Personally, I liked LW for being an integrated place with all that : the Sequences, interesting posts and discussions between rationalists/transhumanists (be it original thoughts/viewpoints/analysis, news related to those topics, links to related fanfiction, book suggestion, ...), and the meetup organization (I went to several meetup in Paris).
If that were to be replaced by many different things (one for news, one or more for discussion, one for meetups, ...) I probably wouldn't bother.
Also, I'm not on Facebook and would not consider going there. I think replacing the open ecosystem of Internet by a proprietary platform is a very dangerous trend for future of innovation, and I oppose the global surveillance that Facebook is part of. I know we are entering politics which is considered "dirty" by many here, but politics is part of the Many Causes, and I don't think we should alienate people for political reasons. The current LW is politically neutral, and allows "socialists" to discuss without much friction with "libertarians", which is part of its merits, and we should keep that.
I have an old list of halfbaked post ideas. At some point I lost sight of what things were "rationality things" and what things were just "things, that I happened to want to talk about with rationalists, because those are the cool people"; and in the presence of this confusion I defaulted to categorizing everything as the latter - because it was easy; I live here now; I can go weeks without interacting with anybody who isn't at least sort of rationalist-adjacent. If I want to talk to rationalists about a thing I can just bring it up the next time I'm at a party, or when my roommates come downstairs; I don't have to write an essay and subject it to increasingly noisy judgment about whether it is in the correct section/website/universe.
I think "things that you happen to want to talk about with rationalists" is a legit category to want an outlet for and having an explicit place for that (which has virtues like "is not literally Tumblr") would be nice. Useful norms might include: one-paragraph OPs normalized, tongue-in-cheek "Rational [Household Object / Unrelated Hobby / Basic Life Skill]" titles allowed/encouraged, granting OP some veto power about what sorts of comments and commenters are allowed under their post, aggressively encouraged and standard-formatted tagging system.
I had been a small-time LW regular for about 3 years and witnessed its decline until I stopped commenting a couple of months back. It was frustrating to see Eliezer, Yvain, Luke and others leave for other social media platforms, and even more to watch them fragment their writings further between personal blogs, FB, Reddit and tumblr. Not because it's a wrong thing to do, just because it's harder to follow and the commenting system is usually even worse than here. Well, except for Reddit. Without a strong leader charismatic emerging and willing to add quality content and drive the changes, I don't expect any site redesign to revive this rather zombified forum. Or maybe if the forum is redesigned one would emerge, who knows. Chicken and egg.
Or maybe it should be a rationality-related aggregator/hub, where all relevant links get posted and discussed. So that one could see at a glance that Scott A posted something on his blog, Eliezer on tumbler, Brienne on Facebook, gwern on his site and someone else on twitter or reddit. All on one page. There are various sites like that around. With the ability to comment locally, or go to the source and discuss it there. Maybe even add linkbacks to this site.
Just my 2c.
If there's going to be a single "hub" where links to rationalist stuff across the web gets posted, it seems like LW itself is a more obvious Schelling point than /r/RationalistDiaspora.
It seems like it might be better to reduce that friction than to try to set up a completely different link-hub site somewhere else. LW's codebase is basically a fork of reddit's, IIRC; does that mean there could be a "Links" section (parallel to "Main" and "Discussion", I guess) that behaves more like a typical subreddit?
(I have to say that on Reddit and HN I actually almost always prefer to go first to the local discussion rather than just following the external link -- so I'm not so concerned about "more friction to following one [link]". But that's dependent on there usually being some local discussion.)
I need to think about this more, but my present impression is in favor of keeping LW and making it good. It seems to me that we gain quite a bit from having a Schelling place to post, such that evidence and arguments posted to that Schelling location become common knowledge.
I agree that LW has been doing fairly badly lately, but I am fairly seriously attempting to craft a post sequence designed to combat that; if not LW, I'd favor some other method that has a single secure Schelling spot.
My impression is that we know a fair bit of applied rationality that was not successfully conveyed by Eliezer's original Sequences (although a fair chunk of it seems to me to be implicit in those Sequences), and that we are now in a position to make a more serious attempt to convey in writing.
One more use I have for LessWrong: learning about subjects from people whom I trust to be smart and rational. A while back I wanted to learn up on perceptual control theory, I found RichardKenneways' and Vaniver's posts a hundred times better than Wikipedia.
This is an invaluable resource for me that I would hate to lose. Even if the quality of new stuff being written on LW is declining, the quality of stuff that I'm reading on LW is still consistently excellent. I really hope we would find a way to keep this aspect going.
Fair, point, but still. Wikipedia's stated role is an aggregator and summarizer of existing knowledge. It's standard is verifiability, not truth.
Many of the rationality community's views are decidedly not mainstream, and better for it. Our standard is higher than theirs.
Despite its flaws, LW has a better signal-to-noise ratio than any other web resource I've found.
Why is Google the biggest search engine even though it wasn't the first? It's because Google has a better signal-to-noise ratio than most search engines. PageRank cut through all the affiliate cruft when other search engines couldn't, and they've only continued to refine their algorithms.
But still, haven't you noticed that when Wikipedia comes up in a Google search, you click that first? Even when it's not the top result? I do. Sometimes it's not even the article I'm after, but its external links. And then I think to myself, "Why didn't I just search Wikipedia in the first place?". Why do we do that? Because we expect to find what we're looking for there. We've learned from experience that Wikipedia has a better signal-to-noise ratio than a Google search.
If LessWrong and Wikipedia came up in the first page of a Google search, I'd click LessWrong first. Wouldn't you? Not from any sense of community obligation (I'm a lurker), but because I expect a higher probability of good information here. LessWrong has a better signal-to-noise ratio than Wikipedia.
LessWrong doesn't specialize in recipes or maps. Likewise, there's a lot you can find through Google that's not on Wikipedia (and good luck finding it if Google can't!), but we still choose Wikipedia over Google's top hit when available. What is on LessWrong is insightful, especially in normally noisy areas of inquiry.
A tangential note on third-party technical contributions to LW (if that's a thing you care about): the uncertainty about whether changes will be accepted, uncertainty about and lack of visibility into how that decision is made or even who makes it, and lack of a known process for making pull requests or getting feedback on ideas are incredibly anti-motivating.
This is probably the single most important obstacle to making a better LW on the technical side.
Some miscellaneous thoughts:
Online community design is an important subfield of group rationality, which is arguably more important than individual rationality. It's hard to deny that many of the biggest group rationality failures are happening online nowadays.
A great thing about online communities is they let you aggregate the work of a variety of sporadic contributors. People have heard of Yvain because he writes good stuff on a consistent schedule. Imagine alternate universe Yvain whose blog has two posts, spaced 6 months apart: Meditations on Moloch and The Control Group Is Out Of Control. Since alternate universe Yvain does not write on a consistent schedule, few people have heard of his blog and his insights aren't read by many people.
