Reminds me of Meditations on Moloch. “Slack” is anything that you have/want/enjoy that you would not need/want/care about if you were optimized for competition. Which is to say, Slack is any resource you could sacrifice to Moloch for an advantage.
Thanks for sharing. I’ve been thinking about this sort of thing a lot the past few years, and it’s nice to have a concept handle that broadly encompasses buffer money/free time/focused attention/etc, instead of referring to each individually.
Thomas Ambrose
Karma: 9
Never used old LW much, but I’m a longtime SSC reader. I read the goals and strategy and hopes this project succeeds. My impressions so far:
-Everything’s very minimalist; it seems very trendy and a little pretentious (though I suppose this is a matter of personal taste). A bit of color could help things like usernames to stand out. A bit of clutter at the top, in the form of a permanent header or sidebar (as opposed to the current, click-to-view menus) might help with site navigation, loading times (I don’t do web design, but this seems like a thing), and making the whole place seem a little less self-serious.
-The site is slow. Slow to load, yes, but I experienced a lot of lag just writing a comment last night. (Maybe all my neighbors were watching HD Netflix last night though, as it’s only minor lag right now. EDIT: Now the lag’s back. I guess the site is only fast for me during low band-use hours.)
-I spent five minutes looking for a way to mark sequences as read, and then tried reading one essay at normal speed to see if I could then tell the difference between it and an unread essay. This is marked as “Done” on the feature roadmap, but I still have no idea how to use it.
-I really like the idea of cross-posting here from personal blogs. It’s not obvious to me how to do this. Is that what a “Link post” is?
-I like the search feature; it’s speedy, and I like how I don’t have to leave the page to see results. It would nice to see more than three post and three comment results though. Also, when I click “LESSWRONG” at top left, it took me to the homepage but left the search view up. It would be nice if this link deactivated search; I was briefly left thinking the link hadn’t worked at all.
-I don’t want to see “Recommended Reading” every time I go to the homepage. I’ve read most of it. I think it’s good to have on the homepage, but I’d rather it be further down or in a sidebar or something. Else, we could have a landing page with recommended reading and a recent activity page that people who just want to see what’s new can bookmark.
Of those, only website speed and cross-posting is likely to affect whether or not I keep using the site. Mostly, it’ll come down to adoption. I hope the project succeeds; it would be very nice to have a functioning central hub for rationalish stuff.