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mushroom comments on Open thread, Oct. 6 - Oct. 12, 2014 - Less Wrong Discussion
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I think one of the things worth noting about LW is that Holden Karnofsky Thoughts on the Singularity Institute is the top rated post. LW is a space where you can argue against the orthodox views if you bring arguments. This distinguish LW from nearly every other online forum.
I don't think that online forums need media exposure. The usual way to find an online forum is through a Google search or through a shared link to a discussion.
Holden Karnofsky is a high-status person, which is the most important factor. I don't think the same criticism by someone else would have received as many upvotes.
If that would be the case all post by high status people should get a high amount of votes. I think it's hard to explain via status why Karnofsky's post got more votes than any single post by Yudkowsky of the sequences.
The big deal is him being a high status outsider who made a contribution with a great deal of effort in it. It can be taken for granted that high-status insiders make many contributions.
How many online community are there that considers outsiders to be high status to an extend that the highest rated post is by an outsider?
It's about a surrounding society's measure of status, not about the community's. Celebrity-outsiders (high status on the outside, indeterminate status on the inside) dropping in at Reddit often get a very positive reception for example. Random-person-outsiders (indeterminate status both outside and inside) get the random person outsider reception. The drop-in celebrities at Reddit probably don't net the top ratings for the whole site, given how Reddit is huge, but a small forum that doesn't have that much inside vote activity could easily end up treating an interesting high outside status person dropping in as the most interesting event in the forum history.
I don't think Holden Karnofsky is high status as far as society goes. Outside of people with interest in Effective Altruism he's just a random person running an NGO.
Social status has many dimensions. Credible professionalism and a position to affect an organization with notable resources and visibility are pretty robust ones.
Givewell has 1 million in revenue per year. There are plenty of organisations of that size. I don't think it's a large amount of resources.
Personally, I upvoted that post for cogency and pertinence. I didn't know enough about Holden Karnofsky to distinguish him systematically from background until that post.
I'm curious. Who is Holden Karnofsky high-status to, in your opinion? I mean, I acknowledge that this website, and effective altruism, and maybe a subset of the philanthropy community in the United States is very enthusiastic about the work he does. If I wasn't, I wouldn't have given Givewell $1000 USD last year.
However, my friends from outside the efficient charity cluster don't know who he is, and I doubt would update to extolling his greatness as soon as I explained what he does anyway.
Of course status is highly context and group specific. Status is relative, not absolute. He has high status in effective altruism / rationality cluster because he's probably the most highly accomplished in this group.
No, I don't think that is the key difference. I think the reason that SIAI (at the time) payed attention to Karnofsky is that he was willing to signal his in-group membership and speak the local jargon, thereby preventing his criticisms from being immediately dismissed (I think MIRI has gotten better about this lately, but they've been pitching themselves so high-status that it's screwing with my intuition about their likely behavior :/ )
Holden Karnofsky is great, and Less Wrong is a great discussion board in a community for being so receptive of arguing against orthodox views. If he identified as a rationalist, I'm sure this community would be fine counting Holden Karnofsky among themselves. However, some media coverage Less Wrong has received is exactly as it is because bloggers, or journalists, or whoever, don't come to this site to have a dialogue, and for both sides to learn something from each other.
I wrote this comment in the moment without lots of forethought, so I didn't clarify myself enough. I haven't invited a student journalist to write an article about Less Wrong to get good press coverage because others are worse. The publication is small enough that it wouldn't get enough traffic to change the outside cultural perspective of Less Wrong's culture anyway. One of the editors mentioned to this student journalist that I'm an organizer for the local meetup, and he came with me with lots of questions. Before he asked, he mentioned his impression thus far of Less Wrong was that it was full of 'hyper-rationalist pseudoscience', and that a typical belief of Less Wrong was of that of a fear-inspiring imaginary counter-factual monster I need not mention by name.
Anyway, in particular, he may want to profile the local meetup. So, I could let him go on impressions he gets from Slate, and RationalWiki, alone, or he could talk to me, and get an impression that Less Wrong is about literally anything else besides fringe transhumanism.
If the article really becomes a thing, I will invite the journalist to interface with Less Wrong as Holden has. If the article is about 'what is this intellectual community we [the readership] have heard popping up in town, and what do they believe?', I will now direct him to the Less Wrong survey results. You've inspired me to do this with your feedback, ChristianKI, so thanks.