I think the "Self-Improvement or Shiny Distraction" post is wrong, which is unfortunate because I suspect it played a big role in killing LW.
Let's rewind to the dawn of the internet era. We're having coffee with Tim Berners-Lee and talking about his new invention, the World Wide Web. Speculatively we can see the Web disrupting many industries, but predicting that the Web will disrupt academia seems downright unimaginative...
Stretch goal: bake EA principles in from the start.
This would be a huge turnoff for many people, including myself.
I have had on the back burner for... probably six months now a post on why I am turned off by / leery about EA, despite donating 10% of my income to charity, caring about x-risk, and so on. One of the reasons that post has stayed on the back burner is "Why Our Kind Can't Cooperate" plus "The Virtue of Silence"--given how few of the issues are methodological, better to just silently let EA be, or swallow my disagreements and endorse it, than spell out my disagreements and expect them to be taken seriously.
But this is suggesting to me that I probably should put them forward, in order to make this conversation easier if nothing else.
After talking with some EAs at the SF Solstice, I think it would be net positive to write this post. Expect it by the end of December if all goes well.
Less Wrong has a high barrier of entry if you're at all intimidated by math, idiosyncratic language, and the idea that ONE GUY has written most of its core content. I think the diaspora is good for mainstreaming the concepts on this site. I wish I had been an active member when it was still a catalyst for motion. The book's existence is good, and HPMoR will still bring people here. This site is important for archival and educational reasons.
Less Wrong might be in a good place to mature in several different directions. If other community members branch out in the way that CFAR and MIRI have, integrating the education-without-academia principles should be a priority in their organizations. It's not a stretch: Eliezer Yudkowsky does not have a degree, and he has done excellent work from a teaching point of view. He also seems to be respectable among academics for his theory work (I'm not knowledgeable enough to vet that personally).
Teaching people to use effective signaling of their competence, without resorting to Dark Arts, might be useful too.
I'm in favor of EA, but ingres is not wrong that embedding those principles could be off-putting. I don't know their personal rea...
I believe that this is the main reason newcomers are reluctant to post anything here. Right now, I notice that I am reluctant to reply to you because I am uncertain if my acknowledgement and agreement with your comment is 'LW-worthy'. While the high standard of posts maintain Lesswrong as a well-kept garden, it discourages people from starting stimulating, although not strictly Hollywood-esque 'rational', discussions.
For me the annoying thing about LW is that it takes extremely long, usually forever, to change anything. You have a new idea? (Such as replacing "Main" and "Discussion" with something else.) You post it in Open Thread, and people agree? You post an article with a more detailed explanation, and many people upvote it? Guess what -- most likely still not going to happen. :(
It's not that we didn't have good ideas in the past. We had many, most of them we never implemented. Maybe some of them would have improved things. We'll never know. Why? Among other reasons, because Reddit codebase is a piece of crap. It would be probably better in long term to rewrite everything from scratch.
At this moment one idea resonates with me: "do one thing and do it well". Identify the purposes that you want to be served. For each of them, build a separate, optimal solution. Link aggregator. Discussion forum. Community blog. Meetup organizer. Rationalist welcome page. Rationalist wiki. Give them all the same header, so people can easily link from here to there, and maybe even a single sign-on system.
For example, an optimal link aggregator would support tags, and filtering by t...
Some more thoughts: The existing system already has some parts of what I suggest here, for example discussion system is separated from wiki system. And we do have a welcome page. I would like to see them better integrated; to have the buttons "About", "Discussion" and "Wiki" as equal choices at the top. Plus a few more.
I imagine the "News" section should be separated from the "Discussion" section; they are interconnected, but they do not serve exactly the same purpose. There are article-oriented discussions, but there are also topic-oriented discussions, and periodical threads. On the other hand, the news section should contain both articles from here, and the articles from somewhere else (currently in the sidebar: rationality blogs). And there should also be a "Chat" section (more or less what Slack does today).
The "News" page would display 20 highest-rated links to articles (both here and on other websites) during the recent month or week. That would be the starting page of the website. A "show more" option would display all links, Reddit-style. Additionally, moderators could give a "promoted&quo...
You bring up a number of important points. Perhaps I missed this when reading, but one role LessWrong plays and continues to play is a good source of discussion. Often I'll find the discussion to be more interesting than a particular article. It's not uncommon for me to be linked to a particular comment divorced from its larger context and not be interested in the larger context. I don't know how common this behavior is, but this is not uncommon for me, and I don't think replacing the rationalist materials with a wiki or Q&A site would suit this well at all. This is one reason to favor something like Reddit.
I'm also generally not a fan of shutting down even semi-active forums. In one online community I've participated in, there were several major forum closures, and each time there was a period of confusion about what to do if you're interested in discussion, along with basically sectarian posturing to get active posters. The sectarian stuff caused major problems down the line, and the current discussion forum for this community more or less voluntarily avoids those conflicts now. There also are a number of roles LessWrong plays that I'm not sure would survive a transition to t...
Edit: On a related note, I find following discussions on Tumblr to be a huge pain, and hope either this improves in the future or that more discussions happen elsewhere.
Tumblr is downright unusable if you want to read a discussion. Unless you are a direct participant, they are nearly impossible to follow, and for direct participants it is only possible because they know what they are replying to. It is obviously intended for those who like to share stuff and not those who like to read. Improving it would require creating a completely different service based on completely different ideas about how to structure discussion.
Agreed, the comments (fortified by the voting system) are a huge reason why I'm here. I bought Rationality A-Z for ease of reading, but discovered that I didn't like it at all without seeing the discussion spawned by every post. In particular, it is very easy to be convinced by a well-written but subtly flawed argument, unless an equally well written rebuttal is in the comments.
The voting system is something that I would hate to lose too, I am very impressed by the people here really upvoting based more on quality than on vacuous agreement. I've had my first three comments on the site and one of my first posts massively downvoted, and it hurt, but now I'm very happy for it.
It's both. There are no "official" guidelines on how you should up/downvote, but a commonly expressed heuristic is "upvote what you want to see more of, and downvote what you would like to see less of". In practice, people vote to signify all kinds of things: agree/disagree, true/false, cool/uncool, interesting/boring, oooh/eeew, etc.
It would motivate me to write more for LW if I could see how many views each of my articles/comments received.
I would caution away from a bias towards "the current situation seems vaguely bad, therefore Something Must Be Done." There are lots of people still getting use out of LessWrong. I think it would be unfortunate that a bias towards Doing Something over Leaving It Be might cause a valuable resource to be ended without good cause. If the site can be reinvented, great, but if it can't -- don't hit the Big Red Button without honestly weighing the significant costs to the people who are still actively using the site.
