I propose crawling the site to create a LW citation index.
This. From the citation matrix it would be easy to calculate internal LessWrong "Page Rank" and find the most influential pages. The only problem is, once this methodology is used and known, people will start behaving differently.
There are some technical details about the exact choice of the model. Simplest version would analyze only articles: each article has the same initial value (karma is ignored), and only links from article to article are considered (links from comments are ignored). (Multiple links from page A to page B are treated as a single link.) This is easiest to do.
If we want to include the karma, the simplest way would be to treat articles with zero or negative karma as non-existent (remove them from the model). I am not completely certain how to treat higher karma. If I understand it correctly, Google Page Rank simulates a random user who with probability 85% clicks a random link on the page, and with probability 15% chooses a new starting page from a uniform distribution -- we could replace the uniform distribution with a weighted distribution where positive karma is the weight of the page. I am not sure how much the results would be sensitive to the "15%" value.
If we want to include comments in the model, considering their karma is IMHO inevitable, otherwise it would be too easy to game the system (by writing new comments to highly ranked pages). But the comments are not new nodes in the graph (that wouldn't work, because to an average comment nobody is linking; and it would be wrong to treat a comment in the article as a comment linked by article), so perhaps they could be treated as a part of the article. A link from the comment would be like a link from the article, just weaker. How exactly weaker, that is determined by the comment karma compared with the article karma. For example a link in a 5 karma comment below a 20 karma article would be treated like a 0.25 link. (If the same link is in more comments, only the best weight is taken. If the comment has higher karma than the article, the link strenght is capped at 1.0.)
Here is the pseudocode:
ARTICLES = articles with karma > 0
TOTALKARMA = sum(A.karma) for each article A in ARTICLES
for each article A in ARTICLES:
... for each hyperlink H in A:
... ... LINKS(A, H.target) = 1.0
... for each comment C with karma > 0 in A:
... ... for each hyperlink H in C:
... ... ... CLINK = min(1.0, C.karma/A.karma)
... ... ... LINKS(A, H.target) = max(LINKS(A, H.target), CLINK)
... TOTALLINKS(A) = sum(LINKS(A, A2)) for each article A2 in ARTICLES
for each article A1, A2 in ARTICLES:
... RANKFLOW(A1, A2) = LINKS(A1, A2) / TOTALLINKS(A1) # where 0.0 / 0.0 = 0.0
for each A in ARTICLES:
... RANK(A) = A.karma / TOTALKARMA
repeat many times:
... for each article A in AS:
... ... NEWRANK(A) = 0.15 A.karma/TOTALKARMA
... ... NEWRANK(A) += 0.85 sum(RANKFLOW(A2, A)) for each article A2 in ARTICLES
... RANK = NEWRANK
Has this gone anywhere?
Guys I'd like your opinion on something.
Do you think LessWrong is too intellectually insular? What I mean by this is that we very seldom seem to adopt useful vocabulary or arguments or information from outside of LessWrong. For example all I can think of is some of Robin Hanson's and Paul Graham's stuff. But I don't think Robin Hanson really counts as Overcoming Bias used to be LessWrong.
Edit: Apparently this has been a source of much confusion and mistargeted replies. While I wouldn't mind even more references to quality outside writing, this wasn't my concern. I'm surprised this was problematic to understand for two reasons. First I gave examples of two thinker that aren't often linked to by recent articles on LW yet have clearly greatly influenced us. Secondly this is a trivially false interpretation, as my own submission history shows (it is littered with well received outside links). I think this arises because when I wrote "we seem to not update on ideas and concepts that didn't originate here" people read it as "we don't link to ideas and concepts" or maybe "we don't talk about ideas and concepts" from outside. I clarified this several times in the comments, most extensively here. Yet it doesn't seem to have made much of an impact. Maybe it will be easier to understand if I put it this way, interesting material from the outside never seems to get added to something like the sequences or the wiki. The sole exception to this is hunting even more academic references for the conclusions and concepts we already know and embrace. Thus while individuals will update on them and perhaps even reference them in the future the community as a whole will not. They don't become part of the expected background knowledge when discussing certain topics. Over time their impact thus fades in a way the old core material doesn't.The community seems to not update on ideas and concepts that didn't originate here. The only major examples fellow LWers brought up in conversation where works that Eliezer cited as great or influential. :/
Another thing, I could be wrong about this naturally, but it seems to clear that LessWrong has not grown. I'm not talking numerically. I can't put my finger to major progress done in the past 2 years. I have heard several other users express similar sentiments. To quote one user:
I've recently come to think this is probably true to the first approximation. I was checking out a blogroll and saw LessWrong listed as Eliezer's blog about rationality. I realized that essentially it is. And worse this makes it a very crappy blog since the author doesn't make new updates any more. Originally the man had high hopes for the site. He wanted to build something that could keep going on its own, growing without him. It turned out to be a community mostly dedicated to studying the scrolls he left behind. We don't even seem to do a good job of getting others to read the scrolls.
Overall there seems to be little enthusiasm for actually systematically reading the old material. I'm going to share my take on what is I think a symptom of this. I was debating which title to pick for my first ever original content Main article (it was originally titled "On Conspiracy Theories") and made what at first felt like a joke but then took on a horrible ring of:
We like linking articles, and while people may read a link the first time, they don't tend to read it the second or third time they run across it. The phrase is eventually picked up and used out the appropriate of context. Something that was supposed to be shorthand for a nuanced argument starts to mean exactly what "it says". Well not exactly, people still recall it is a vague applause light. Which is actually worse.
I cited precisely "Politics is the Mindkiller" as an example of this. In the original article Eliezer basically argues that gratuitous politics, political thinking that isn't outweighed by its value to the art of rationality, is to be avoided. This soon came to meant it is forbidden to discuss politics in Main and Discussion articles, though it does live in the comment sections.
Now the question if LessWrong remains productive intellectually, is separate from the question of it being insular. But I feel both need to be discussed. If our community wasn't growing and it wasn't insular either, it could at least remain relevant.
This site has a wonderful ethos for discussion and thought. Why do we seem to be wasting it?