LessWrong 2.0
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:
What went wrong (or horribly right):
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.
What roles LW served, and what could do it better:
First, some roles that LW (the website) doesn't or can't serve:
- 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. Direct work on any of the Many Causes is going to be done by people working directly on that task, not by posts on an internet forum.
- Physical interaction with like-minded people. You can organize a meetup on LW, but you can't attend one.
- Practical rationality training. The Sequences are great at giving people a philosophical foundation, but they can only do so much. There's a reason why CFAR has workshops instead of writing articles and books.
- Focal Point / News Organization
- Welcoming Committee / Rationality Materials
- Meetup Organizer / Social Club
Focal Point / News Organization
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).
Welcoming Committee / Rationality Materials
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.
Meetup Organizer / Social Club
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.
Why not have that and LW?
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.
TL;DR
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.)
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Comments (312)
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.
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.
does something prevent you from cross posting?
previously it was suggested to post here; then in 6 months delete the text; include a link to the text on your blog. (or just leave it)
Hassle, two comment threads to follow, probably bad for search rankings.
More hassle.
I would guess if the version on the external blog is posted first and the post on LW links to the original blog the blog's SEO doesn't suffer that strongly.
or leave it up.
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).
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 the diaspora, like the page about sharing academic papers. I also often enjoy reading the open threads. Perhaps transitioning LessWrong more towards discussion would be a good middle ground.
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. Tumblr seems to be bad for discussion by design.
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.
Wait a minute, comments are upvoted based on quality rather than agreement? Until now, I thought that if a comment had, say, nine points, it meant that there existed at least nine LessWrongers who agreed with everything the comment author said. That is not so?
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.
A reason to shut down the forum entirely instead of leaving it in its current state is that low quality posts made by randos here can hurt the reputation of the forum and the people & organizations that were at one time or another affiliated with it. See e.g. this farewell that someone linked to on SlateStarCodex. There places online like the /r/SneerClub subreddit where people will post something that one particular Less Wrong user said and make fun of it, which tarnishes the reputation of the site in general. Banning Lumifer and VoiceOfRa would help a little in the short term, but running a quality online forum requires ongoing maintenance.
LOL
Well, I guess I'm used to hearing that I'd be the first against the wall when the revolution comes... X-D
"Don't throw the baby out with the bathwater" is good advice.
There's no reason to shut down the entire forum if the problems can be solved with less collateral damage.
Having participated in online communities which would somewhat regularly get made fun of by others, I'm not sure I agree that others making fun of an online community tarnishes its reputation in the general population. Seems to me that most people aren't aware of the people making fun of the community. I think dishonest representations with wider distribution are much more harmful, e.g., RationalWiki's take on LessWrong. And we should do something about that, but again, I don't think shutting down the forum is the right approach.
Also, I tend to ignore farewell posts like that. In my experience, they happen regardless of the "health" of the community. I can think of one online community I've participated in that regularly has such threads, despite activity being at an all time high. They can describe real problems which should be fixed, but often don't.
Maybe rss feeds?
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.
(I haven't RTFA or most of the comments yet.)
When ESRogs started /r/RationalistDiaspora, that's what I was hoping it would become.
I think the main thing that went wrong, is that not enough people saw it. It didn't pick up critical mass, or even self-sustaining mass. Now, ESRogs seems to be the only submitter, and there's not enough voting to act as a filter or to make links show up on my reddit front page.
But there's nothing stopping it from becoming that thing, if a bunch of people did start using it all at once. To that end, I just submitted something.
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.
LW isn't suitable as-is, I think. There's more friction to submitting a link (you need to create a text post, put the link in there, and current norms dictate that you write a summary), more friction to following one (you need to click to the post, then click the link), and discussion is ordered by submission time and not votes. It's like browsing /new on a subreddit that only allows self-posts.
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.)
Perhaps. I'm not sure LW is the right place for it, especially while LW still has original content, and a culture that some find offputting.
Technically, Reddit is pretty customizable, in ways that I think would be difficult to migrate to LW. For example, suppose we wanted to implement Alicorn's suggestion "granting OP some veto power about what sorts of comments and commenters are allowed under their post".
On reddit, I think we can get a pretty good stab at it. Create some standard discussion norms, with wiki pages describing them. If someone submits a link with title starting [NO NRX], have automoderator assign it a specific piece of flair. Then use subreddit CSS to add some text prominently to the comments page, "discussion of neoreactionary ideas is forbidden in this thread", linking to the wiki.
A developer could easily get something similar on LW. But I don't think it would be so easy for a developer to copy the features of reddit which make a developer unnecessary.
I would love there to be a single, canonical rationality-related link aggregator (with tags and other ways of categorizing!), but I don't want it to be on Reddit. Reddit has an implicit culture of transience. You can't discuss too old posts. Links are ordered chronologically. Links can't be grouped, categorized. It's hard to search for old or obscure links.
OTOH maybe a link aggregator should be transient, because the nature of blogs, news sites, Facebook feeds, and tumblr posts is transient too. Today Qiaochu Yuan or Scott Alexander found this particular article interesting; in a year's time this article is irrelevant.
There's also link rot, and many old links for interesting material are 404.
Maybe we shouldn't aggregate links at all, but aggregate the knowledge itself. Therefore something similar to LW wiki. But I strongly believe wiki is an overrated model for aggregating knowledge and it wouldn't work for aggregating rationality-related knowledge.
There should be a rationality knowledge base, something that transcends wikis, FAQs, tutorials, blog posts, link posts, Stack Overflow, Wikipedia outlines. Maybe it would require thinking intensely for 5 minutes (like how CFAR teaches), maybe it would require coming up with completely new concepts and code.
But this knowledge base would have to heavily incentivize people to contribute to it, otherwise the actual knowledge is never going to be written. Counter-intuitively, wikis are terrible at incentivizing contribution.
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.
Link flair isn't perfect, but it allows this.
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 think this isn't a big factor. Instead people post to fb because:
low thresholds: it's socially acceptable to post anything from am odd thought you had to a big essay, and there's no expectation you polish your post or get friends to review drafts
positive comments: over the years comments on LW have gotten more and more critical, not clear why
blocking people: if there's someone who really annoys you but is well behaved enough that they meet site rules you can't ban them on LW but you can still block them on FB so you don't have to interact with them.
What keeps you off fb? I find some of my best discussions happen there these days.
(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:
I think there real value in having discussion about rationality in a way where friends who aren't rationalists come to see them. It does limit the amount of jargon that you can use, but it has real benefits.
Yup, but there is also value in having discussion about rationality that doesn't need to take such things into consideration.
AFAIK you're right about "searchable", but the timestamp of any comment on Facebook is a permalink. For example, here's a link to the earliest comment on EY's latest Facebook post.
Neat. Thanks!