(I briefly searched, to see if there's an article on LW about the idea of a bias towards Doing Something. It would of course be essentially the opposite of status quo bias; and yet I think it's a real phenomenon. I certainly feel like I observe it happening in discussions like this. Perhaps the real issue is in the resolution of conflicts between a small minority who are outspoken about Doing Something, and a large silent majority who don't express strong feelings because they're fine with the status quo. This is an attempt to express a thought that I've had percolating, not a criticism of this post.)
I agree with this. I might not get as much value from LW as I used to, but it being up and running is still positive net value for me.
In particular, the stupid questions thread is something I like about current LW which doesn't seem to have an alternative. (Also the open thread, the bragging thread, and the rationality quotes thread, in slightly different ways.)
I would caution away from a bias towards "the current situation seems vaguely bad, therefore Something Must Be Done."
I agree, and I am a firm believer in Don't Do Something, Just Stand There.
One of the things that is perhaps unclear from this post is just how much Standing There has been done; people were talking about this as a problem in 2013, I went from believing that a decline existed and it was okay to believing a decline existed and it wasn't okay in 2014, most of the in-person conversations about this happened in August of this year.
I approach Less Wrong et al mostly from the Grey Tribe Social Club and community clearinghouse perspective. In that sense, I see four things we get from Less Wrong that we do not get from the disapora:
I'm pretty sure everybody's blog software provides an RSS feed. Just configure them to provide full text, and display that on Less Wrong as a feed alongside Main and Discussion.
This doesn't work very well. Especially on tumblr, a lot of blogs have some rationalist content and lots of non-rationalist content. An aggregator that didn't include anything from The Unit of Caring would be sorely lacking, but one that included her entire tumblr feed would be overinclusive. And she doesn't even use that blog for cute animal pictures.
Tags might solve most of this: in this case, the craft and the community would capture a lot of the relevant stuff. In general, people could choose a specific tag for "include this on the diaspora feed". If the platform doesn't support tag-specific RSS, the aggregation software could do the filtering.
But there's another problem, that tumblr's rss feeds are shit. When I followed Scott's, it would occasionally attribute things to him which he was replying to, and not show his reply. (Or maybe not that exactly, but something along those lines.)
And yet another problem, that even after filtering for rationalist content, there is just too damn much of it. It needs curation.
I am not sure what is the point of shutting LW down -- I don't see the upside. Even if you accept that it's nothing but a ghost town with a large library, haunted by spirits, after exorcising them you're left with nothing. The spirits disperse to all corners of the 'net, the library grows silent and really dead... that doesn't look like a good outcome.
Things evolve and change. This is both good and inevitable. LW cannot exist frozen in time and we want to move into the future, not attempt to return to the past. LW will never be what it used to be and that's fine.
One obstacle not discussed is the 'tone' or 'pleasantness' of posting to LW. Since this is a huge reason why people left, that may seem like an oversight, but I think the fix is fairly routine and so not worth much space in the post.
Right now, the Diaspora solves this by only bringing things people actively seek out to their attention. If you're going to Scott's blog, you'll know that you'll see the occasional post about Tom Swifties, and it's his blog, so who are you to complain about it?
It seems like subreddits partially solve that problem ("What is this cryonics doing in my rationality?" becomes "Well, what'd you expect from the medical futurology subreddit?"), and tags do an even better job (tagging something "rigorous" will attract attention you want, and not tagging it that will hopefully dissuade attention you don't want).
Add in some active moderation and better voting / tagging powers for respected users, and you're mostly done.
Something seems wrong to me about the "Welcoming Committee / Rationality Materials" section in the OP. I mean, if we imagine someone arriving in Rationalistan as a result of a link in the HPMOR author's notes or something of the kind and getting intimidated by how much stuff there is and/or how little they feel they know ... whyever would what they then need look like Wikipedia? Wikipedia is terrific and I am a huge fan, but it's not great at providing "social reinforcement" and "other people to ask questions of".
Vaniver's other suggestion for something that would serve this need better than a Redditalike is Stack Overflow. That's a better fit, but the SO model works best where what people need is answers to specific questions that have clear-cut answers. Surely that's not the situation of someone newly arriving in Rationalistan. Their questions are going to be more like "WTF is all this?" or "I think I need to reevaluate how I think about lots of important questions but I barely know where to start; what shall I do?". Stack Overflow itself (and I think most of its offshoots) strongly discourages that sort of open-ended question on ...
Here you can find a mind map aggregating the opinions of every commenter up until the time of this comment.
I will further edit it as comments are added. If you want to make it editable from the community let me know (and suggest a service that does so!). If you think I have misrepresented your opinions let me know and I'll fix it.
My analysis:
I like those suggestions too, I'm in favor of keeping it open.
I'm tempted to go through Eliezer's Facebook page and start copy/pasting interesting things to LessWrong Discussion...
I vote for both plans at once!
1) Make the current LW read-only. All content is still accessible, but commenting and voting is disabled. The discussion section is closed as well. Let things rest for a month or so.
2) Announce that during the next year, LW will have one post per week, at a specified time. There will be an email address where anyone can send their submissions, whereupon a horribly secretive and biased group of editors will select the best one each week, aiming for Eliezer quality or higher. The prominent posters you've contacted should create enough good content for the first couple months. Voting will be disabled for posts, and enabled only for comments. There will also be one monthly open thread for unstructured discussion.
I don't think anything short of that would work. LW's problem is the decline in quality, so the fix should be quality-oriented, not quantity-oriented.
LW's problem is the decline in quality, so the fix should be quality-oriented, not quantity-oriented.
I think it went the other way: demands for quality, rigor, and fully developed ideas made posting here unsatisfying (compared to the alternatives) for a lot of previously good posters.
I fear this would disincentivize our best potential posters, those like Scott who have their own blogs and following and post a lot there.
Restricting to one post per week will mean posters and topics will rarely repeat, and there will be no sequences, not even short ones. Everyone who wants to write a series of even 2 or 3 posts would have to do so on their own blog. Posts in response to the discussion on the previous post would also be impossible. Posts from several people in reply to one another, or on the same topical subject, would be almost impossible. This greatly limits the possible topics of discussion.
A blogger doesn't always know in advance which of his posts will be the best ones. He just posts them and looks at the response. But then it's too late to repost on LW (an LW that demands original content is very different from a blog aggregator that promotes existing posts). So the blogger would have to pre-select what to post on LW, and if he's denied or waits too much in the one-per-week queue, they can pull the request and post it themselves. Posting your less-good content immediately, while waiting to publish what you hope-but-aren't-sure is your best, isn't fun.
That led to high average quality
It's not that restrictions led to high quality posts. It's that the availability of high quality posts allowed restrictions.
Don't cargo-cult.
Interesting.
