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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.)
At one point I was planning on making a contribution. It was difficult just getting the code setup and there was very little documentation on the big picture of how everything was supposed to work. It is also very frustrating to run in a development mode. For example, on Mac you have to run it from within a disk image, the VM didn't work, and setting up new user accounts for testing purposes was a huge pain.
I started trying to understand the code after it was set up, and it is an extremely confusing mess of concepts with virtually no comments, and I am fluent in web development with Python. After 4-6 hours I was making progress on understanding what I needed to make the change I was working on, but I wasn't there yet. I realized that making the first trivial contribution would probably take another 10-15 hours and stopped. The specific feature I was going to implement was an admin view link that would show the usernames of people who had upvoted / downvoted a comment.
The issues list on GitHub represents at least several hundred hours of work. I think 3 or 4 contributors could probably do a lot of damage in a couple months of free time, if it weren't quite so unenjoyable. $10K is definitely a huge underestimate for paying an outsider. I do think that a lot of valuable low-hanging fruit, like stopping karma abuses and providing better admin tools, could be done for $10-20K though.
Maybe it would be easier to make contributions that rely on the code as little as possible -- scripts running on separate pages, that woud (1) verify that the person running them is a moderator, and (2) connect to the LW database (these two parts would be common for all such scripts, so have them as two functions in a shared library) -- and then have a separate simple user interface for doing whatever needs to be done.
For example, make a script called "expose_downvotes" that displays a text field where the moderator can copy the comment permalink... (read more)