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Vaniver comments on Open thread, September 2-8, 2013 - Less Wrong
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Agreed. One of the reasons why I wrote a comment that was a bunch of links to other posts is because I think that there is a lot to say about this topic. Just "LW is like the Mormon Church" was worth ~5 posts in main.
A related question: is LessWrong useful for people who are awesome, or just people who want to become awesome? This is part of patrissimo's point: if you're spending an hour a day on LW instead of an hour a day exercising, you may be losing the instrumental rationality battle. If someone who used to be part of the LW community stops posting because they've become too awesome, that has unpleasant implications for the dynamics of the community.
I was interested in that because "difference between the time a good idea is suggested and the time that idea is implemented" seems like an interesting reference class.
Isn't this a danger that all online communities face? Those who procrastinate a lot online get a natural advantage against those who don't. Thus, unless the community is specifically designed against that (how exactly?), the procrastinators will become the elite.
(It's an implication: Not every procrastinator becomes a member of elite, but all members of elite are procrastinators.)
Perhaps we could make an exception for Eliezer, because for him writing the hundreds of articles was not procrastination. But unless writing a lot of stuff online is one's goal, then procrastination is almost a necessity to get a celebrity status on a website.
Then we should perhaps think about how to prevent this effect. A few months ago we had some concerned posts against "Eternal September" and stuff. But this is more dangerous, because it's less visible, it is a slow, yet predictable change, towards procrastination.
Yes, which is I think a rather good support for having physical meetups.
Agreed.
Note that many of the Eternal September complaints are about this, though indirectly: the fear is that the most awesome members of a discussion are the ones most aggravated by newcomers, because of the distance between them and newcomers is larger than the difference between a median member and a newcomer. The most awesome people also generally have better alternatives, and thus are more sensitive to shifts in quality.
Supporting this, I'll note that I don't see many posts from, say, Wei Dai or Salamon in recent history - though as I joined all of a month of ago take that with a dish of salt.
I wonder if something on the MIRI/CFAR end would help? Incentives on the actual researchers to make occasional (not too many, they do have more important things to do) posts on LessWrong would probably alleviate the effect.
Perhaps to some degree, different karma coefficients could be used to support what we consider useful on reflection (not just on impulse voting). For example, if a well-researched article generated more karma than a month of procrastinating while writing comments...
There is some support for this: articles in Main get 10× more karma than comments. But 10 is probably not enough, and also it is not obvious what exactly belongs to Main; it's very unclearly defined. Maybe there could be a Research subreddit where only scientific-level articles are allowed, and there the karma coefficient could be pretty high. (Alternatively, to prevent karma inflation, the karma from comments should be divided by 10.)