I find the comments at SSC to be useless. I mean, there may or may not be good content in there, but it's nearly impossible to read/participate in those comments so I just don't use them or read them or look at them.
Maybe like 1 out of 10 posts, I'll find myself heading towards the comments and giving up after 5 minutes.
SSC has a very vigorous comment section, but for me at least Scott's articles are an order of magnitude more valuable than the comments.
Hi. As a longtime lurker (my first introduction to the site may have been as early as twelve years old) I'm very glad to see this conversation finally come to a head. I'm of the opinion that the current site needs to either reinvent itself or shut down. I think that the biggest negative of the rationalist diaspora has in fact been keeping track of who has flown to what corner of the earth, further Eliezer Yudowsky and others posting on Facebook is annoying to me, because I do not use Facebook and find it to be an actual pain at times to get access to their posts. Having a less proprietary mirror would make me much more likely to read their writings. At the same time, given the implied privacy of Facebook I have to wonder if the point of posting there is so that things will not be read outside of the small audience EY now caters to.
Reinventing LessWrong as an archival site for the sequences and a hub for coordinating the diaspora would be a prudent use of its Schelling-Point real estate.
I largely agree with your analysis, though I do have some ideas on what an online community that does not waste peoples time and gets them to do interesting things would look like. If somebody would be interested in discussing this with me they may email me at:
wqcbfgntr@yvahkznvy.bet (Rot13'd to prevent email spam.)
(or here, but I'm kind of public discussion shy).
(I am not ingres even though I am asking a question you asked them.)
I don't like Facebook as a venue for such things because:
One thing I have found aggravating about interacting with people on Facebook is that my interaction shows up in my social contacts' feeds.
This is fine if you have one community of friends, but gets weird if you have multiple, and downright bothersome if you want to keep them separate. In particular, I have a friend from middle school who will occasionally jump into a conversation that I enter with something unhelpful, and I cringe at the thought of someone else discovering that I'm the only mutual friend my LW friend has with my middle school friend. One solution, of course, is to unfriend everyone on FB I know who isn't a LWer. I find this unsatisfactory for many reasons. ;)
Ignoring privacy / monopoly concerns, Facebook is also remarkably inconvenient for reading long-form writing.
Twitter and Tumblr have similar problems. I thought Reddit did too, but they actually make their RSS feeds easy to find, although it's fairly annoying that they're not full-text (makes it much harder to read on a phone).
I like online social interaction. I used to get this on LessWrong; for me, it was a fun Internet forum to hang out on. With the lack of new major content, though, I've been finding less to talk about. Perhaps we need to design LW 2.0 as a platform that supports "random nerdy fun social times", general life advice ("I'm having a problem, help me Internet Hive Mind!) and other things that aren't directly related to How To Think Better.
The people still posting to LW seem to be getting use out of it; going archive-only doesn't seem great to me.
The two technical changes I think would most help with continued use of the site:
remove the main vs discussion distinction, and remove promotion.
make it more usable on phones
I suggest there are two purposes to the proposal to go archive-only if a plan to restore to LW to something like its former glory doesn't emerge:
in addition to the purpose explicitly mentioned in the OP:
I would be sad if LW were to close -- it's still one of the less stupid discussion venues on the web -- but I'm not sure that ...
If LW was archived without a proper replacement, I'd either move my posts to a website like FiMFiction (which wouldn't be a very good alternative), or, more likely, stop posting and commenting on rationality-related stuff entirely.
My two cents:
Merge Main and Discussion
Make new content more visible. Right now the landing page, and in particular the first screen, mostly consists of boilerplate. You have to scroll or click in order to view if new content has been posted. In the current attention scarce era of Facebook and Twitter streams, this is not ideal.
Discourage/ban Open threads. They are an unusual thing to have on a an open forum. They might have made sense when posting volume was higher, but right now they further obfuscate valuable content.
Discourage/ban Open threads. They are an unusual thing to have on a an open forum. They might have made sense when posting volume was higher, but right now they further obfuscate valuable content.
I'd say the opposite: the open threads are the part that's working. So I'd rather remove main/discussion and make everything into open thread, i.e. move to something more like a traditional forum model. I don't know whether that's functionally the same thing.
•Discourage/ban Open threads. They are an unusual thing to have on a an open forum. They might have made sense when posting volume was higher, but right now they further obfuscate valuable content.
I don't think this is a practical idea. The site is hostile enough to new users who lack much rationality knowledge and perspective on the content. The Open threads (and even moreso the Stupid Question threads) give people a place to pose questions and try out ideas that they aren't confident enough in to make into Discussion posts. People are less harsh in those threads (although I've seen people be harsh in stupid questions threads) and it provides a chance to participate in content without having read the 1700 pages of The Sequences or having lurked on the site for 2+ years.
In case it wasn't clear: "losing karma" and "not good enough" were intended to be separate fears. Writing something I know is great and still losing a ton of karma hurts in one way. Writing something that shows me up as an idiot hurts in a very different way.[1] Circulating an article means fewer people to notice I'm an idiot, but also closer scrutiny and more effort required on their part. I think the fear of not being good enough would be about as bad either way.
[1] So far as I can recall, neither has actually happened to me, so I'm guessing on the basis of introspection. But I've had kinda-parallel experiences outside LW.
I think making it easy to circulate drafts and encouraging people to do so is a great idea, but I don't think it's a solution to the "fear of being Not Good Enough" problem.
A few points:
I would hate to see LW close and I don't think that would be a helpful step in getting people exposed to rationality unless a new central hub rose to take its place. I found LW through HPMOR just this year and have very little idea of what LW looked in it's supposed glory days. Things aren't great now, but if LW had been completely dead I likely wouldn't have moved from wanting to be rational to reading 600+ pages of Rationality:From AI to Zombies, making tons of connections and rationalist friends, attending CFAR, starting a LW meetup in my area, and more. A completely dead website would have given the impression of a dead philosophy that was abandoned by the people who followed it because it wasn't actually that useful after all.
Decreases to the level of polish, rigor, and rationality knowledge publicly deemed necessary before posting in the various areas could be helpful (in current LW or a LW 2.0). I mainly post in Open and Stupid Question threads because of this.
People here can be pretty cold and harsh in their replies. I've also heard of issues regarding downvote brigades or mass downvoting of people's posts due to personal disagreements. If this place really is full of "unquiet spirits" then a method of removing them, discouraging that kind of conduct, or changing them into kind benevolent spirits should be included in the works.
Looking at the discussion, my impression has been that there are at least two things that'd be valuable:
Personally I'd also suggest:
One thing LessWrong should have been, and never was, is a place to expand on and critique the ideas behind Friendly AI and Coherent Extrapolated Volition. It's nearly 2016, and AFAIK we still have no more details on what CEV is or how it might work than when the site was created. I find it strange to talk about shutting the site down when it's never gotten around to what should have been its primary purpose.
