Which subreddits should we create on Less Wrong?

lukeprog

Less Wrong is based on reddit code, which means we can create subreddits with relative ease.

Right now we have two subreddits, Main and Discussion. These are distinguished not by subject matter, but by whether a post is the type of thing that might be promoted to the front page or not (e.g. a meetup announcement, or a particularly well-composed and useful post).

As a result, almost everything is published to Discussion, and thus it is difficult for busy people to follow only the subjects they care about. More people will be able to engage if we split things into topic-specific subreddits, and make it easy to follow only what they care about.

To make it easier for people to follow only what they care about, we're building the code for a Dashboard thingie.

But we also need to figure out which subreddits to create, and we'd like community feedback about that.

We'll probably start small, with just 1-5 new subreddits.

Below are some initial ideas, to get the conversation started.

Idea 1

Main: still the place for things that might be promoted.
Applied Rationality: for articles about what Jonathan Baron would call descriptive and prescriptive rationality, for both epistemic and instrumental rationality (stuff about biases, self-improvement stuff, etc.).
Normative Rationality: for articles about what Baron would call normative rationality, for both epistemic and instrumental rationality (examining the foundations of probability theory, decision theory, anthropics, and lots of stuff that is called "philosophy").
The Future: for articles about forecasting, x-risk, and future technologies.
Misc: Discussion, renamed, for everything that doesn't belong in the other subreddits.

Idea 2

Main
Epistemic Rationality: for articles about how to figure out the world, spanning the descriptive, prescriptive, and normative.
Instrumental Rationality: for articles about how to take action to achieve your goals, spanning the descriptive, prescriptive, and normative. (One difficulty with the epistemic/instrumental split is that many (most?) applied rationality techniques seem to be relevant to both epistemic and instrumental rationality.)
The Future
Misc.

Less Wrong is based on reddit code, which means we can create subreddits with relative ease.

To make it easier for people to follow only what they care about, we're building the code for a Dashboard thingie.

But we also need to figure out which subreddits to create, and we'd like community feedback about that.

We'll probably start small, with just 1-5 new subreddits.

Below are some initial ideas, to get the conversation started.

Idea 1

Main: still the place for things that might be promoted.
Applied Rationality: for articles about what Jonathan Baron would call descriptive and prescriptive rationality, for both epistemic and instrumental rationality (stuff about biases, self-improvement stuff, etc.).
Normative Rationality: for articles about what Baron would call normative rationality, for both epistemic and instrumental rationality (examining the foundations of probability theory, decision theory, anthropics, and lots of stuff that is called "philosophy").
The Future: for articles about forecasting, x-risk, and future technologies.
Misc: Discussion, renamed, for everything that doesn't belong in the other subreddits.

Idea 2

Main
Epistemic Rationality: for articles about how to figure out the world, spanning the descriptive, prescriptive, and normative.
Instrumental Rationality: for articles about how to take action to achieve your goals, spanning the descriptive, prescriptive, and normative. (One difficulty with the epistemic/instrumental split is that many (most?) applied rationality techniques seem to be relevant to both epistemic and instrumental rationality.)
The Future
Misc.

Thoughts:

There's already a fragmentation issue -- If you're reading "Main" the "Recent Comments" only shows you the recent comments in "Main", if you're reading "Discussion", the "Recent Comments" only shows you the recent comments in "Discussion". I've no idea what the Search function actually retrieves and whether it works across subreddits. Until such is fixed, or until an "All" functionality is visibly added, be careful about splitting the forums further.
I feel your division between "epistemic rationality', "instrumental (or normalive) rationality" and "the future" is bad and would cause people to freeze up when deciding where to post what.

Suggestions:

SCIENCE ( Discussion of Math, Science, Decision theory, thought experiments, etc, whether LW-produced or discussion of outside research -- the place that the actual mathematicians and computer science theorists would be participating in)
SOCIAL (Meetups & any discussion of other real-life LW community activities (e.g. holiday rituals, housing arrangements) goes here)
MEDIA (The monthly media threads would go here, and so would HPMoR, Friendship-is-Optimal, all other LessWrong-inspired fanfics discussion -- but we would now encourage the more easy creation of threads that discuss specific authors, novels, movies, webcomics, SMBC, xkcd, etc. LW regulars would be encouraged to advertise and seek feedback for their own fiction).
OPEN (A merging of "Discussion" and "Open threads" - every topic that doesn't go anywhere else, and where barrier to entry is low. )

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Which subreddits should we create on Less Wrong?

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Which subreddits should we create on Less Wrong?

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