You're looking at Less Wrong's discussion board. This includes all posts, including those that haven't been promoted to the front page yet. For more information, see About Less Wrong.

estimator comments on Ideas to Improve LessWrong - Less Wrong Discussion

10 Post author: adamzerner 25 May 2015 10:55PM

You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.

Article Navigation

Comments (30)

Comments (30)

You are viewing a single comment's thread.

Comment author: estimator 26 May 2015 07:26:21PM 1 point [-]

What are you trying to improve on LW, and why? What is the purpose of improvements? What do you want LW to be like after you'll apply them?

Personally, I'd want LW to be an effective tool in learning how to apply rationality, discussing rationality and rationality-related topics, and developing new rationality techniques. Every instrument has its purpose; if you want to study, say, math, isn't it more effective to go to some math communities and seek help and assistance there? If you want to chat like in Facebook, why not go to Facebook? If you have a brilliant startup idea, why not go to the (potentially much broader) community of people interested in such kind of ideas? And so on.

The obvious, and very important, improvement is writing more high-quality posts on rationality-related topics, like the sequences.

The harder subsection mostly consists of technical improvements. Is it an actual bottleneck of LW, or our needs are mostly satisfied with nested comments?

Submitting...

Comment author: adamzerner 27 May 2015 01:56:43AM *  0 points [-]

Good points, thanks for bringing them up.

On second thought, I think I may have overestimated the value of things like study partners and project collaboration. Personally, I just really value being able to do these things with other LW users. Inferential distance is one big reason. I sense that I'm not alone here, but I'm not sure.

In addition to these sorts of tangential things, I also would like to see the quality of posts and conversation on LW improve, and I think some of the other points I brought up would help address that.

The harder subsection mostly consists of technical improvements. Is it an actual bottleneck of LW, or our needs are mostly satisfied with nested comments?

Hmm, I don't want to nitpick, but I'm struggling to answer this question because I don't know how to interpret words like "bottleneck" and "satisfied". I think that a more sophisticated UI could really transform how people think and communicate. As for how things are right now, I'd qualitatively describe it as "fine". Maybe "mildly satisfying".

Powered by Reddit Powered by Reddit