for the community if you were an expert on overcoming akrasia, creating communities, teaching or testing rationality, and similar instrumental rationality topics; but if you are not an expert there, you don’t need to pretend. Write about the stuff you know. At least write the first article and see the reactions (worst case, you will republish it on your blog later).
Upvoted. My thoughts:
For full disclosure, I don’t consider myself very successful in real life either, and my ambitions are also much higher than where I am now. This is a phenomenon that my friends from the Vancouver rationalist meetup have remarked upon. My hypothesis for this is that Less Wrong selects for a portion of people who are looking to jump-start their productivity to a new level of lifestyle, but mostly selects for intelligent but complacent nerds who want to learn to think about arguments better, and like reading blogs. Such behavioral tendencies don’t lend themselves to getting out an armchair more often.
Mr. Bur, I don’t know if you’re addressing myself specifically, or generally the users reading this thread, but, like Mr. Kennaway, I agree wholeheartedly. I personally don’t feel extremely qualified to rewrite the core of Less Wrong canon, or whatever. I want to write about the stuff I know, and it will probably be a couple of months before I start attempting to generate high-quality posts, as in the interim I will need to study better the topics which I care about, and which I perceive to not have been thoroughly covered by a better post on Less Wrong before. I believe the best posts in Discussion in recent months have been based on specific topics, like Brienne Strohl’s exploration of memory techniques, or the posts discussing the complicated issues of human health, and nutrition. With fortuitous coincidence, Robin Hanson has recently captured well what I believe you’re getting at.
My prior comment got a fair number of upvotes for the hypothesis about why there was an exodus from Less Wrong of the first generation of the most prominent contributors to Less Wrong. However, going forward, my impression of how remaining users of Less Wrong frame the purpose of using it is a combination of Mr. Bur’s comment above, and this one.
Note: edited for content, and grammar.
Any blog selects for people who like reading blogs. :D
LW is about… let’s make it a simple slogan… improving your life through better thinking in a community.
Which is like your hypothesis, with the detail that those nerds want to experience a supportive environment. Specifically, an environment that will support them in correct thinking (as opposed to: “you just have to think positively, imagine a lot of success, and the universe will send it to you” or: “don’t think about it too much, join this get-rich-quickly scheme”), and in their clumsy attempts at improving the productivity (neither: “just be yourself, relax, learn to accept your situation”, nor: “too much talk and no action, either show me some amazing results right now or shut up”).
Same here. I would like to write about education in general, and math education specifically. But to make it better than just random opinions, random memories, and random links to “Scenes From The Battleground”, I need to read some more materials and gather information.
Agreed wholeheartedly.
All purposes seek their own destruction. You achieve a goal and continue on to further things. Even purposes to provide an ongoing service will decay as the world changes around it and new methods must be found.
What is LessWrong to be? A thing that was, or a thing that still has a role? And if the latter, what is that role and who will drive it, given that the founders and several of the former leading lights have moved on to other loci of activity?
Creating rationalist communities—a work that has to be done offline, by different people at different places, but we can coordinate and share success stories here.
Rationality curriculum—I would love to read a progress report from CFAR. When they have some materials that other people can use, that’s again a work for everyone in their own city.
Other than that, I think we should try to apply rationality in things we care about, whatever that is. For example, I am interested in computer programming: I would like to know whether some programming languages are really better than others, or whether that’s just an affective death spiral. As a reader, I think that reading about most topics where the author knows what they talk about and tries to be rational, would be interesting.
[WARNING: GOOEY PERSONAL DETAILS BELOW]
I became part of much of the meatspace rationalist community before I started more frequently using Less Wrong, so I integrate my personal experience into how I comment on here. That’s not to mean that I use my personal anecdotes as evidence for advice for other users of this site; I know that would be stupid. However, if you check my user history on Less Wrong, you’ll notice that I primarily use Less Wrong myself as a source for advice for myself (and my friends, too, who don’t bother to post here, but I believe should). Anyway, Less Wrong has been surprisingly helpful, and insightful. This has been all since 2012-13, mostly, well after when it seems most of you consider Less Wrong to have started declining. So, I’m more optimistic about Less Wrong’s future, but my subjective frame of reference is having good experiences with it after it hits its historical peak of awesomeness. So, maybe the rest of you users here concerned (rightfully so, in my opinion) about the decline of discussion on Less Wrong have hopped on a hedonic treadmill that I haven’t hopped on yet. I believe the good news from this is that I feel excited, and invigorated, to boost Less Wrong Discussion in my spare time. I like these meta-posts focused on solving the Less Wrong decline/identity-crisis/whatever-this-problem-is, and I want to help. In the next week, I’ll curate another meta-post summarizing, and linking to, all the best posts in Discussion in the last year. Please reply to me if this idea seems bad, or unnecessary, to stop me from wasting my time writing it up, if you believe that’s the case.