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