Posts are linkable, comments to posts are not. (ERRATUM: they are also linkable)
Compounded with the fact that comment threading is limited to two levels and comments are loaded in small batches, making even the browser in-page search function useless, it makes following discussion with hundreds of comments impossible.
However, one of the things that Facebook does right and LW/Reddit does not, IMHO, is that votes on Facebook (well, there are only likes, actually) are public. Even if there were downvotes, making them public would make it socially harder to pull the mass downvoting sprees and other manipulations that plague LW and Reddit.
I think "plague" is too strong a word, on LW at least. Mass downvoting is an obnoxious nuisance but so far as I know there's only one person (with, admittedly, at least three identities at different times) who's done much of it. There are occasional reasons to suspect small-scale vote manipulation of other kinds (a few sockpuppets, a small voting ring) but not very often, not very severely, and so far as I know never to such an extent that there was a serious investigation, never mind anyone getting caught.
The obvious downside to public voting is that it increases the scope for downvoting to produce hostility and/or drama. Perhaps that just means an equilibrium where no one downvotes anything that isn't clearly terrible. Would that be better or worse? I'm really not sure.
(Technically, how would it work out? Surely we shouldn't retroactively make everyone's historical votes publicly visible -- they were made with the understanding that they weren't going to be. But then we have a system with two kinds of votes in: old ones that aren't publicly visible and new ones that are. That's going to complicate things.)
We already have such a system for the polls that allow you to vote annonymously and also to vote with your name.
True. But I suspect the polls are an extra thing that was added on with that feature already in place, whereas the voting mechanics are already there without provision for two kinds of vote. Modifying existing code in ways that break assumptions it may have made is always more painful than writing new code.
The existing code is likely a database that tells you whether people have voted for a specific post. Adding an additional column to that database for private/public votes shouldn't be hard.
From my hazy memory of the LW codebase, you may be making unjustified assumptions about how it stores data. The database setup is ... idiosyncratic.
(Here is an article -- with a link to more details -- about the Reddit DB architecture. LW is, I believe, forked from a version of Reddit a bit older than that article.)
I agree that public votes would likely improve the state of affairs. Public downvotes allow a person who doesn't understand why they were downvoted to ask the person directly. It also creates social accountability for the votes.
You might want to read the comment you're replying to again.
Right, my bad.
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).
You can make it less random by viewing in chronological order. You do that either by appending "?sk=h_chr" to the main Facebook URL, or by selecting "Recent First" rather than "Top Stories" in the little dropdown near the top of the left sidebar whose name I forget.
(In case it helps remember the cryptic string of characters: "?" in a URL introduces parameters, and is followed by something of the form key=value&key=value&key=value; in this case we have only one key/value pair; "sk" presumably stands for "sort key", i.e., the attribute of a feed entry that will be used for sorting on when FB decides what to show you and in what order; I don't know why "h_"; "chr" is clearly short for "chronological".)
I am not sure whether in this mode of operation FB always shows you all the stuff you are potentially interested in in chronological order; my guess is that it still filters it in some undisclosed way. But it's at least a bit more deterministic.
(I agree with all you've said here about Facebook.)
You can save a post for later reading from the dropdown menu to the right of the byline, though you'll still need to remember to check your saved posts once in a while.
(BTW, does anybody remember how the hell you access the list of saved posts on Less Wrong? EDIT: never mind, here it is.)
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. ;)
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.
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.
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. Heck, Tim is using the Web to share physics research already. After all, the Web means
An end to credentialism. Now any amateur physicist can contribute in their spare time.
Smoother, better peer review processes.
Cheap, universal distribution.
Academia could use a shakeup anyway: much academic writing stinks, and philosophy in particular has gone astray.
Now fast forward to the present. The academic utopia we envisioned has happened to some degree--see Wikipedia and the AskHistorians subreddit, for instance. But it hasn't happened to the degree we hoped. Why not? I can think of a few reasons:
Financial incentives and prestige inertia that benefit established systems. See e.g. Bryan Caplan on this.
Lack of a profit motive. The Web revolutionized areas it was possible to get rich revolutionizing. Revolutionizing academia has much less profit potential. (Revolutionizing credentialing might make someone rich, but academia serves valuable roles for society that aren't credentialing and are hard to make money from. For example, it certifies smart people as high status topic experts. If you've attended high school you know that smart people are not high status by default. We're lucky to live in a world where journalists are more likely to interview college professors for trend pieces than celebrities. If colleges went away and cons + Mensa became the primary places smart people gathered, that might change.)
The acceleration of addictiveness. The Web is selecting for addictive stimuli. Blogs are a more addictive version of personal websites. Twitter and Facebook are more addictive versions of blogs. If the web-based version of academia is optimizing for something other than addictiveness, it's likely to get crowded out. (I suspect this is playing a role in Wikipedia's decline.)
All of these factors seem surmountable, and indeed LW made decent progress despite them. They haven't been surmounted due to a combination of apathy and this problem not being on peoples' radar.
That's the research side of academia. Now let's look at the teaching side.
Imagine you're a professor teaching a critical thinking class. Out of all the classes in the general education curriculum, the case for your class actually helping the lives of your students is among the strongest. You're a really good teacher, and your students are so engaged with your assigned readings that they are putting off homework for other classes to do them. Sounds great right?
That's basically the problem Patri's post complained about. It's a "first world" problem by professorial standards. If your students are really having issues with their other classes because they are so excited about the readings for your class, maybe do the readings during class so they aren't a distraction while doing other homework, prevent students from reading ahead, or something like that.
The higher education bubble is likely going to "pop" eventually. (Maybe when employers realize that taking Coursera classes is a positive signal of conscientiousness, curiosity, and having the wisdom to avoid debt... Google's HR guy is already on record saying people who make their way without college are "exceptional human beings".) The market will provide a new solution for credentialing because there's money in that. There's less money in the other stuff academia does, and it'd be great if we could start laying the foundation for that now. Stretch goal: bake EA principles in from the start.
This would be a huge turnoff for many people, including myself.
So you'd be upset to, say, see research proposals prioritized for funding using explicitly utilitarian criteria? How would you rather see them prioritized?
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.
If there's some reason to avoid broadcasting your thinking, you could just leave a comment in this thread instead of making a toplevel post. (Or send me a private message.) Anyway, you've got me curious already... is your objection to EA in principle, what the EA movement looks like in practice, or what the EA movement might become in practice? Does it extend to any explicit utilitarian calculations in general? (Feel free not to answer if you don't want to.) Personally I'm a bit apprehensive about what the EA movement might become, but the EA leadership seems apprehensive too, so that's reassuring.
Please do.
Why not post it as username2? (If this is an equivalent to username, that is. I think LW shouldn't disregard confessionals, since clearly people talk much more freely there.)
Same. I like my arguments modular. I say this despite liking EA a lot.