It wasn't such a place partly because Eliezer discouraged attempts to fill in the gaps, figure out what he meant, or critique the assumptions of his program. LessWrong was a fundraiser for a cause that it wanted not to discuss.
The main thing holding me back from posting on Less Wrong, and I really doubt that I'm alone in this, is that it feels sort of mutually exclusive with posting on my own blog. That blog has to exist for the things I want to post that would be too far offtopic for LW, but then if I want it to not be dead, that consumes my entire posting volume.
The best solution I've come up with for this is linkposts a la Reddit. And we could even make them automatic!
That is, take the current Recent on Rationality Blogs sidebar. Either leave it as a sidebar, turn it into a subreddit, or mix it in with the appropriate reddits. Make each link votable up or down. The resulting karma is displayed on the link and provided to the associated LW account.
We could probably also set it up so that automatic blog posts are either opt-in (watch this rss feed, anything with the #lw tag becomes a link-post) or opt-out (watch this rss feed, anything that doesn't have the #no-lw tag becomes a link-post).
There's a bit of a wrinkle how to deal with non-community links; my suspicion is that it'd be relatively easy to check if a link is to an account in the blog database, and associate it with the owner if so (someone linking to a SSC article gives Yvain the karma, not them) and the link-poster if it's to something else (a relevant NYT article, say).
Well I totally missed the diaspora. I read star slate codex (but not the comments) and had no idea people are posting things in other places. It surprises me that it even has a name "rationalist diaspora." It seemed to me that people ran out of things to say or the booster rocket thing had played itself out. This is probably because I don't read Discussion, only Main and as Main received fewer posts I stopped coming to Less Wrong. As "meet up in area X" took over the stream of content I unsubscribed from my CSS reader. Over the past few years the feeling of a community completely evaporated for me. Good to hear that there is something going on somewhere, but it still isn't clear where that is. So archiving LW and embracing the diaspora to me means so long and thanks for all the fish.
I think it would be good to merge PredictionBook with LW. Both are run by Trick Apps. Having them together would help LW to make us of more prediction making.
Predictions would be a new tab besides Main and Discussion. The Wiki might also worth having it's own tab.
Just as we have at the moment a [poll] tag we could have a prediction tag to be used inside LW discussions.
In an ideal (although not very realistic) scenario LW could have a karma denominated prediction market. However, that would require a lot of work to implement.
The biggest thing I feel the lack of right now is a place for semitechnical discussion with people who are roughly on the same page. Suppose I wanted to discuss some thoughts on trying to go beyond the Hibbard 2012 model in terms of applying machine learning to FAI - there's just not a good place that I know of. When agentfoundations was founded I was hoping it would be that place, but that's not really how it panned out.
Yesteray I posted the draft for a new article on the LW slack. I circulating drafts of articles before publishing them on LW proper might be in general a good way to improve the quality.
There are an awful lot of ideas in this comment thread but many ideas have been proposed in the past. Without leadership, nothing's going to happen, and as I understand it the leaders of lw have left. Nate's been contacted? Ok, does he have decision making power? Is he an appropriate leader to have it? Will he use it? Well, I hope so, but the first step is a deliberate move to take ownership and end the headlessness
I have the requisite decision-making power. I hereby delegate Vaniver to come up with a plan of action, and will use what power I have to see that that plan gets executed, so long as the plan seems unlikely to do more harm than good (but regardless of whether I think it will work). Vaniver and the community will need to provide the personpower and the funding, of course.
I've been spending quite a bit of time on Less Wrong chat. I think that LW chat has demonstrated that when there are different channels, it really opens up the conversational space. One thing that I've found to be very surprising is that: a) Less Wrong chat has surprisingly little discussion of politics b) Less Wrong chat has lots of discussion about parenting.
My favoured system would be for Less Wrong to gain different subs, with the ability to follow or unfollow them and have content appear on a mainscreen that summarises the subs that you choose to follow.
Thanks for laying all this out so clearly, you have put a lot of thought and effort into this!
Want to highlight that many potential effective altruists find out about EA from active engagement with Less Wrong. As a strong EA, for me that counts as a significant piece of evidence for keeping Less Wrong going, in a reinvented form.
I also gain a lot from discussion and feedback here. I think Reddit or another venue would not do as good a job at it. This is another reason I'd prefer to have a reinvented site.
Book reviews seem to be usually welcome on LW, and there are threads about learning from books; but AFAIK there is no object-level intro into how to cultivate a habit of asking yourself but what does it actually mean? when you read.
For example, when I recently opened a high-school botany textbook and tried to read it as someone who wants to get a technical understanding of botany from it, the first chapter had me stumped. Okay, so there are different branches of botany, all those special sciences about algae and lichens and mosses - but what does it mean? ...
We know there has been evaporation happening. So the question is... who left, and who stayed?
Well... Less Wrong is, well, boring. Nothing interesting is happening here.
Without interesting things happening, people won't come see what's going on. Without people coming to see what's going on, nobody will want to write things for Less Wrong, because almost nobody will be around to read them. Without people writing things - well, nothing interesting is going to happen, because new things are a kind of interesting, and perhaps the only kind Less Wrong really...
As much as I like Omnilibrium as a concept, there's a lot of work needed to productize the site. A lot of the style is whitespace, there are boxes instead of icons (notably the bookmark icon), there's no password reset (and the site barfed on my >20 character autogenerated password so that if I lose my current browser profile, I'm going to lose my account there), etc. But even worse, people didn't move there en masse so the site was never bootstrapped.
I'm not convinced that the karma system as it exists today actually performs its desired task anymore because a good chunk of the voting seems to be done by the unquiet spirits. Back when I cared about karma here, it was because it reflected the opinions of people that I very much respected. I don't feel that way anymore.
One possible[*] solution would be to port the Omnilibrium algorithm back to LessWrong, customizing the scoring for each user, but this might be a place where we should hold off proposing solutions.
[*] As in, "Well I suppose that's technically possible, but..."
What's wrong with the unquiet spirits? I don't think that that is a good reason to shut the site down.
Organizations typically go through changes when the founders move on. That's not unusual. That's expected.
I value the ability to have discussions with people on this site, and oppose the idea that the site should be archived and shut down.
For about a bit more than a year I have been wanting a forum very similar to this one. In the process of gradually unsubscribing from the defaults on Reddit I found that even many of the Truesubreddits were not satisfying any longer and not knowing of the existence of LessWrong I put a moderate amount of effort in fruitlessly trying improving those subs. It took joining the Effective Altruïsm to stumble on this site, the point being that there likely is a considerable pool of potential users for this site who I suspect don't know that this site exists eith...
