Alexandros comments on Ways to improve LessWrong - Less Wrong

5 Post author: adamzerner 14 September 2014 02:25AM

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Comment author: Alexandros 15 September 2014 05:02:13AM 0 points [-]

I admire your optimism and determination. It's not my intention to convince you not to try. Even if you don't succeed, and it's not impossible that you could succeed, you will certainly get a lot out of it. So take my negativity as a challenge, and prove me wrong :).

Comment author: adamzerner 15 September 2014 05:21:14AM *  0 points [-]

Thanks for the encouragement! Would you mind offering your opinion on a few things though?

  1. How many people would a complete overhaul take, and how long would it take (roughly)?
  2. Why are the site owners reluctant to change?
  3. What do you think of my rough cost-benefit argument? The things I said are my intuition, but I could easily be overlooking certain things, and I don't understand it well enough to be too confident in the intuition. So what do you think? (you seem to share the belief in the value of the benefits, but don't seem to think they outweigh the costs)

Also, I don't want to get anyone's hopes up about my contributions. I'm still learning to code and I don't know how good I'll be in 13 weeks when I finish my bootcamp and I can't tell how long it'll be before I'm capable enough to contribute to something like this.

Comment author: Alexandros 16 September 2014 09:25:55PM 0 points [-]
  1. I don't know, I haven't done the effort estimation. It just looks like more than I'd be willing to put in.
  2. One hypothesis is that LessWrong.com is a low priority item to them, but they like having it around, so they are averse to putting in the required amount of thought to evaluate a change, and inclined to leave things as they are.
  3. I think it is unlikely it will have as much benefit as you expect, and that the pain will be bigger than you expect. However, if you add the fact that your drive may help you learn to program, then the ROI tips the other way massively.

By the way, an alternative explanation for the fact that so many developers are here but so few (or none) actually contribute to LW code, is that they're busy making lots of money or working on other things they find exciting. This is good news for you, because making the changes may be easier than I originally estimated. As long as you are determined enough.

Comment author: ChristianKl 24 September 2014 09:52:26PM 0 points [-]

I think a core reason is intransparency of how to contribute changes. You don't know who you have to convince to chance something so most people don't even try.

Comment author: adamzerner 16 September 2014 11:12:27PM 0 points [-]

Ok, thanks for your input! I'll have to do more research and brainstorming into how much benefit it really would have.

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