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 reasons for feeling that way, but I know many people feel that utility-maximizing about human lives is "icky." To be more charitable, they believe that human life has inherent sacred properties. They also believe that assigning mathematical values to people signals that you're "cold." If someone comes to Less Wrong with those ideals, they have to a) digest a LOT of LW philosophy to be okay with EA principles, or b) stick around despite their distaste for certain core principles.
Back when LW was more active, there was much lower math density in posts here.
That's interesting.
There's also less math density on the rationalist blogs and the rationalist Tumblr-space, which at this point have much more current activity than LW.
Maybe because many people are not sure whether their topics are "LW-worthy", but when they do something mathematical they feel comfortable about posting it here. If I write my opinion about something, people will most likely disagree; but if I write an equation and solve it correctly, there is nothing to disagree with.
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.
To say the most obvious thing, the quality threshold for comments should be much lower than for articles. And maybe these should be also some "chat" area where comments just appear and disappear without voting, so that no one would hesitate to post there; and then after receiving some positive feedback they would feel comfortable with posting regular comments.
Maybe there could be a special posting mode for newcomers, which would provide some advantages and disadvantages, like training wheels. For example it would not display negative comment karma (karma below zero would be displayed as zero), it could encourage specific verbal feedback which would be visible only to the comment author (or perhaps require downvoters to select one of predefined explanations, such as "you were rude" or "you promoted pseudoscience"), but it would also limit the number of comments per day and per thread (to prevent spamming by people who can't take a hint). After receiving enough total karma, the newbie mode would be turned off. -- That's just a quick idea, maybe completely wrong.
Or maybe we could encourage people being nice to each other by giving positive feedback additionally to upvotes. Such as "this is nice" or "thank you for the research", which would be displayed as small icons above the comment. Generally, to add some optional flavor to the numbers, whether positive or negative.
Assuming this trend exists (I haven't noticed it) I think that in addition to that we also have a fact that reaching higher hanging fruit requires better tools.
Yes, I agree completely. Honestly, I thought this line of reasoning was common knowledge in the rationalsphere, since I think I've seen it discussed a couple times on Tumblr and in person (IIRC, both in Portland, and in the Bay Area).
Is that true? How do we know?
Well, no posts are deleted. If you look at Main and sort chronologically, you can go through and count articles per time and what fraction of them are math-heavy (which should be easy to check from a once-over skim).
I think this is pretty much accepted wisdom in the rationalsphere. Several people, online and in person, have said things to the effect of "Tumblr is for socializing, private blogs are for commenting on whatever the blogger writes about, and LessWrong is for math-heavy things, quotes threads, and meetup scheduling." But if you doubt it, you can absolutely check.
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.
Um, exactly.
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 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.
To continue with my theme about the bias towards action, I would note the following. Suppose that one periodically samples a random variable to decide whether the correct action is to leave some situation alone, or to intervene. Assuming that one continues sampling after getting back "do nothing", but that an "intervene" decision is final, it should be clear that "intervene" will always win eventually, if the random variable has even a tiny probability of coming up "intervene", even if the vast majority of the probability mass is on "do nothing".
So in light of that, if one is going to continue to stand around and talk about intervening, one should probably bias further and further away from intervening as time passes, to account for the fact that eventually the coin will come up "intervene" through bad luck no matter what the correct decision is.
I'm not convinced this is a problematic bias. What's your prior that the current implementation of LessWrong is near "optimal" in any sense? If it's not, then we necessarily have to Do Something to improve it, don't we? The question shouldn't be if a change is required, but whether any proposed change is for better or worse. And then if it's for the better, is it worth the cost?
Of course, this argument applied even when LW was "doing well". The threat of shutdown is just a convenient excuse for us to participate in the improvement process. It even got a long time lurker like me to post a comment.
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 means I should regard it as a bad idea, conditional on our not finding a way to rejuvenate it. "End of December" (one of the options near the end of the OP) seems like an awfully short deadline, though, and I think Vaniver is proposing it because what he actually favours (as he's said) is the closing-down of LW, and the shorter the timescale the less danger there is that someone will try to do something else instead.
This expresses my meaning.
I am more worried about ghosts than tumbleweeds.
I was unclear when talking about dates; the end of December is very soon, and chosen simply because it is the end of the year. Next March, also, was suggested solely because it would be tidy to close LW on the anniversary of its opening, not because March is a tactically good time. I think that if LW should be shut down, that needs to be after a replacement has been settled on, not before, and so I'm not sure we're aligned on the 'danger that someone will try to do something else instead.'
I am not in fact worried "that someone will try to do something else instead" -- I thought, perhaps overcynically, that you might be preferring a short to a long timescale because the shorter the timescale the less likely it is that someone makes a credible How To Save LW proposal before it expires.
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 the grounds that that's not what SO is good at.
The biggest weakness of Less Wrong as a welcoming committee isn't that it's a forum rather than an encyclopaedia or a Q&A site; I think a forum is the Right Thing for that purpose. The biggest weakness is the whole "ghost town of unquiet spirits" thing -- which I think is an unkind exaggeration but it's hard to deny has some truth to it. LW would make a better welcoming committee if it were livelier and more impressive, and it won't gain those attributes as a welcoming committee.
Having said that, I agree that there's a place for something Wikipedia-like. The LW wiki was meant to be that, but it's never had a great deal of participation. I have no idea what could be done to change that. People contribute to things to benefit others, or to benefit themselves. Editing a wiki is never going to bring much personal gain, and when all the material that would go into the wiki is already out there in other forms (e.g., the Sequences) it's hard to see that the benefit is going to be big enough to excite people doing it altruistically.
I agree with you that the motivational bits, of wanting to acculturate to LW to be around the cool people, rely on the cool people being here.
The main reason I'm uncertain about the forum as the right model is that I don't see it in many other educational contexts and I think there are weird dynamics around the asymmetry between questioners and answerers and levels of competence/experience. (The cool people want some, but not too much, interaction with not-yet-cool people.) Perhaps the Slack and IRC channels and similar venues deserve some more of my attention as potential solutions here.
Agreed. This dynamic gets even worse when the problems are psychological. If someone goes to Stack Overflow and posts "hey, this code doesn't do what I expect. What's going wrong?" we can copy the code and run it on our machines and find the issue. If someone goes to Sanity Overflow and posts "hey, I'm akratic. What's going wrong?" we... have a much harder time.
One of the things that comes up every now and then is the idea of rewriting the Sequences, and I think the main goal there would be to make them with as little of Eliezer's personality shining through as possible. (I like his personality well enough, but it's clear that many don't, and a more communal central repository would reduce some of the idiosyncrasy concerns.)
Some think that the Sequences could be significantly shortened, but I suspect that's optimism speaking instead of experience. There are only a handful of sections in the Sequences where Eliezer actually repeats himself, and even then it's likely one of those places where, really, it's worth giving them three slightly different versions of the same thing to make sure they get it.
