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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.)
It seems to me that for larger communities, there should be both: (a) a central core that everyone keeps up on, regardless of subtopical interest; and (b) topical centers that build in themselves, and that those contributing to that topical center are expected to be up on, but that members of other topical centers are not necessarily up on. (So that folks contributing to a given subtopical center should be expected to be keeping up with both that subtopic, and the central cannon.)
It seems to me that (a) probably should be located on LW or similar, and that, if/as the community grows, the number of posts within (a) can remain capped by some "keep up withable" number, with quality standards raising as needed.
Your (a) / (b) division basically makes sense to me.[*] I think we're already at the point where we need this fracturing.
However, I don't think that the LW format makes sense for (a). I'd probably prefer curated aggregation of good content for (a), with fairly clear lines about what's in or out. It's very unclear what the threshold for keeping up on LW should be.
Also, I quite like the idea of the topical centres being hosted in the same place as the core, so that they're easy to find.
[*] A possible caveat is dealing with new community members nicely; I haven't thought about this enough so I'm just dropping a flag here.