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The world is locked right now in a deadly puzzle, and needs something like a miracle of good thought if it is to have the survival odds one might wish the world to have.
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Despite all priors and appearances, our little community (the "aspiring rationality" community; the "effective altruist" project; efforts to create an existential win; etc.) has a shot at seriously helping with this puzzle. This sounds like hubris, but it is at this point at least partially a matter of track record.[1]
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To aid in solving this puzzle, we must probably find a way to think together, accumulatively. We need to think about technical problems in AI safety, but also about the full surrounding context -- everything to do with understanding what the heck kind of a place the world is, such that that kind of place may contain cheat codes and trap doors toward achieving an existential win. We probably also need to think about "ways of thinking" -- both the individual thinking skills, and the community conversational norms, that can cause our puzzle-solving to work better. [2]
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One feature that is pretty helpful here, is if we somehow maintain a single "conversation", rather than a bunch of people separately having thoughts and sometimes taking inspiration from one another. By "a conversation", I mean a space where people can e.g. reply to one another; rely on shared jargon/shorthand/concepts; build on arguments that have been established in common as probably-valid; point out apparent errors and then have that pointing-out be actually taken into account or else replied-to).
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One feature that really helps things be "a conversation" in this way, is if there is a single Schelling set of posts/etc. that people (in the relevant community/conversation) are supposed to read, and can be assumed to have read. Less Wrong used to be a such place; right now there is no such place; it seems to me highly desirable to form a new such place if we can.
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We have lately ceased to have a "single conversation" in this way. Good content is still being produced across these communities, but there is no single locus of conversation, such that if you're in a gathering of e.g. five aspiring rationalists, you can take for granted that of course everyone has read posts such-and-such. There is no one place you can post to, where, if enough people upvote your writing, people will reliably read and respond (rather than ignore), and where others will call them out if they later post reasoning that ignores your evidence. Without such a locus, it is hard for conversation to build in the correct way. (And hard for it to turn into arguments and replies, rather than a series of non sequiturs.)
Thanks for addressing what I think is one of the central issues for the future of the rationalist community.
I agree that we would be in a much better situation if rationalist discussion was centralized and that we are instead in a tragedy of the commons - more people would post here if they knew that others would. However, I contend that we're further from that desired equilibrium that you acknowledge. Until we fix the following problems, our efforts to attract writers will be pushing uphill against a strong incentive gradient:
The incentive that pushes in our favor is that writers can correctly perceive that by writing here, they are participating in a community that develops very well-informed and considered opinions on academic and future-oriented topics. But that it not enough.
To put this more precisely, it seems to me that the incentive gradient is currently pointing far too steeply away from LessWrong for 'I [and several friends] will try and post and comment here more often...' to be anything like a viable solution.
However, I would not go as far as to say that the whole project is necessarily doomed. I would give the following counterproposals:
I think (i) or (ii) would have some reasonable hope of working. Maybe we should wait to figure out whether (i) will occur, and if not, then proceed with (ii) with or without (iii)?
I thought ii) had been discussed in the past and was supposedly happening, but nothing ever came from it.