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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.)
Successful conversations usually happen as a result of selection circumstances that make it more likely that interesting people participate. Early LessWrong was interesting because of the posts, then there was a phase when many were still learning, and so were motivated to participate, to tutor one another, and to post more. But most don't want to stay in school forever, so activity faded, and the steady stream of new readers has different characteristics.
It's possible to maintain a high quality blog roll, or an edited stream of posts. But with comments, the problem is that there are too many of them, and bad comments start bad conversations that should be prevented rather than stopped, thus pre-moderation, which slows things down. Controlling their quality individually would require a lot of moderators, who must themselves be assessed for quality of their moderation decisions, which is not always revealed by the moderators' own posts. It would also require the absence of drama around moderation decisions, which might be even harder. Unfortunately, many of these natural steps have bad side effects or are hard to manage, so should be avoided when possible. I expect the problem can be solved either by clever algorithms that predict quality of votes, or by focusing more on moderating people (both as voters and as commenters), instead of moderating comments.
On Stack Exchange, there is a threshold for commenting (not just asking or answering), a threshold for voting, and a separate place ("meta" forum) for discussing moderation decisions. Here's my guess at a feature set sufficient for maintaining good conversations when the participants didn't happen to be selected for generating good content by other circumstances:
This seems hopelessly overcomplicated, but the existence of Stack Exchange is encouraging.