I suspect the main benefit from rewriting the Sequences would actually be that it would be an excuse to post useful stuff about rationality again.
Not just rewriting them. My biggest problem with LW-rationality is that I haven't and probably can't internalize it on a very deep, systematic level, no matter how many times I re-read the articles. Instead of a long chain of blog-posts about everything on Earth, there should be a very focused rationality textbook with exercises, with spaced repetition and all that science of teaching and learning baked it. Luke Muehlhauser argued LW is a philosophy blog. Yet after reading RAZ I don't feel like I understand LW epistemology on a deep level. I still don't feel confident arguing with philosophers, even if I intuitively understand they are full of shit.
While I have many intuitions about how to be rational, and I'm ridiculously more sane and productive, than I was a year before, thanks to LW, my understanding of LW maths, science and philosophy is vague and not at all transparent.
I have read somewhere that all else being equal dialogues attract people's attention better than monologues, at least on television. Perhaps in some cases some ideas (including old sequence posts, especially more controversial ones) could be presented as Socratic dialogues, o perhaps, if a post is being written collaboratively by more than one person, one could write a position and the others (or two) could ask inquisitive questions or try to find holes in his or her argument. You would think that having comments already covers that, and in a sense it is indeed similar to having two waves of comments. However, in this case, the post that is saw by most people has already covered at least a few objections and thus is of relatively higher quality. Secondly, this allows "debate" posts that do not present any clear conclusion and contain only arguments for different positions (where does the controversy lies is often an interesting and informative question). Thirdly, I conjecture that is psychologically more pleasant to be nitpicked by one or two people (who you already know they were explicitly asked to do that) than a lot of commenters at once. You could call this series "Dialogues concerning (human) rationality" or something like that.
Of course, not all posts should be written as dialogues (e.g. some more technical ones might be difficult to structure this way).
While I'm not against LW wiki itself (it already exists, for starters), I'm very much against making LW “something like a wiki”, because I'm >50% confident it will fail. I flinched when I read “community-maintained wiki pages with explanations and links” in the original post, because “community-maintained wiki” are almost universally dead before reaching maturity.
Michael Snoyman wrote a small article on why people are willing to contribute to free software documentation via pull requests, but not via wiki edits. I wholeheartedly recommend everyone to read the article, but the gist is as follows.
For a wiki:
For documentation that is improved through pull requests:
Why LW-as-a-wiki would discourage contributing (writing wiki-like articles)? Of all wikis I remember, the only successful are Wikipedia and very narrow-focused wikis (e.g. UESP for The Elder Scrolls or Ring of Brodgar for Haven and Hearth video games). In both cases they are thriving because there are very clear expectations of what a final article is supposed to look like.
LW is far away from being definitive canonical reference, which is good. Every rationality-relevant topic could be explained from different perspectives, so I would hate there to be the one definitive article on, say, control theory.
Then you'd have all the Wikipedia problems: edit wars, deletionism, constant arguing over the rules and article layout, slowly corrupting powers of wiki moderators, censorship. On a wiki everything is supposed to be canonical, so much effort will be wasted on arguing over canonical definitions and phrasings, or on referencing more and more rules and guidelines. Wiki model has bad incentives: wins the one, who is more stubborn.
LW-as-a-wiki would stagnate very quickly, as there will be huge psychological and social obstacles for people to contribute. I will go into these obstacles in greater detail in follow-up comments. For now I want to say that we should analyze what is wrong with the wiki model from cognitive psychology and science of human motivation perspective, and see how we can do better.
The most important revolutionary idea behind LW (and more specifically lukeprog era LW) is that science is a superweapon, and if diligently learn relevant science and then try to fix the problem, you can outdo your competitors by a large margin (see also: beating the averages). So maybe we should figure out psychology of motivation, incentives for contributing, that kinds of things, before patching LW codebase. Maybe LW should be a community blog, a Reddit-style site, a wiki; or maybe it should be something completely different.
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.
The advantage of Facebook is that you don't have to code anything. The disadvantage is that if you disagree with how certain things work, there is nothing you can do about it (other than leave Facebook).
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.
Most programmers do most of their programming for pay, working for institutions with offices and employees.
The Linux kernel is great. How sure are you that it would be as successful as it is if its development didn't receive quite a bit of funding (and direct participation) from institutions with offices and employees? See, e.g., this brief article. It's from 2009, but my impression is that the situation it describes is fairly representative of Linux development both before and after 2009 as well.
(I do think the comment you're replying to is an overstatement, but it's not so very far from the truth.)
Correct, but it says nothing about their ability.
The funding part doesn't make sense, which why I didn't address it. But if you insist, we should be looking at how much code was accepted, and from whom. There's also the question of where the money actually goes, although I'm not sure how much important that is.
There's also plenty of other FOSS projects out there, but the LK is the first thing that pops into my mind and admittedly I can't name too many despite running a GNU+Linux system myself. What a shame. (mutt, Emacs, vim, BASH, and other smaller projects like Irssi or the Suckless tools are also good examples)
My main reason for addressing that initially was that I think there is some overlap between LW-ers to the hacker archetype. At least, I believe there should be.
I'm not sure I understand. You suggested that the general consensus among programmers is that "office and employees" is terrible, which is hard to reconcile with the fact that most programmers do most of their programming in an office with employees.
I'm not sure what you mean. What "funding part" of what doesn't make sense how?
That's almost exactly what the article I linked to looks at. The difference is that between "submitted" and "accepted"; are you expecting that the accepted-to-submitted ratio will have been markedly different between the groups listed there?
All good and valuable things, and for the avoidance of doubt I am not trying to diss open-source software here. I really sincerely do think it's great, and I wish there were more of it. But I don't think any of that makes the original claim very wrong: generally when something big needs doing and people care a lot about it, the way it happens involves getting a bunch of people together in a single place and paying them money to do the job.
(Not always for profit; charitable and government-funded organizations are still mostly institutions with offices and employees.)
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 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'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.
I'm tempted to go through Eliezer's Facebook page and start copy/pasting interesting things to LessWrong Discussion...
You can start copy/pasting interesting things to LessWrong discussion even if they are not from Eliezer's Facebook page. For example, LessWrong could have "Best of" threads (similar to Reddit's "Best of" subreddit) where people could post the most interesting threads or comments they have found elsewhere (this is different from "Rationality Quotes" threads).
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.
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 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'd want a way to still directly post to LW, and probably a way to filter by tag (for example, only posts tagged "lesswrong" go to LW).
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.
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 from an IT background, so I will also discuss technology. There's two technical problems you mention. The first is aggregation of the work of diaspora authors; right now, all we have is links on the sidebar and author links to each other. This actually seems like the simplest problem to solve. 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. Call it Diaspora or something. This does, admittedly, require cooperation from the owners; my intuition is that it would be easier to get in this community than most others.