...So compared to when most things were either posted or crossposted to LW, it seems like we currently spend too little attention on aggregating and unifying content spread across many different places. If most of the action is happening offsite, and all that needs to be done is link to it, Reddit seems like the clear low-cost winner. Or perhaps it makes sense to try to do something like an online magazine, with an actual editor. (See Viliam's discussion of the censor role in an online community.) I note that FLI is hiring a news website editor (but they're
There's a reason why CFAR has workshops instead of writing articles and books.
Is there? Given that this community seems to be quite skeptical about the value of e.g. university over self-teaching from textbooks, what's the rationale for that format?
New venues in rationality discussions seem to be the LW Slack, R/SlateStarCodex, the facebook group, the nonopen CFAR mainling list, Omnilibrium, the EA forum and the Intelligent Agent Foundations Forum.
I don't think that proliferation of different venues is bad.
I am somewhat new to LW, so I only know the "eternal september" period.
Even tough the contributions and the comments do not have the same quality as the old content, there are still (in my opinion) some interesting posts and discussions, so I'd prefer not archive LW.
The use of LW as focal point would really interest me since I am a bit lost in the diaspora, the other two points are also good and deserve to be implemented.
I think a knowledge aggregator fills a different purpose from a link aggregator. When someone has an idea they want to explore, they write something about it, and that can be put in a link aggregator. By default it's not yet ready for a knowledge aggregator. But it's more likely to become ready if people see it and discuss it.
I think transience is okay for a link aggregator.
Links can't be grouped, categorized.
Link flair isn't perfect, but it allows this.
I like rationality quotes, so whatever happens I hope that stays alive in some form. Maybe it could move to /r/slatestarcodex.
I'm almost exclusively a lurker. I don't visit meetups and don't read the Rationality Quotes threads. What I largely use lesswrong for now is the aggregation feature of the "RECENT ON RATIONALITY BLOGS" tab. I suspect I could duplicate this functionality with some combination of RSS Feed/blog subscription feature, but I'm unmotivated to do so and have convinced myself that the blogroll list curated by LessWrong is valuable. Hopefully my experience is demographically representative enough of a larger pool of lurkers as to be valuable.
For what it's worth, I got relatively little[1] out of reading the Sequences solo, in any form (and RAZ is worse than LW in this regard, because the comments were worth something even on really old and inactive threads, and surprisingly many threads were still active when I first joined the site in 2014).
What really did the job for me was the reading group started by another then-Seattleite[2]. We started as a small group (I forget how many people the first meetings had, but it was a while before we broke 10 and longer before we did it regularly) that simp...
I'd like to see a section listing current projects among the community.
I've picked up a vague sense of the growth out of LW (a few blogs, CFAR, Beeminder, Mealsquares, etc.), but a list of current work would be an impressive testimony of the effects of rationality.
But the point is for each listed project to give people direction as to what they can do with their new found rationality. It could list tasks to be done, how to prepare to do them, project needs. Let people know either what they can do, or what they can study to become able to do. Help them prep...
One way of dividing up the options is: fix the current platform, or find new platform(s). The natural decay process seems to be tilting towards the latter, but there are downsides: the diaspora loses cohesion, and while the new platforms obviously offer some things the current one doesn't, they are worse than the current one in various ways (it's really hard to be an occasional lurker on FB or tumblr, especially if you are more interested in the discussion than the "OP").
If the consensus is to fix the current platform, I suggest trying the simple...
I think the problem with Main is the exclusion criteria is too strong for the current state of the site. If Main featured an average of one post a day or every other day, with the best post from that period, then that would keep it useful. One post every 15 days simply isn't enough content to garner viewership. Discussion has enough content, but it isn't very well curated. I think the karma system has largely failed other than to prevent trolling. I can think of multiple examples where a correct answer to a factual topic discussion got buried in the c...
Does LW have Google analytics data? If so, I think it would be good if people in this debate could look at it. Maybe share the link in slack instead of here publically.
Between January 1st and today (rounded to the closest 1000):
Most-read open threads (rounded to the closest hundred):
Landing pages with over 10,000 sessions from Jan 1st to Dec 3rd:
Getting direct work done. Open-sourcing things is powerful, but it remains true that money is the unit of caring. When people really want something done, they have an institution with an office and employees that get the thing done.
What?
The Linux kernel is a prime example, along with plenty of other, impressive FOSS programs can't be summed up by "powerful". The general consensus with programmers was that "office and employyes" is less than adequate and often insult-worthy.
I am trying to point at a common failure mode where one says "aha! We'll just open source our problem, and then we won't have to pay for labor," without understanding what sorts of labor Open Source is good at providing or not providing.
I don't come here much because there is not too much content. I'd come here more often if there was links to content that is nice. Even if it is just a sidebar with links to off-site posts. I mean, there is the blogs people who used to post here now post at, there's other rationality blogs, there's the occasional reddit thread of interest.
I have no problem with the 'ghosts haunting the dead site' staying around.
I think the first step is for whoever controls LW, which I suppose is Eliezer, to hand over control to someone who's active on the site. This is important because promoting posts is important to get a high viewcount. I don't get the impression anybody reads all the new posts to Main and promotes the ones they think are good.
More transparency about who's in charge and how they operate LW would be good during and after this process.
Eliezer's policy was explicitly, "Although you now create the content for LessWrong, that gives you no right to have any say in how it's run." I think that's part of why people left, and ought to change going forward.
I think we should either develop a plan that makes LW fully functional at the three roles mentioned above (and any others that are raised), or we should close down posting and commenting on LW (while maintaining it as an archive).
First, I wonder who this "we" is. Does the "we" discussing this include any people with the power to do any of it?
I don't agree with shutting it down. Post warning message banners if you like, but I believe in the free market. I'm not talking about money or the invisible hand; I'm talking about the idea that...
I thought an idea of a greeting party and a closer-tied community sounds good. Maybe something like a number of small teams, so that any newcomer would be taken into one and shown the most valuable stuff, with bonus ability to cooperate on articles or code projects, or research, or wherever the team advantage is. Together with some in-group chat where people may get to know each other better. And, of course, the big free-for-all discussions and articles should stay, so the community would not be divided too much. There should also be less nitpicks at the main articles comments if the articles were already discussed and edited by the group.
The easiest way to create close-knit groups is sustained geographical proximity. Hence meetup organization.
Consider Benjamin Franklin's Junto, which met weekly to discuss things and had self-improvement as a focus. Every member was required to submit an essay (on any subject they liked) at least once every three months, and they would propose topics for discussion during the meetings. But the members were, presumably, filtered by Franklin; this is much more of an invite-only salon than it is a public-facing organization.
