Is Less Wrong, despite its flaws, the highest-quality relatively-general-interest forum on the web? It seems to me that, to find reliably higher-quality discussion, I must turn to more narrowly focused sites, e.g. MathOverflow and the GiveWell blog.
Many people smarter than myself have reported the same impression. But if you know of any comparably high-quality relatively-general-interest forums, please link me to them!
In the meantime: suppose it's true that Less Wrong is the highest-quality relatively-general-interest forum on the web. In that case, we're sitting on a big opportunity to grow Less Wrong into the "standard" general-interest discussion hub for people with high intelligence and high metacognition (shorthand: "intellectual elites").
Earlier, Jonah Sinick lamented the scarcity of elites on the web. How can we get more intellectual elites to engage on the web, and in particular at Less Wrong?
Some projects to improve the situation are extremely costly:
- Pay some intellectual elites with unusually good writing skills (like Eliezer) to generate a constant stream of new, interesting content.
- Comb through Less Wrong to replace community-specific jargon with more universally comprehensible terms, and change community norms about jargon. (E.g. GiveWell's jargon tends to be more transparent, such as their phrase "room for more funding.")
Code changes, however, could be significantly less costly. New features or site structure elements could increase engagement by intellectual elites. (To avoid priming and contamination, I'll hold back from naming specific examples here.)
To help us figure out which code changes are most likely to increase engagement on Less Wrong by intellectual elites, specific MIRI volunteers will be interviewing intellectual elites who (1) are familiar enough with Less Wrong to be able to simulate which code changes might cause them to engage more, but who (2) mostly just lurk, currently.
In the meantime, I figured I'd throw these ideas to the community for feedback and suggestions.
At the risk of sounding ridiculous, I will self-identify as a member of the intellectual elite since no one else seems to want to.
I'm occasionally engaged in LW and I'm interested in rationality and applied psychology and the idea of FAI.
I don't think LW is necessarily the best venue for discussing big important ideas. Making a post on the internet is something I might spend 4-5 working hours on. It might even be something I'll spend a couple days on, but that's an inconsequential amount of my time. And the vast majority of the people who read whatever post I generate will spend generously 15-20 minutes thinking about it. I'm actively working on reading and checking the math in a 300 page textbook in order to make a post on LW six months from now that maybe 100 people will read and almost no one will take seriously. If my day job weren't writing academic papers with similarly dim readership prospects this would surely be overwhelmingly demoralizing. There's a commitment issue here where it doesn't make sense to invest a lot of time in impressing/convincing LW readers. I have no guarantee that anyone is seriously engaged with whatever idea I present here as opposed to just being entertained, and most of the people reading this forum are not looking for things to seriously engage with. There's a limit to how many, how big, and how strange the ideas you encounter once a week in a blog can be. They might be entertaining, they might be interesting, but they can't all change the way you see the world. It takes a lot of time (for my mind at least) to process new ideas and work through all the implications.
LW is set up in such a way that it's a constant stream of updates, and any given post can expect a week or two of attention, at which point it fades into the background with all the other detritus. But big ideas are hard to grapple with in a week, and so most LW responses are the sort of off the cuff suggestions that you get when you expose people to a new idea they don't fully understand. I've been reading LW for 9 months now and I'm still on the fence about FAI. The internet makes publishing much easier, but it doesn't make thinking any easier. This is I think one of the reasons that science hasn't abandoned publishing in journals and why there aren't many elites on the web. Accessing content is already much much easier than digesting that content. I have whole binders full of papers I need to read and digest that I don't have time for. And so does everyone else probably. LW posts are primarily entertainment and most of the people who post here are doing it for a brief applause or to float an idea they haven't seriously worked on yet.
I'm also less clear as to what sort of content you want that you don't have. What's your end goal?
If I had to make code suggestions, I would say that discussions on a single post get too long before anything is resolved. There seems to be no point in commenting once there's a certain number of comments, and so discussion tends to sort of stall out. I'd be interested to see what the distribution of # of comments on high karma posts looks like and whether there's a specific number of comments which seems to function as a sort of glass ceiling. I also think that as time goes on things get pushed down the queue and become invisible. The fact that no matter how brilliant your idea is it's basically got a week in the limelight and then will be forgotten forever isn't super conducive to using LW to seriously discuss difficult problems.
And this is all off the top of my head, because of course I haven't seriously thought about this.