But that doesn't solve the greater difficulty, aggregation of comments. Even if we publish an aggregated feed of all known LW authors, and also allow posts on LW itself for people who don't have their own blog, we still end up with N+1 disconnected communities.
Normally I'd say "everybody come back to LW and post here", but 1. that's not going to happen; people like owning their own gardens; and 2. you rightly point out that it benefits authors to have fuller control over their publishing environment. So there's a divide here between what's useful to authors and useful to the community.
The problem we're actually trying to solve is community aggregation. We want individual homes for authors, but we also want a town square for residents and visiting speakers.
So I'm going to step to the side and bring something out here...
/Error exits stage right, returns pushing small wooden horse labeled "hobby"/
Anyone who follows SSC comment subthreads complaining about crappy commenting features will know what I'm going to say next.
Distributed discussion is a solved problem, and the solution is not Disqus or anything like it. The solution is called NNTP, and it has been around since approximately forever. It is currently mostly unused because no one has written (or, perhaps, popularized) a good web frontend for it; and today, the web is the Internet in most users' eyes. It does not have all possible good features (in particular, it does not have a voting system, although it could probably be kludged in), but given the number of times I've answered feature complaints with some variant of "you know, somebody implemented something that does that 20 years ago, but no one uses it", I am guessing it has enough.
So my personal solution is: Start a rationalist Usenet, with NNTP providing the backend and blogging software acting as a client. Each diaspora author gets a top-level group tree, within which groups are moderated by them. "blogs" are effectively frontends to the tree, presenting the local author's work as top-level posts and comments as replies. Less wrong collects posts from friendly authors using NNTP's existing mechanisms for distributing posts, but is only responsible for moderating within its own top-level tree, provided for general discussion and non-blog-owners (and as a sort of meta-moderator). Effectively, NNTP is now the database the site reads from. Only you don't necessarily need the site to read it; power users who want better efficiency can use all the power of existing nntp clients.
This solution does require blog authors to use blogging software that accepts NNTP as a post/comment backend. However, I think it is an easier problem to convince a few dozen authors to do this (and to write such a frontend if necessary) than a few thousand readers to switch to non-web clients for anything. A web interface is necessary for any such plan anyway; in today's world, if Google doesn't index it, it doesn't exist.
We're a heavily tech-slanted community. There ought to be enough technical expertise here to pull such a thing off.
And while I'm dreaming, I'd like a pony.
(Now that I've reached the bottom of my comment, I'm thinking of writing this up in further detail, as a full post, to describe exactly how such a plan could be implemented and solve technical and coordination problems -- note that my proposition above could be adopted incrementally, which is important to the latter issue. I've never presented a full argument to a non-old-timer audience and I don't know how convincing it would be. I'd rather get a sense of initial reactions first, though, and I've already spent more time on this post than my employer would probably approve of.)
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.
Feed filtering is policy, not mechanism; as you say, tags for inclusion provide an acceptable way to manage this and very light on the diasporists. A curated feed alongside it (akin to Promoted) would work well too, provided someone's willing to do so.
The issue with tumblr's RSS feeds is mechanism, though. That's the layer I so desperately want to burn down because it is legitimately full of Fail. Reply reference chains are currently broken almost everywhere on the Internet. But not because they can't be done well.
It's certainly true that most of the disapora personages that LWers are familiar with got their audience here first, but I think that's a selection effect.
I made an off-the-cuff list of people who strike me as notable in the diaspora, rot13ed in case people want to make their own lists and compare.
Ba Ghzoye: Fpbgg, Bml, Abfgnytroenvfg, Puevf Unyydhvfg, Gur Havg bs Pnevat, Tehagyrq naq Uvatrq. Ba snprobbx: Ryvmre, Oevraar, Ebo Jvoyva.
Of whom, I think 3/9 first had an audience here.
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.
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.
Well, I was one of those "previously good posters" (top 10 for a long time) and I left because of the decline in quality. I don't remember exactly, but I think Eliezer also claimed to leave because of nastiness in the comments, not because people were asking him to be more rigorous.
The limiting factor of having an active community on LW is people's desire to hang out here. I strongly believe that desire depends mostly on the average quality of posts they read, and doesn't depend on their freedom to post. Eliezer had a fandom even in the OB days, when no one except him could post at all. Only Scott can post on SSC today, yet each of his posts gathers hundreds of comments. I'm just suggesting the same model here.
Truth.
A datapoint: I am entirely uninterested in a read-only LW. On this basis it has to compete with the whole 'net and, well, I don't think it will win.
From my point of view "that desire" depends mostly on the quality of people you can talk to. You don't need a social website to read blog posts.
A social club version of LW also has to compete with the whole net ;-)
IMO the best contributors on LW (Yvain, Alicorn, Wei...) joined mostly because of the quality of Eliezer's posts, not because of the people. There were hardly any people back then. I might be misremembering, but I think Yvain started posting when LW was still read-only, by emailing his posts to Eliezer or something.
Yes, but here it has a pronounced advantage. Out of all more or less active forums known to me, LW has the least idiots. That's a huge plus. Besides, I like weirdness.
Yes, and at that point EY was "people" they wanted to talk to.
FWIW my feeling is much the same as Lumifer's. However, people like me and Lumifer may not be the ones whose feelings matter here -- if all the best people have abandoned LW because the quality is low, people who are still active participants probably (1) aren't the best people, (2) aren't producing the high quality of stuff that LW needs to attract and keep the best people, and (3) in any case aren't the ones LW is having most trouble retaining.
(Counterargument: "first do no harm". Countercounterargument, kinda: if LW is made read-only, who cares whether anyone is or isn't interested in it? it will make no difference.)
"Nastiness in the comments" and "people asking him to be more rigorous" aren't mutually exclusive. I heard a lot of this in person, so I can't easily provide references, but back when that was all going down I remember a lot of talk from Eliezer and other major contributors about how LW was getting unpleasantly nitpicky.
In Eliezer's case this probably has something to do with the fastest-gun-in-the-west dynamic, where if you're known as a public intellectual in some context you're going to attract a lot of people looking to gain some status by making you look stupid. But I heard similar sentiments from e.g. Louie, and he was never Internet famous like Eliezer was.
I don't think the existance of the discussion-section prevents high quality posts in the main section.
But that's exactly what happens! How can anyone not see that?
Bad content drives out good. Right now LW has settled into a state where people write tons of low quality posts, because they are just as visible as high quality posts. The tiny difference in visibility between main and discussion isn't a strong enough incentive.
In the early days of LW, posts were manually promoted to main by Eliezer, and the discussion section didn't exist. That led to high average quality which attracted many people.
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.
OK, thought experiment. Let's say Scott announces a contest for the best guest post on SSC. Do you think there will be many high quality submissions? I think yeah. Now let's say Scott opens posting on SSC to everyone with a pulse. Do you think the quality will stay high for long? I think nope.
