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Alicorn comments on Lesswrong, Effective Altruism Forum and Slate Star Codex: Harm Reduction - Less Wrong
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Comments (150)
I think this post misses a lot of the scope and timing of the Less Wrong diaspora. A lot of us are on Tumblr now; I've made a few blog posts at the much more open group blog Carcinisation, there's a presence on Twitter, and a lot of us just have made social friendships with enough other rationalists that the urge to post for strangers has a pressure release valve in the form of discussing whatever ideas with the contents of one's living room or one's Facebook friends.
The suggestions you list amount to "ask Scott to give up his private resource for a public good, even though if what he wanted to do was post on a group blog he still has a LW handle", "somehow by magic increase readership of the EA forum", and "restructure LW to entice the old guard back, even though past attempts have disintegrated into bikeshedding and a low level of technical assistance from the people behind the website's actual specs". These aren't really "solutions".
I don't like this.
I do not have the time to engage in the social interactions required to even be aware of where all this posting elsewhere is going on, but I want to read it. I've been regularly reading OB/LW since before LW existed and this diaspora makes me feel left behind.
I started a thing back in March called the LessWrong Digest. First of all, to you and/or anyone else reading this who signed up for it, I'm sorry I've been neglecting it for so long. I ran it for a few weeks in March, but I was indisposed for most of April, and it's been fallow since then. It contains highlights from the blogs of rationalists who post off of Less Wrong. It doesn't contain Tumblrs yet. I'll restart it tonight. I intend to build upon it to have some sort of rationalist RSS feed. I don't know how many other rationalist Tumblrs or blogs it would include, but lots. Hopefully I can customize it.
Anyway, it's my goal to make bring such projects to fruition so no rationalist under the sun cannot be found, no matter how deep into the blogosphere they burrow.
This sounds like a great project! I approve of it. Let me know if I can help.
If you want, I can help with the tumblr part of this. If you don't need help with the tumblr part, but want to be pointed in the right direction, I host the Rationalist Masterlist with most of the tumblr rationalists on it.
Also keep in mind that tumblr tends to have a very low signal-to-noise ratio.
There's a Masterlist for rational Tumblr, but I'm not aware of a complete list of all rationalist blogs across platforms.
Perhaps the Less Wrong community might find it useful to start one? If it were hosted here on LW, it might also reinforce LW's position as a central hub of the rationality community, which is relevant to the OP.
I have already thought of doing this, and want to do it. I've been neglecting this goal, and I've got lots of other priorities on my plate right now, so I'm not likely to do it alone soon (i.e., by the end of June). If you want me to help you, I will. I may have an "ugh field" around starting this project. Suggestions for undoing any trivial inconveniences therein you perceive are welcomed.
Sorry for the late reply, and thanks for the offer! Unfortunately I wasn't actually talking about doing it myself, just putting it out there as an idea. Good luck though; it sounds like a valuable thing for the rationality community to have.
I rarely bother to comment on this site but this is important meta information. Many outsider groups and rationalists in particular seem to dissolve the moment their exclusion from standard social systems is removed. The most dumbed down example I have, and I specifically desire to post as low brow and example as possible, is the episode of Malcom In The Middle titled "Morp." Its prom backwards in case you missed that. The outsider group starts an anti-prom where they do everything ironically, and amusingly have all the same status bullshit problems over who is in charge or what should even be done as the normal kids prom. Then when some random dumb popular girls come down, feel upper class girl pity, and invite them to real prom everyone but Malcolm goes.
Less Wrong and its specific section of the rationalist community has approached this same singularity. It was all about getting enough like-minded and conveniently located people to form your own samesy, dull, cookie cutter clique just like normal people. Alicorn is a prime example of posts that expose this issue, although that whole cuddle pile bullshit is a more general example.
Much like say Atheism+, the OB/LW community has exploded into a million uncoordinated fragments merely seeking to satisfy their standard social needs. Meanwhile each of these shards has the same number of useless, weird, counterproductive group beliefs as mainstream Christians. And they've accomplished almost nothing except maybe funding the useless MIRI, if one even considers that an accomplishment. EA people even came and said MIRI doesn't qualify for GiveWell.
Indeed I feel my comparison to A+ is quite apt. So much bullshit spewed about improving stuff, raising the sanity waterline vs inclusive atheism but each group did essentially the opposite of their goal.
As per my title and associated duties I here mark the collapse of "internet rationalists" as a cohesive, viable, or at all productive group. Scott has a popular blog, Elie has a full time job wasting his life but gets paid good money, and Alicorn can now throw "interesting" "dinner parties." Also innumerable Tumblr related bullshit storms. Well, some movements accomplished less.
Adieu.
This is undiplomatically expressed but may contain an important seed of useful information for anyone who would like to recentralize rationalism: meeting people's normal, boring, apey social needs is important for retention, especially at scale when it seems more tempting to split off with your favorite small percentage of the group and not put in the effort with the rest. If you want people to post on Less Wrong, what's in it for them, anymore?
(I understand the desire to scare-quote the interestingness of my dinner parties but they are, in fact, parties at which dinner is served, in the most literal possible sense.)
Indeed. Especially if the point of LW is to socialize newcomers to rationality, well, socializing newcomers is hard and not particularly glamorous work, and we're (to some extent) selecting for people who don't want to be socialized!
That's clearly not true. Alicorn again is a perfect of example of someone who clearly wanted to be socialized. I mean... dinner parties. Yes, I cannot get over the whole dinner party thing, get over it.
More on point though, centralization is the ultimate bug bear of the left/progressive/radicals/w.e. Look at the internecine wars of feminism or socialism or atheism. Furthermore everyone wants to address their local personal issues first and also divides who is allowed to interfere in problems among demographic or identity lines.
The success of a revolutionary movement, various religions being examples, requires both that it be more correct than what came before and that it be either equally or more satisfying. One should be careful though of copying the old systems too closely. Ethical Humanist solstice parties? Good lord what a terrible idea.
And notice how she's mostly absent on LW preferring instead to plan and arrange her dinner parties... :-P
If you say so, I barely come on here much. Today is the most active I've been in months.
What does this mean? I guess you mean "(some subset of) Alicorn's posts" (though I can't help thinking the way you've phrased it is suggestive of some kind of personal animosity), but which ones and what exactly do you think is wrong with them?
Curious what (in your own case, and your best estimation of other people's case) motivated the move to Tumblr?
I don't feel like I "moved to" Tumblr. I ran out of things that seemed like they'd be best expressed as LW posts and stopped being motivated by karma circa I think late 2010/early 2011 and my posting dropped off considerably. It was the end of 2012 when my sister convinced me to get a Tumblr, and I don't even mostly Tumbl about rationality (mostly). Scott has a Tumblr I think explicitly because he can dash off posts without worrying as much about quality, there; Mike has one for very similar social reasons to my own; I don't think most other people I can think of who are big on Rationalist Diaspora Tumblr were ever heavy posters on LW, although I could be missing some who don't have corresponding screen names, or forgetting someone. They're to a substantial extent different people who happened to enter the circle of interest when Tumblr was a reasonably effective way to hang out on a space with rationalists in it, and so they did that, because for whatever reason it was comfier.
Is there directory of LessWrong Tumblr?
Yep. If you have a tumblr and want to be on the list, tell yxoque.
The solutions were bad in purpose so other people would come up with better solutions on the spot. I edited to clarify :)
The boundaries of relevante is something to think. A lot of places outside LW have discussions. Political topics was a thing back then, but now apparently people mention is Open Threads, and the most frequent talkers are still posting elsewhere. EA emerge, and with good coordination. However, this does not mean we should stop possible dynamical changes.