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Mirzhan_Irkegulov comments on LessWrong 2.0 - Less Wrong
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Comments (312)
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.
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.