Of course restrictions aren't the only thing necessary for high quality. You also need a seed of amazing content. Luckily, LW already has that :-)
First, you are conflating categories. SSC is a blog -- a place where one person (or maybe a few) posts content and the visitors consume it. Comments are secondary and are not that important. LW is not a blog -- maybe it was once long time ago and it still misleadingly calls itself a blog, but functionally it's a forum attached to an archive.
One important difference is that blogs have ownership. I'm not talking about the legal sense, but rather about the feeling of responsibility/control/caring. When things are not owned by anyone in particular, there are... consequences. Consult the XX century history for particulars. LW used to be owned by EY. Right now it's not owned by anyone in particular.
If you want LW to go back to being a blog, you need to find preferably one, but not more than 5-6 people who will commit to the care and feeding of LW and who will have power to change things to their liking. But, of course, future is uncertain so as the result the LW might flower and be rejuvenated, or it may crash and burn.
The alternative is to treat LW as social platform, a forum, where content is provided mostly by the participants. Yes, you do not get solely high-level content, you get a lot of low-level stuff, too, but that's a filtering problem which has many well-known solutions. At the moment LW's filtering capabilities are rather... rudimentary.
Yeah, I want LW to be a high quality blog and I'm aware of the risk involved. I'm not as interested in a forum, there's tons of those already and none of them are very exciting. IMO exciting things are more worth creating than non-exciting things.
The critical question is whose blog? Who will have ownership?
"The whole community" is not a good answer.
There are even more non-exciting blogs :-P
SSC is heavily dependent on comments, to the point where they are arguably not even secondary any more.
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.
The problem with them is that there is no sorting mechanism, so unless I have the time to read several hundred comments I must resort to things like Ctrl-F'ing for the names of certain commenters I particularly like, or going to the most recent comments and hoping that if a discussion has survived this long then it's probably going to be interesting.
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.
Functionally, this is turning LW into a magazine with one article per week. I think that's a decent approach, though I have some reservations.
Remember the shift from OB to LW, and one of the big changes being that people went from having to email Hanson about posting something (and maybe getting shot down) to being able to post something themselves. I worry that this creates too much in the way of inconvenience and risk of failure for posters, and means that they'll post it somewhere else instead of on LW.
But I think the tournament nature of it--there's a post every week, and so we need people to contribute, and if your post doesn't make it (or gets waitlisted or so on) it's not because you're absolutely bad, just relatively bad--does improve the idea significantly.
I'm also not sure how well this plays with the fragmentation in interests of people in the community.
I agree about fragmentation, but people's interests were always diverse. One way or another, LW needs to find its voice. That's a hard problem that the editors will have to work on.
Re: fragmentation of interests. Posts on LessWrong seem to easily slide into a number of clear categories (epistemic rationality, fighting akrasia, decision theory math, social events...) It would be great if the site was organized to group posts together, so that if I don't know math and just want to follow the best self-help tips it would be easy to do so.
This can work very well with the "one post a week" idea, which I'm in favor of. Consistent schedule + high quality is what keeps people coming back. That's why so many webcomics religiously stick to their posting schedule (like XKCD's M-W-F). We can have a post every X days in each of 3-4 basic categories, so I'll know that one Wednesday is AI-post day, the next Saturday is akrasia post day, the next Wednesday is social post day etc.
The main challenge would be getting enough good posts, two thoughts on that:
If the good writers contribute enough stuff upfront it can create a good buffer that will allow the editors to plan the best schedule, i.e. how many days between posts can be kept consistently.
I think a lot of people are already intimidated about posting given the very high standards. If quality is a concern more than quantity, I don't think that people with something important to say will be too discouraged by having to submit to moderation. A lot of us have our own blogs, tumblrs, Facebooks etc. Since I know that LW has a much wider reach than my own blog, I wouldn't mind trying to "win the week" on LW first, and posting on my platform as a fallback if I don't make it.
Waiting for moderation on what you wrote requires delaying gratification, which is very hard... but not something that a real rationalist would have trouble overcoming, no? ;-)
Of all the suggestions so far, I think this is the most likely to succeed at reinvigorating the discussion and the community.
This plan will increase the average quality of the content (and therefore attract high-quality commenters), and also incentivize contributors to write high-quality posts in an attempt to score very scarce status points associated with being published on the website. These weekly posts will presumably be a Schelling point for discussion topics at Less Wrong meetups worldwide.
I assume people will put rejected material on their personal blogs, and that these posts will often be comparable in quality to what is currently posted under Discussion. Perhaps we can have a section of the website that functions as a content aggregator for the community.
It would be slightly ironic if it turns out that we can save Less Wrong by essentially turning it into a peer-reviewed journal, but I don't think we should let that stop us
I suspect that #2 alone would do as much good as #1 + #2. (There might be value in some kind of enforced scarcity, but e.g. making #2 the only source of posts in Main would surely suffice.)
It is in any case dependent on finding enough people with enough ideas and time and writing skill to produce one "Eliezer-quality or higher" post per week. That seems to me to be rather more high-quality posts than LW is getting at present, so unless this plan is going to jumpstart everyone's motivation more than seems plausible to me it'll depend on cooperation from some people currently out in the rationalist diaspora. Is enough such cooperation likely to be forthcoming?
I don't see why you should shutdown the rest of the site to do this. What's the benefit of not having a discussion section or restricting the total number of posts? The problem as I see it has nothing to do with the total number of posts, but with the fact that there are not many high quality posts. In regards to your second point, couldn't you just do something similar with the existing promoted section. It should be fairly easy to set up an email address for people to submit potential promoted worthy posts and a group of reviewers who will review, select and post one article a week.
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.
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.
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.
I have access to LW's GA data. I don't think I have the rights needed for giving anyone else access (and would be reluctant to do so without permission anyway), but I can provide answers if people have specific questions.
How many people look at an open thread? How many people read new articles on main?
How many visits does LW get each day?
Preferably broken out by landing pages.
Landing pages with over 10,000 sessions from Jan 1st to Dec 3rd:
That made me smile.
Thank you.
Data is useful.
Between Jan 1 and Dec 3rd inclusive (337 days), 2 597 800 sessions from 1 384 542 users. That's an average of 7708 sessions per day.
Between January 1st and today (rounded to the closest 1000):
Most-read open threads (rounded to the closest hundred):
(somewhat bizarrely, http://lesswrong.com/lw/28l/do_you_have_highfunctioning_aspergers_syndrome/ had 41 000 unique views, narrowly beating lesswrong.com/message/inbox/ ; and http://lesswrong.com/lw/ihw/advanced_placement_exam_cutoffs_and_superficial/ had 35 000 unique views, beating /r/discussion )
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 allows.
There's a bootstrapping problem. Eliezer bootstrapped Less Wrong the first time around, and the more prominent people from that era developed followings and reputations here, then, well, left, because they had more control elsewhere. Nobody stepped in to replace them; new interesting people, by and large, reach SSC (and its brethren blogs) and stop there.
