I will cheerfully bet at 1:1 odds that half the people who show up on LessWrong do not know how to filter posts on the frontpage. Last time I asked that on a survey it was close to 50% and I’m pretty sure selection effects for who takes the LW Census pushed that number up.
Yes but it’s an out-of-the-way button mixed in with a bunch of buttons, as opposed to like, kinda the primary choice you’re expected to make on the site.
“Isn’t it weird an arbitrary to make a front-and-center choice ‘hey wanna turn off the AI content’?” yes, which is why we didn’t do it the last couple times we talked about it.
Yeah, I don’t know how typical that frontpage full of AI is, I just checked as I was writing the review. It seems like if you don’t de-emphasize AI content at this point though, it’s easy for AI to overwhelm everything else.
One idea if you want like, a minimal change (as opposed to a more radical archipelago approach) is to penalize each extra post of the same tag on the frontpage? I don’t know how complicated that would be under the hood. I’d be happy to see the one or two hottest AI posts, I just don’t want to see 3/4ths AI and have to search for the other posts.
To be clear, I think there’s a bunch of AI posts on the front page because that’s what’s getting upvoted, and also if LessWrong does want to show mostly AI posts then especially given the state of the world that’s a reasonable priority. It’s not what I usually write or usually read, but LessWrong doesn’t have to be set up for me- I’m just going to keep reviewing it from my perspective.
I think it would be better if the default was that LW is a site about AI and longtermist cause areas and other stuff was hidden by default. (Or other stuff is shown by default on rat.lesswrong.com or whatever.)
Correspondingly, I wouldn’t like penalizing multiple of the same tag.
I think the non-AI stuff is less good for the world than the AI stuff and there are downsides in having LW feature non-AI stuff from my perspective (e.g., it’s more weird and random from the perspective of relevant people).
Yes, but random people can’t comment or post on the alignment forum and in practice I find that lots of AI relevant stuff doesn’t make it there (and the frontpage is generally worse than my lesswrong frontpage after misc tweaking).
TBC, I’m not really trying to make a case that something should happen here, just trying to quickly articulate why I don’t think the alignment forum fully addresses what I want.
(In case that came across as sarcastic, I sincerely appreciate your stating the position clearly and think lots of other people probably hold that position. I’m being a little silly with paraphrasing a meme, but I mean it in a friendly kind of silly way.)
Fair. For reference, here are my selections which are I think are a good default strategy for people who just come to LW for AI/AI safety reasons:
(Why “-” a bunch of stuff rather than “+” AI? Well, because “+” adds some fixed karma while “-” multiplies by a constant (less than 1), and I don’t think adding karma is a good strategy (as it shows you really random posts often). I do like minus-ing these specific things also. If I could, I’d probably do AI * 1.5 and then reduce the negative weight on these things a bit.)
So this might be a good suggestion for a “AI focus” preset.
I don’t understand. Can’t people just hide posts tagged as AI?
I will cheerfully bet at 1:1 odds that half the people who show up on LessWrong do not know how to filter posts on the frontpage. Last time I asked that on a survey it was close to 50% and I’m pretty sure selection effects for who takes the LW Census pushed that number up.
I don’t disagree. I assumed Raemon intended something more elaborate than just a salient button with this effect.
Yes but it’s an out-of-the-way button mixed in with a bunch of buttons, as opposed to like, kinda the primary choice you’re expected to make on the site.
“Isn’t it weird an arbitrary to make a front-and-center choice ‘hey wanna turn off the AI content’?” yes, which is why we didn’t do it the last couple times we talked about it.
Yeah, I don’t know how typical that frontpage full of AI is, I just checked as I was writing the review. It seems like if you don’t de-emphasize AI content at this point though, it’s easy for AI to overwhelm everything else.
One idea if you want like, a minimal change (as opposed to a more radical archipelago approach) is to penalize each extra post of the same tag on the frontpage? I don’t know how complicated that would be under the hood. I’d be happy to see the one or two hottest AI posts, I just don’t want to see 3/4ths AI and have to search for the other posts.
To be clear, I think there’s a bunch of AI posts on the front page because that’s what’s getting upvoted, and also if LessWrong does want to show mostly AI posts then especially given the state of the world that’s a reasonable priority. It’s not what I usually write or usually read, but LessWrong doesn’t have to be set up for me- I’m just going to keep reviewing it from my perspective.
[Mildly off topic]
I think it would be better if the default was that LW is a site about AI and longtermist cause areas and other stuff was hidden by default. (Or other stuff is shown by default on rat.lesswrong.com or whatever.)
Correspondingly, I wouldn’t like penalizing multiple of the same tag.
I think the non-AI stuff is less good for the world than the AI stuff and there are downsides in having LW feature non-AI stuff from my perspective (e.g., it’s more weird and random from the perspective of relevant people).
Your preferences are reasonable preferences, and also I disagree with them and plan to push the weird fanfiction and cognitive self-improvement angles on LessWrong. May I offer you a nice AlignmentForum in this trying time?
Yes, but random people can’t comment or post on the alignment forum and in practice I find that lots of AI relevant stuff doesn’t make it there (and the frontpage is generally worse than my lesswrong frontpage after misc tweaking).
TBC, I’m not really trying to make a case that something should happen here, just trying to quickly articulate why I don’t think the alignment forum fully addresses what I want.
(In case that came across as sarcastic, I sincerely appreciate your stating the position clearly and think lots of other people probably hold that position. I’m being a little silly with paraphrasing a meme, but I mean it in a friendly kind of silly way.)
(I would not work on LessWrong if that was the case and think it would be very harmful for the world)
Fair. For reference, here are my selections which are I think are a good default strategy for people who just come to LW for AI/AI safety reasons:
(Why “-” a bunch of stuff rather than “+” AI? Well, because “+” adds some fixed karma while “-” multiplies by a constant (less than 1), and I don’t think adding karma is a good strategy (as it shows you really random posts often). I do like minus-ing these specific things also. If I could, I’d probably do AI * 1.5 and then reduce the negative weight on these things a bit.)
So this might be a good suggestion for a “AI focus” preset.