I’ve been a LessWrong organizer since 2011, with roughly equal focus on the cultural, practical and intellectual aspects of the community. My first project was creating the Secular Solstice and helping groups across the world run their own version of it. More recently I’ve been interested in improving my own epistemic standards and helping others to do so as well.
Raemon(Raymond Arnold)
Karma: 35,286
Note: I currently lean towards changing the Progress Bar metric from “tagged posts over 25 karma” to 35 or 40 karma.
The original reason we went with 25 karma was an awkward compromise due to the LW2.0 karma inflation – old upvotes were only worth 1 point, now regular upvotes are worth 2 for most longtime users, and strong upvotes mean the average is more like 3-4. We haven’t gotten around to re-running the old vote history with the new vote-weighting, and that means that old (often great) posts have much lower karma than modern posts.
We plan to bring the old and new votes in sync someday, but didn’t have time to do it this week.
For modern posts, the threshold I’d have preferred to set was ~50 karma. This was roughly the equivalent of 25 back-in-the-day (hence the original metric). But I don’t really want to make people feel obligated to tag a bunch of mediocre modern posts – I’d rather taggers start shifting their efforts towards improving tag descriptions (turn stubs into full fledged A or B tier tags), and thinking about how the tag ontology fits together (i.e. are some tags duplicates? which tags are related?)
My current guess is we should set the threshold to 40, and then I’m just going to strong upvote a bunch of older posts that deserve it to bump them over the threshold.
(Meanwhile, to all the users who have doing doing tons of tagging: thanks!)
Curated.
When I first read it a few years ago, this blogpost quickly became foundational to how I think about culture. I recently pinged Malcolm about crossposting it because I thought it was essential to have on the Communication Cultures tag.
First, I think “Tell Culture” is pretty good when done right, and I think Malcolm correctly identified some important failure modes it was likely to fall into. I’m not 100% sure whether “Reveal Culture” is quite the platonic ideal of the culture, but I do think it’s a net-improvement. And fleshing out the gears has solidified my distinctions between Guess, Ask and other variant cultures that play with similar clusters of norm.
I think my only serious criticism of “Reveal Culture” is that the name is a bit more clunky. I think it’s a slight improvement of “Tell” because it avoids the impulse to think “Tell culture means I’m allowed to tell people what to do”. But, it’s two syllables long, and it’s not quite intuitive the way “Interrupt Culture” is.
Culture In General
I think more importantly, this post lays out some key mechanics of “what is necessary to have a culture.” And this has shaped all my thinking since about various types of cultures I’ve wanted to build or understand. The post was a key piece of my “Rationalist Culture Lit Review” in The Real Hufflepuff Sequence Was The Posts We Made Along The Way, because it helped me make sense of all the other “communication culture” posts.
An interesting thing about Supernatural Fitness (a VR app kinda like Beat Saber) is that they are leaning hard into being a fitness app rather than a game. You don’t currently get to pick songs, you pick workouts, which come with pep talks and stretching and warmups.
This might make you go “ugh, I just wanna play a song” and go play Beat Saber instead. But, Supernatural Fitness is _way_ prettier and has some conceptual advances over Beat Saber.
And… I mostly endorse this and think it was the right call. I am sympathetic to “if you give people the ability to choose whatever, they mostly choose to be couch potatoes, or goodhart on simple metrics”, and if you want people to do anything complicated and interesting you need to design your app with weird constraints in mind.
(Example: LessWrong deliberately doesn’t show users the view-count of their posts. We already have the entire internet as the control group for what happens if you give people view-counts – they optimize for views, and you get clickbait. Is this patronizing? Yeah. Am I 100% confident it’s the right call? No. But, I do think if you want to build a strong intellectual culture, it matters what kinds of Internet Points you give [or don’t give] people, and this is at least a judgment call you need to be capable of making)
But… I still do think it’s worth looking at third options. Sometimes, I might really want to just jam to some tunes, and I want to pick the specific
In the case of Supernatural Fitness, I think it is quite important that your opening experience puts you in the mindset of coaches and workouts, and that songs are clustered together in groups of 15+ minutes (so you actually get a cardio workout), and that they spend upfront effort teaching you the proper form for squats and encouraging you to maintain that form rather than “minimizing effort” (which I think Beat Saber ends up teaching you, and if you’re coming from Beat Saber, you might have already internalized habits around)
At first I thought “maybe they should make you learn proper form first, but eventually give you the ability to choose individual songs.” Then I simulated myself doing that, and thought “well, I would probably end up just doing less workouts.”
My current guess for my coherent-extrapolated-preference for the game is for something like “Individual song plays are more like rewards for actually completing a workout” (i.e. if you make it all the way through you get credits that can be spent on playing individual songs). Or, alternately, maybe players can assemble workouts out of at least 3 songs.
It’s probably complicated somewhat by the app licensing popular music, and the licenses might be temporary.
I can see the case for that, but FYI it just made me go make this meta comment rather than intuitively classifying a calibration post. I think it might be fine to have the disambiguation live in the text rather than the title.