But... SSC gets its biggest influxes in traffic when Scott Alexander talks about exactly those sorts of things we explicitly forbid talking about here - identity, politics, etc.
There's a balancing act between talking about things people feel really strongly about - the things they're mindkilled about - and never talking about anything interesting at all. The biggest drama I haven't personally introduced is whether or not some guy who did something bad several years ago might still be hanging around under a new username.
So... who left, and who stayed?
I am optimistic about Omnilibrium as a place with LWish norms where people can talk about politics and other 'fun' topics. I think this is also one of the reasons why I think I'm more bullish on the diaspora and people branding their own blogs than other people are--someone needs to have skilled hands before I endorse them talking about a touchy subject.
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..."
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.
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.
My impression is that people are reluctant to post in Main for three reasons:
Merging Main and Discussion would deal with the last of those. The first is clearly parasitic on the other two so we probably needn't worry about it independently, and in any case merging Main and Discussion would make it go away.
The second would remain, I think. If we merge Main and Discussion -- and perhaps even if we don't -- I suggest that the "Main post karma multiplier" should be substantially reduced. Maybe 2 or 3 would work well. If we don't merge Main and Discussion, I would also suggest applying the same karma multiplier to posts in Discussion.
I think the issue of "Fear of being Not Good Enough" and therefore fearing to lose a lot of karma can be circumvented by giving the draft of the article to other people and improving on the draft till it's good enough.
Maybe we can find a way to promote the circulation of draft articles?
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.
I think there are multiple different issues of "not good enough". From my own perspective I do believe that I have good ideas worthy of sharing but on the other hand I know that the quality of my writing ability isn't as high as I would like it to be. The writeup of the idea improves though letting the draft circulate and incorporating feedback.
On the other hand it wouldn't help in the same way for a person who thinks their ideas aren't good enough.
These are the exact three points that I wanted to voice. The fewer steps there are between entering lesswrong and seeing articles, the fewer steps there are between entering lesswrong and participating in discussions. That our landing page is a navigation list and not a a set of recent articles, the way any other group blog website would have, has irked me since the previous skull graphic was introduced.
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.
I think it is, except that having different stuff into open threads makes it less visible.
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.
(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.
I think /r/SlateStarCodex fulfills some of these. As a Focal Point/News Organisation, we see that it is evolving to a general rationlist-ish subreddit with about 9/25 articles on the front page not being written by Scott. In terms of the Stack Overflow-like function, with about 4/25 front page posts being questions related to various SSC/rationalist things.
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.
...which probably means that we should ask Vaniver or RichardKennaway to edit the wiki pages...
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.
What do you mean? (I ask because I am more used to other kinds of web resources - mail lists of petitions, interactive maps, culinary recipes - about which I would have said that the signal-to-noise ratio is good enough. Maybe you mean discussion forums in particular?)
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.
Yes, I usually go to Wikipedia, too. And yes, I expect to have to go elsewhere afterwards. I go to Wiki mostly because the articles there are brief (sometimes just to check if something is really called what I think it is called), but I don't search Wiki itself because when I see Google results, I automatically note pages which I should visit after I get the minimal information from Wiki. (Sometimes Wiki articles appear to me to ramble about the topic, especially when it is something etnographic.) So I guess I do agree with you that the s-2-n ratio is good enough. However, sometimes when I have time to kill, I prefer other Google results specifically because Wiki (for me) is kind of a curiosity stopper.
If LW also came up in the first page of a search, I'd go there too, simply because that would be such an improbable occurrence considering what I search for:)
It would motivate me to write more for LW if I could see how many views each of my articles/comments received.
Views per comment might be arduous (I am not a web developer, I don' t know HOW arduous) but views per post might be doable.
Views per page are easy, views on a comment by itself are easy. How to estimate whether or not someone saw any particular comment when they look at a page with many comments is hard.
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.
I think this is a good idea and I might even start using PB again if it was done that way.
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.
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?
University isn't an workshop enviroment. There might be a few MBA programs that do actual workshop type exercises but a STEM program generally ignores emotional engagement.
A textbook can only give you knowledge. A workshop can touch you much more deeply.
The social proof effect of physically attending a workshop and spending a weekend around similarly inclined people is not to be underestimated. In-person instruction also provides better feedback for the instructors, allowing for more rapid iteration.
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.
I like rationality quotes, so whatever happens I hope that stays alive in some form. Maybe it could move to /r/slatestarcodex.
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 tags; the main page would contain X recent entries with more than Y upvotes; the "show more" link would show all recent entries. An optimal discussion forum would support creating new topics, which is not the same as articles (each linked article could automatically spawn its own minidiscussion, but there should be some more general topics); I am not sure about details. Community blog would allow people to post articles (which would be automatically linked by the link aggregator) if a community of moderators agrees the articles are good enough (if they are not, no one else will know about them, so there is no public shame); maybe each article could have an optional "public draft" phase where people can suggest improvements. Etc.
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" flag to an article which would make it displayed on the title page regardless of its score; that would be used e.g. for the official MIRI/CFAR announcements. No need to separate "Main" and "Discussion" (and "rationality blogs"), they are simply "high karma or promoted" and "low karma".
The "Discussion" starting page would be separated into three sections: (1) Article-related discussions. For any article displayed in the "News" section, whether from this website or another, a user could click a "start discussion" button, and a discussion linking to the article would be automatically created. This would be most similar to how we discuss now, except that we could in the same way discuss e.g. the SSC articles. (2) Periodic discussions, such as Open Thread, Media Thread, Rationality Diary, etc. There would be a fixed set of them; a new thread always replacing the old one. (3) Topic-oriented discussions that users could create without linking to any specific article, such as "University studying advice" or "Resources for programmers" or "Parenting". These should be in general longer living than the article-specific debates.
The "Chat" page would contain a few channels, where people could communicate in real time.
The top menu would be approximately: "Welcome", "News", "Discussion", "Chat", "Meetups", "Wiki".
The "Welcome" page would actually be a read-only version of a section in wiki. The first page would contain a short explanation of the community and the website, and a link to the "Rationality A-Z" e-book (and other LW-related books, such as Bostrom's "Superintelligence").
One big change that I imagine would be having a team of pseudonymous moderators, whose actions would be completely transparent. They could do more or less anything, but there would be a "moderation log" where anyone could see all special actions they did. Each moderator would have a pseudonym different from their standard LW username, so people could debate possible moderator abuse without taking revenge on their regular contributions.
...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.
Why do you believe that would be an improvement?
Because I sometimes want to judge a thought as just that, regardless of authorship.
If you want to replace all usernames with "Anonymous" and all karma scores with a zero, this can probably be done by a bit of client-side Javascript. You'll need something like a Greasemonkey add-on and the appropriate JS script.
