palladias comments on Poll - Is endless September a threat to LW and what should be done? - Less Wrong
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I think this site is dying because there's nothing interesting to talk about anymore. Discussion is filled with META, MEETUP, SEQ RERUN, links to boring barely-relevant articles, and idea threads where the highest comment has more votes than the thread itself (i.e. a crappy idea). Main is not much better. Go to archive.org and compare (date chosen randomly, aside from being a while ago). I don't think eternal september is the whole explanation here -- you only need 1 good user to write a good article.
One issue with the LW/CFAR approach is that the focus is on getting better/more efficient at pursuing your goals, but not on deciding whether you're applying your newfound superpowers to the right goals. (There's a bit of this with efficient altruism, but those giving opportunities are more about moving people up Maslow's hierarchy of needs, not on figuring out what to want when you're not at subsistence level).
Luke's recent post suggest that almost no one here has the prereqs to tackle metaphysics or normative ethics, but that always has seemed like the obvious next topic for rationality-minded people. I was glad when Luke was writing his Desirism sequences back at CSA, but it never got to the point where I had a decent enough model of what normative claims desirism made to be able to evaluate it.
Basically, I think these topics would let us set our sights a little higher than "Help me optimize my computer use" but I think one major hurdle is that it's hard to tackle these topics in individual posts, and people may feel intimidated about starting sequences.
The problem is that there is an unfortunate tendency here, going all the way up to EY to dismiss philosophy and metaphysics.