Another option is to create teams of some sort--mastermind groups are structured similarly to the Junto, with the group rotating its focus between individuals to ensure that someone is paying attention to their plans and giving them feedback and encouragement on them. (It's useful to have a deadline and social pressure; being ashamed that you have nothing to show when it's your turn is likely to make you get something done.) But how to create those teams? Do volunteers just put their names into a hat and get assigned to a group, or will that be insufficient to actually create social pressure / be subject to moral hazard effects?
So, my best experience with this sor...
I've also talked to many of the prominent posters who've left about the decline of LW, and pointed out that the coordination problem could be deliberately solved if everyone decided to come back at once. Everyone that responded expressed displeasure that LW had faded and interest in a coordinated return, and often had some material that they thought they could prepare and have ready.
High value is assigned to many original top posters. This leads me to three questions:
What demand will LW 2.0 satisfy that will keep these prominent original posters ret
Getting people to go ahead and eat the cost of cross posting with the explicit knowledge that the community appreciates this seems like it would help.
...but if I went completely, crazily, unbelievably optimistic, I'd add: let there be a regime of viewing the site (or however it's called) without karma and user names, but in such a way that if one wants to PM some commenter, there'd be a 'PM' box right next to the comment.
(Upvoted, thanks.)
I think I disagree with the statement that "Getting direct work done." isn't a purpose LW can or should serve. The direct work would be "rationality research"---figuring out general effectiveness strategies. The sequences are the prime example in the realm of epistemic effectiveness, but there's lots of open questions in productivity, epistemology, motivation, etc.
You make a pretty good case for better platforms for accomplishing individual parts of what LW can do but I think LW should be the central place that takes a solid stab at doing all of them because once you send someone to another site, they're less likely to be willing to spend the (now-consumed) time/energy on a 2nd or 3rd site for the other things you mention in the article.
I have always viewed this site as the central meeting point or repository for all things related to rationality and find that the infrastructure is already very promising with a comb...
The problem with filter bubbles is more about disagreement getting filtered out, not topics being filtered out. We're forced to filter very aggressively for topics anyway, just because there are too many topics and if we didn't filter close to 100% of the uninteresting topics we'd never have time for the interesting ones.
In other words, "X is potentially valuable and important" can be applied to EA, but it can also be applied to a random guy blogging about how much it sucks that his garage band broke up, as well as a near-infinite amount of other topics.
This is a proposal to replace (or supplement) the tagging system with a classification system for content that would be based on three elements: subject, type, and organization.
For me, one of the problems with current LessWrong is that it has too many interesting distractions in it. Ideally, I would want to follow just a few things, with highly groomed content. For example, I'd like to see a section devoted to summaries of recent behavioral psychology articles by someone who understands them better than I do. I suspect that other people would like to see o...
Near as I can tell LW 'faded' because it was initially created to sneak obsession with a particular flavor of AI apocalypse into the minds of as wide an audience as possible under the guise of a rationality movement so as to make money for the singularity institute, and now there are actual institutions which are more lucrative potential funding sources. That, and the ai safety subtext that underlaid everything has gone nowhere at the institute itself to all outward appearances.
Interesting place to talk about interesting things with interesting people though! Keep that around for sure!
I think moving some of the information from the about page to the main page would be a good idea. I suspect that new people coming here will want to read the "famous" posts first. Recommending Eliezer's book would also be a good idea.
LW is a convenient way to follow a lot of people, since you only need to go to one site, or follow one RSS feed. Since those people don't post here directly anymore, is it possible to make LW automatically cross-post? This is common in the open source world with the "planets", like Planet GNOME. I assume we...
That is true with an assumption. The assumption is that I will regularly return to LessWrong and read EA articles if I see them. My own assessment of myself is that I won't, so the assumption would be false. (I could be wrong.) I generally avoid EA articles because I'm not all that interested in them. No knock on the field, it's just not why I'm here. But the fact that I have to wade through articles on EA and all the other topics I don't care about deters me from returning to LessWrong, which I do less frequently than I wish I would, because I miss the optimal time to comment on articles.
There are a few thoughts here. I mostly came here to read and educate myself on the rationality movement and this sort of thing. I think that LW is a tremendous resource of information and that that information should be collected as a resource and transported to a place like Medium where it can be read and experienced. I think it is very intimidating and I think everything can be organized into three broad categories: Philosophy, Technical, Theoretical
In short, it's time for some media organization and distribution in such a way that people can experience...
Alternate titles: What Comes Next?, LessWrong is Dead, Long Live LessWrong!
You've seen the articles and comments about the decline of LessWrong. Why pay attention to this one? Because this time, I've talked to Nate at MIRI and Matt at Trike Apps about development for LW, and they're willing to make changes and fund them. (I've even found a developer willing to work on the LW codebase.) I've also talked to many of the prominent posters who've left about the decline of LW, and pointed out that the coordination problem could be deliberately solved if everyone decided to come back at once. Everyone that responded expressed displeasure that LW had faded and interest in a coordinated return, and often had some material that they thought they could prepare and have ready.
But before we leap into action, let's review the problem.
The people still on the LW site are not a representative sample of anything. With the exception of a few people like Stuart Armstrong, they’re some kind of pack of unquiet spirits who have moved in to haunt it after it got abandoned by the founding community members. At this point it’s pretty much diaspora all the way down.
--Yvain on his Tumblr.
One of the problems is that people who control the LW website are running it in pure maintenance mode. LW was put out to pasture -- there have been no changes to functionality in ages.
--Lumifer
LW's strongest, most dedicated writers all seem to have moved on to other projects or venues, as has the better part of its commentariat.
In some ways, this is a good thing. There is now, for example, a wider rationalist blogosphere, including interesting people who were previously put off by idiosyncrasies of Less Wrong. In other ways, it's less good; LW is no longer a focal point for this sort of material. I'm not sure if such a focal point exists any more.
This dwindling content can be seen most clearly in the "Top Contributors, 30 Days" display. At the time I write this there are only seven posters with > 100 karma in the past 30 days, and it only takes 58 to appear on the list of 15. Perhaps the question should not be whether the content of LW should be reorganised, but whether LW is fulfilling its desired purpose any longer.
As nearly all the core people who worked the hardest to use this site to promote rationality are no longer contributing here, I wonder if this goal is still being achieved by LW itself. Is it still worth reading? Still worth commenting here?
--qsz
LW does seem dying and mainly useful for its old content. Any suggestions for a LW 2.0?
--signal
So let's talk suggestions for a LW 2.0. But just because we can restart LW doesn't mean we should restart LW. It's worth doing some goal factoring first (see Sacha Chua's explanation and links here). Before getting into my summary, I'll note that The Craft and the Community Sequence remains prescient and well worth reading for thinking about these issues. And before we can get into what our goals and plans are, let's talk some about:
So why did LessWrong fade? One short version is that LW was a booster rocket, designed to get its payload to a higher altitude then discarded. This is what I mean by what went horribly right--MIRI now has a strong funding base and as much publicity as it wants. Instead of writing material to build support and get more funding, Eliezer (and a research team!) can do actual work. Similarly, at some point in one's personal growth it is necessary to not just read about growing. We should expect people who aren't habitual forum-posters to 'grow out' of heavy reading and posting on LW.