Checking "Enable Anti-Kibitzer" in Preferences already does that.
Thank you! *has to recalculate her values of crazy and unbelievable *
The option has an annotation that it only works in Firefox. I just checked and it works for me in Chrome.
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
What's needed is not so much leadership as the simple capability to execute.
People who are interested in doing things have no control and people who have control are not interested.
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.
Not sure how you would create small close-knit teams on the basis of LW, but if you want to head in this direction, multiple subreddits seem to be the way to go.
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 sort of thing in an online setting was probably the vassal system in Asheron's Call. (It's been a decade since I played the game, so don't trust any specifics.) Most MMORPGs use a guild system--a guild will have a leader, and then a bunch of members. The way it worked in Asheron's Call was a tree--everyone who had 'sworn fealty' would do it to a particular person, and so the equivalent of 'guilds' were 'kingdoms' where the fealty tree terminated in someone who hadn't sworn fealty to anyone else.
It was, basically, a pyramid scheme. If someone swears fealty to you, you get 10% of their experience, including the experience that they get from their vassals. Given the power differential between higher level and lower level players, this was often a very good deal for both parties; it was expected that one would provide items / assistance / tips to one's vassals. ("Okay, you're high enough level that you can start getting experience in this other spot; let me show you how to get there and how to best grind there.") So mid-level players would hang out near the starting zones, offering support to any interested newbies (which only really pays off if they stick around!).
But the feature that makes this work is that both people get something out of it: the newbie gets benefits from sponsorship, the sponsor gets a steady stream of experience if they bring the newbie up to speed, and sponsorship is entirely voluntary. It doesn't seem like the mechanical support is there for LW, but having some sort of sponsorship connection to establish personal relationships might be helpful.
It seems to me that the first issue with close-knit groups is purpose. If there is none (and I'm not sure whether general self-improvement qualifies), at best you'll get a club which will become close-knit in a decade or two.
Mmm; I think people are mostly adaption-executors when it comes to a lot of social interaction, and close-knitness comes from ape-things like familiarity and spending a lot of time around each other and looking into each other's eyes, not having a shared purpose. The stated purpose is typically the excuse for the gathering.
I think this is more true for male-only groups; the primary way to get strong relationships between men is to put them on a team tasked with accomplishing a goal, possibly with an opposing team to rally together against. But I think that 'camaraderie' is a specific thing different from 'close-knitness.'
Well, yes, but that takes time. A lot of time.
There are a couple of shortcuts. One is shared strong emotions, but that might be a bit difficult in this case. Another is purpose which leads to shared activity and forced cooperation.
I'm not seriously proposing trying to reorganize LW into purposeful teams, but you mentioned groups and plans and feedback -- what kind of activity will those groups undertake?
In person events like CFAR workshops and also the community camp I attended in Berlin seem to be good at this.
I believe at least some people here have some stuff they want to do that is not orthogonal with rationality and may be helped by a group effort. Translation of some materials, writing articles, research, programming projects, just discussions of some topics. Then there is going to be a Group Bragging thread, where people can tell how much they have managed to do in a month or so. If the group hasn't bragged for a few months, it's considered dead. That can also give us some new info about group building and maintainance, which seems like a neglected topic here, as well as some data about which groups survive better than the others.
That's generally true for any sufficiently large collection of people. The issue is how do you bootstrap the whole group coalescence process.
It should be not extrodinarily hard to re-enable the ability to submit links which this sites software came with (aka make https://www.reddit.com/submit?selftext=false and https://www.reddit.com/submit?selftext=true both work), and run a bot which scrapes from a list of blogs/tumblers/etc to auto-submits those links (could make the list drawn from the XML export of a wiki page, protected so only wiki admins can edit, with a request thread requiring x current recognized people to vouch for you before you're added, or having someone/a small team designated to handle those requests).
Then put top rated posts on the front page with reasonable turnover/ability to see past ones and LW becomes again the best place to rapidly check for new content across the wider rationality community.
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 comments, and a clearly wrong answer got upvoted above it.
So what's needed is more content, and better curation of that content.
One possibility is to use moderators to choose which discussion posts get elevated to Main, and have a clear goal to maintain a constant stream of content, and to simply choose the best post that appears during the pre-agreed selection period. A constant stream of content will lower quality in the short term, but increase viewership, which will improve quality in the long-term by giving the moderators more options of what to elevate to main. There will be slim pickings at times, but if you don't post content this will lower the long-run quality of the site. There should be a clear standard of how many moderators are around, and a clear standard for when a moderator is replaced.
Other possibilities such as a wiki or an open-sourcing community are far removed from the site's current purpose, and thus are more likely to fail. I'm not sure why the purpose of being a news organization for rationality content as a concept is bad, or why Vaniver believes such a purpose is unworkable when it seems to have worked pretty well for several years even if the current iteration isn't working. Remember Occam's Razor.
Edit - I should add that I don't consider Meetups and Community News to really be content. It's only relevant to a subset of LessWrong users. I think including those in Main actually detracts from the intention of Main, but that when you remove them there's not much content there fulfilling the purpose of Main. Community News and major discussion posts are two very different topics, and shouldn't be included in the same category, which is a sorting issue. Major discussion posts are what I consider to be the main content, and those should be curated, and maintained at a constant level.
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.
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 either. I urge anyone active in places like truesubreddits to be more vocal about the existence of this site.
This aspect of accessibility touches on the flipside that Facebook would be too accessible to the wrong kind of potential users, with in addition the format itself possibly leading to a decline in quality. Consider for example that moving LW to Facebook would mean friends of members in the group, despite not being suitable for the page at all, would see they are member and might join to see what it is all about. I once joined a couple groups on philosophy and psychology on Facebook and was very much displeased with the quality of the posts.
I do agree with the idea of expanding the subject matter of this site. Even though I felt a great sense of relief and homeliness when I finally discovered this site this poses a partly unnecessary barrier to becoming active. The lack of breadth in issues being discussed not only means that I currently have to do some homework and have been lurking for weeks prior to contributing anything, but also that those active on the site only can only still the hunger of few of their likely many interests. I wonder if a poll has ever been conducted as to what potential subforums or features users would like to see added/ changed? You have written this post addressing multiple problems and suggestions, but it would have been better if a survey were included in this or a subsequent post to see where precisely the problems lie and to what extent the solutions for them bear support.
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.
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? What questions do they deal with? How small or large are they in scope? How do algae people speak with moss people or - God forbid - ecology people? (Actually, they often don't.) If 'science begins when you begin working with numbers', then when do botanists begin working with numbers? (Okay, cladistics or phytocoenology are rather hard to explain at the start, but there have to be simple examples.) From the very start the textbook teaches you to memorize words but not to look too closely at the things built from them.
I think such micro-reviews - of a chapter, of half a chapter - with informed commentary would be nice to have.