Tagging meta question:
There’s a Calibration (Probability) tag. How important is it to keep that distinct from other forms of calibration (i.e. if you think some parameter will be within particular bounds, those bounds tend to be correct).
Prompted by this post on time calibration.
I suppose that all calibration is implicit probability calibration (i.e. if I think something will take between 15 and 45 minutes, I’m sort of implicitly claiming it has a high probability of being so, even if I didn’t concretely decide it was my 90% confidence interval). But, if all calibration can be reformulated as probability, do we need the “(probability)” disambiguation?
So, on one hand, I don’t have any examples in mind of times when Chesterton’s fence was actually harmful. (I don’t know that I’ve ever seen it do anything other than slow someone down a little bit, or provoke some interesting conversations)
On the other hand, it’s kinda embarrassing to me that I hadn’t seen anyone point out “dude, you should actually evaluate whether Chesterton’s fence is useful in practice” until now. Thanks!
Thanks!
(fwiw: I was assuming the people in pods would already have infected each other or would be about to infect each other anyways (due to sharing a house and lots of airspace), so the intent was something more about how much additional spread would be between pods, outdoors)
I don’t think this issue would go away with replacing algolia. The problem is a sort of generic “algolia is faster than making a database query, but that speed comes with some default settings that require re-wiring, which I’m sure is possible but requires some upfront costs that aren’t part of my usual workflow. I think any search engine would come with the same issue.”
And the people most likely to be willing to try Circling are those who least need it and in fact need the opposite.
This feels like a fairly strong claim that I don’t think you’ve justified. (I also note that you just claimed people don’t generally know better than other people about what they need. But, you’re kinda implicitly claiming here that you know better than the people who do circling whether circling is right for them)
I am with you on “circling and circling-esque-things have some risks that people don’t realize”, and “people into circling shouldn’t implicitly assume everyone will be into it”, and there are several better practices that people should be doing with regards to it. But you seem to be assuming a level of danger that’s 10x-100x worse than it is, and/or assuming a harm minimization model that I don’t think most people are running.
I think most of the danger from circling lives in black swan events (I’ve seen a bunch of circles, only 2 cases where I think someone was harmed)
Agreed. It’s just actually a bit annoying to get it to work right, due to how the algolia search function works.
(quick note: the Edit Tags button is actually admin only. We can make that available to everyone soon though)
I think it’s possible “secrets !== promises” should have been the title here. I think it’s probably the single most important bit.
Thanks! Yesterday I was looking at the Martial Art of Rationality and trying to figure out what to tag it, and kinda gave up. I believe you created the tag for that? (I think it was the first tagged post). Kudos, it was a good solution I think.
In this case someone just gave it a list and asked it to create more. (I do think the ideal process here would have been to feed it some posts + corresponding taglists, and then given it a final post with a “Tags: …” prompt. But, that was a bit more work and nobody did it yet AFAICT)
(totally off the cuff, this is not official Ray Opinion let alone a commonly endorsed LW Team opinion)
I think there’s something of a spectrum of value.
I think it’s straightforwardly valuable to add the Obvious Posts to the Obvious Tags, and this is a job that most people can do.
I think, indeed, niche specialists are going to need to make the Niche Specialist tags.
The thing that gets a bit tricky is that different people might be finding the same topics but giving them different names. Something that I think is useful for Niche Specialists to do is to also be putting some effort into “taking in the overall evolving tagging structure”. Then, thinking about how to resolve multiple overlapping tags, and or competing definitions within tags, etc.
Perhaps most interestingly: most of the LW team is currently leaning towards tags evolving in a wiki-like direction. So, one of the things we need here is not just good tagging, but good pedagogy for introducing various concepts on a given tag page. And that requires some thinking about how the concept relates to other concepts.
I guess this means that there’s maybe two types of people I’m especially excited by getting involved with Tagging: people with the niche interests (who would be even more beneficial if they learned to look holistically at the concept-space), and people who are good at pedagogy and/or mapping out the concept-space, who could probably use to learn a bit more about individual niche areas to help improve the descriptions for the niche tags.
(I find myself thinking about Scott Alexander’s Alchemists / Teachers story where you need a mix of people who are particularly good at a subject to even understand the details at all, and people who are good at education to make it easier to understand, and various points on the spectrum between to bridge the gaps)
(joke was more about the general principle of putting opaque AIs in charge of alignment ontology, even if this one obviously wasn’t going to be adversarial about it)
Sorry, to be clear this was a joke.
Thanks!
One thing I’ll add is that the tagging we could most use help with is fairly “conceptually nuanced.” We’re most excited to have taggers that are something like “dedicated ontologists” who think seriously about LessWrong’s concepts and how they fit together.
This role requires a bit of onboarding/getting-in-sync, and I’d be interested in chatting with anyone who’s interested in that aspect of it. Send me (or Ruby) a PM if you’re interested.
Update: we asked GPT-3 to create some tags, and it suggested, among other things: “Robotic Autonomy”
I feel obligated to link CGP Grey’s The Rules for Rulers, which makes some similar points through a somewhat different lens with a bunch of cute graphics.