Another short version is that there was only so much to say about rationality (in 2012, at least), and once it was said, it wasn't clear what to say next. Whether something is on topic for LW and whether it belongs in Main, Discussion, or an Open Thread is unclear and so less and less content is created, and so less and less people visit, leading to even less content. The easiest example of friction is whether or not 'effective altruism' is a core LW topic; this comment by iceman expresses the problem better than I could.
Relatedly, while rationality is the Common Interest of Many Causes, in that many different causes all potentially benefit from someone coming to LessWrong and adopting its worldview and thought patterns, LessWrong seems flavored enough by MIRI and Eliezer in particular that we mostly see the Many Causes free riding instead of contributing to the upkeep of LW (in terms of content, not hosting funds). Even CFAR, the most closely related of the Many Causes to LessWrong's stated mission, mostly overlaps with LW instead of supporting it. (To be clear, this is a decision I endorse; CFAR has benefited from not being tied to the idiosyncrasies of LessWrong. CFAR staff are also some of the most frequent contributors left of the founding community members.)
I should elaborate that by Many Causes I explicitly mean a broader tent than Effective Altruism. Anyone who is sympathetic to the Neo-Enlightenment Eliezer talks about in Common Interest of Many Causes strikes me as enough of a fellow traveler, regardless of whether or not they have found something to protect or whether or not that something to protect is the kind of thing Givewell would consider altruistic or a top priority.
First, some roles that LW (the website) doesn't or can't serve:
If your values and interests are similar to a community's, the main benefit you get out of the community and the community gets out of you have to do with correlating your attention. If something of interest to me happens, be it a blog post or a book or an event or a fundraiser, I won't know unless it enters one of my news streams. Given the high degree of shared interests between supporters of the Many Causes or by virtue of social ties to the community, treating the community's attention as a shared resource makes great sense. (Every promoted post since Julia Galef's in April seems like an example of this sort of thing to me.) For example, MIRI's Winter Fundraiser is going on now. But there are Many Causes, not one cause, and as much as possible the ability to direct shared attention should respect that.
Many people in the community also have interesting thoughts, which they typically post to their blog (or twitter or tumblr or ...). Aggregating those into one location reduces the total attention cost of keeping up with the community. (This is especially important if one wants to maintain people who are time-limited because they are working hard on their Important Project!) The experience of SSC seems to suggest that it's way better for authors to have control over their branding. I suspect much of the mainstream attention that Scott's received is because he's posting to a one-man blog, and thus can be linked to much more safely than linking to LW.
So compared to when most things were either posted or crossposted to LW, it seems like we currently spend too little attention on aggregating and unifying content spread across many different places. If most of the action is happening offsite, and all that needs to be done is link to it, Reddit seems like the clear low-cost winner. Or perhaps it makes sense to try to do something like an online magazine, with an actual editor. (See Viliam's discussion of the censor role in an online community.) I note that FLI is hiring a news website editor (but they're likely more x-risk focused than I'm imagining).
If we were going to modify LW to serve this role better, multiple reddits seems like the obvious suggestion here (and a potentially interesting innovation may be tag reddits, where categories are not exclusive). "Main" and "Discussion" do not at all capture the splits in what the audience wants to pay attention to. Integrated commenting across multiple sites, if possible, seems like it might be a huge win but may be technically very difficult (or require everyone to agree on a platform like Disqus).
Someone is interested in learning more about thinking better; probably they have tons of confusion about philosophy, how the world works, and their own goals and psychology. Someone mentions this LessWrong place, or links them particular articles, or they read HPMoR and follow the links in the Author's Notes.
But then they realize just how long Rationality: From AI to Zombies is, or they don't understand a particular part. Without social reinforcement that it's interesting and without other people to ask questions of, they likely won't get all that far or as much out of it as they could have.
And then there's all the other things that someone picks up by being part of a community--who the various people are, what they're working on, what options are out there.
It seems to me that the the optimal software for something like this is perhaps more like Wikipedia or Stack Overflow than it is like Reddit. If we're building a giant tree of rationality-related concepts and skills, it doesn't quite make sense to have individual blog posts written by individual authors, instead of community-maintained wiki pages with explanations and links.
You can't do the physical meeting up online, but you can alert people to meetups near them. At time of writing, according to the map on the front page, one of the five closest meetups to me (in Austin, Texas) is in Brussels.
Part of that is groups moving to other communication channels to organize meetups. In Austin, for example, the email list is a much more reliable way to contact people--especially since many of them don't regularly check LW! But the lost advertising potential seems significant, and something like the EA Hub seems like a better solution.
There's also a role to be played in colocating rationalists, either through helping form group houses and shared apartments or moving subsidies / loans. It's not clear it's efficient for more people to move to the Bay Area relative to secondary or tertiary hubs, but it does seem likely that we should put resources towards growing the physical community.
There's also a much longer conversation that could be had about effectively employing more social technology to develop and strengthen the community, but I get the sense that most of those organizations, be they formal institutions or churches or families or mastermind groups or taskforces, are categorically unlike online forums, and the community they will be developing and strengthening will not be "LessWrong readers" so much as "meatspace rationalists." So I'll ignore this for now as off topic, except to note that I am very interested in this subject and you should contact me if also interested.
So far, I've talked about things that would serve various roles better than LW, though perhaps not at the same time. One could easily imagine them existing side by side: it's not like Scott Alexander needed to shut down his Yvain account to start posting at SSC, he just made the alternative and started posting to it. Similarly, a reddit for the rationalist diaspora already exists (though it doesn't see much use yet), as do two (well, one and a half) for SSC.
The trouble is the people who have noticed that people have left, but not where they're going, and the links to LessWrong over all the old material. If LessWrong is a ghost town that's being haunted by a pack of unquiet spirits, well, better to be upfront about that than give people the wrong impression about what rationalists are like.
I think we should either develop a plan that makes LW fully functional at the three roles mentioned above (and any others that are raised), or we should close down posting and commenting on LW (while maintaining it as an archive). The shutdown could either happen at the end of December, or March 5th to correspond to the opening of LW, but the most important factor is that there be replacements to point people to. It seems likely we should leave open the LW wiki (and probably make the LW landing page point to a wiki page, so it can be maintained and updated to point to prominent parts of the diaspora). The Meetups functionality should probably be augmented or replaced (either static links to dynamic objects, like Facebook groups, or with functionality that makes it easier on the organizers, like recurring meetups).
(I wrote that as an 'or', but at present I lean heavily towards the 'archive LW and embrace the diaspora' position.)