I've noticed a distinct trend lately in that I've been commenting less and less on posts as time goes by. I've been wondering if its just that the new car smell of lesswrong has been wearing off, or if it is something else.
Well, I think I've identified it. I just don't care for discussions about how to go about building communities. It may, in the long run, be beneficial to work out how to build communities of rationalists, but in the meantime I find these discussions are making this less and less a community I want to be a part of, and (if I am not unique) may be having the opposite effect that they intend.
Don't get me wrong. I am not saying these discussions are unimportant or are not germane to the building of this site. I am saying that if a new person comes here and reads the last posts, are they going to want to stay? For myself, I find I am willing to be part of a community of enthusiastic rationalists (which is why I started reading this blog in the first place), but I have NO interest in being part of a community that spends all its time debating on how to build the community.
Lately, to me, this place has seemed more of the latter and less of the former.
He cross-posted an excellent article between here and his blog (that's how I found his blog in the first place), but hasn't linked to older articles. Perhaps he's influenced by a perceived norm against authors posting links to their own content, as some sites do have such a norm. However, I don't think Less Wrong has such a norm, and if it did, then content written prior to its founding would definitely be exempt.
It's more that my work has advanced tremendously in the last year or so, but my blog hasn't really kept up. And while there's definitely an overlap in target audiences between LW and my blog, that doesn't mean my blog articles are directly appropriate for LW.
So the idea of doing a series here was to do something more aimed at pulling together an explanation of the models I've developed of "the human platform", as it were.
In practice, though, I've realized that if I do posts in the series more often than once every few weeks, I would end up negle... (read more)