Ideas to Improve LessWrong

Adam Zerner

16 Ideas to Improve LessWrong

25th May 2015

6 min read

16

This article is something that has been in my head for a while. I hadn't planned on doing a write-up so soon. I wanted to take the time to a) refine my ideas and b) figure out how to express them clearly before posting. But the recent post Less Wrong lacks direction made me change my mind. My thinking now is that I overestimated the downside (wasting peoples time with a less than fully thought out post) and that there's enough value to justify posting a rough draft now.

LessWrong has been one of the most amazing things I've experienced in my life.

I have learned a ton, and have "leveled up" quite a bit.
Knowing that there are this many other relatively rational people in the world and being able to interact with them is a truly amazing thing.

But I see so much opportunity for LW to do more. Below are some thoughts.

Easy

A way to discuss ideas for the site, vote on them, and incentivize the generation of good ideas. I sense that having this would be huge. a) I sense that there are a lot of good ideas out there in people's heads but that they haven't shared. b) I sense that by discussing things, there could be a lot of refinement of current ideas, and a lot of generation of new ideas.
More generally, my impression is that it'd be a good idea to subdivide sections for posts. Right now it's pretty much Main, Discussion or Open Thread. Ex. someone who has an idea to improve LW might not think it's "Discussion worthy" (or even "Open Thread worthy"), but I sense that if there were a section explicitly for "LW Ideas", they'd be a lot less reluctant to post. More generally, it'd justify more "bite sized posts" rather than requiring a full write-up.
- One example of a subsection that I think would be cool is a Personal Advice section. The ability to post anonymously seems like it'd be a useful feature here. Other ideas for subsections: AMA!, Brainstorming/Unrefined Thoughts, I Don't Understand X, Contrarian Thoughts.
Social coordination:
- Apartments/living together.
- "What are you currently learning? What do you want to learn?". so8res recommends pairing up, and I agree.
- Geographical map of users to facilitate friendships and/or dating. (This already exists. But it seems that a low proportion of LW users added a pin on the map. My impression is that because of network effects, the usefulness of this is very much a function of how many users there are. Also, I sense that there'd need to be some sort of a different UI that with some sort of organization.)
- Online chat. Like Facebook. I think it'd be a) cool and b) sometimes useful.
Project ideas. There are a lot of smart, skilled and ambitious people here who want to do good things. If LW made it easier to coordinate and work with people, I could see it having a huge impact.

Harder

Crowdsource the refinement of posts.
- Maybe have an answer wiki for each article that summarizes the main points.
- Maybe let the author award karma to people who submit a diagram of something explained in the article (I'm a big fan of explaining things visually). Along similar lines, maybe do the same thing for people who submit relevant YouTube videos. Ex. I think that this would be a relevant clip to add to an article about expected value (beware: cringeworthy). (Again, I'm really not a big fan of writing as a medium)
- Maybe allow collaboration on drafts. And allow the author to award karma to collaborators.
Side comments. I really think that for a lot of scenarios, this is a much better UI. But I also think there are use cases for the traditional comments at the bottom of the page, and so there should be both.
Make use of some sort of debate tool. I think there are a lot of improvements that could be made to the current approach of having nested comments. It might be sufficient for the level of conversation elsewhere on the internet, but not here.
- I should emphasize that this seems like it'd be a large and difficult undertaking.
- But I should also emphasize how important I think it is. Media For Thinking The Unthinkable largely expresses my views here. I think that the mediums we use to write, think and communicate play a large and very underrated role in determining how well we could think. As a society, we don't seem to really recognize this, and we don't seem to have made much progress as far as inventing such tools goes. The importance of such tools goes way beyond LessWrong, but I guess I'm just noting here that LW would benefit greatly from it. I don't think that there are many legitimately deep conversations on LW, and I think that the limitations of nested comments are a big part of the reason why.
- Along similar lines, I think it's pretty important for there to be a way to highlight and take notes on articles (currently, most people don't). I've been using scrible. Come to think of it, scrible actually isn't that bad of a solution, but I think it'd be awesome if there were a better way to do this built in to the site. (This is another thing I'd like to see across the internet, but I digress...)

There are also a bunch of ideas I have on how the design of the site could be better, but those don't seem relevant to post now (I think we all agree that there's a lot to improve on).

(As far as actually implementing change, things in the "Easy" section seem rather... easy to implement. One option is to just "hack it together". Have "thread" posts, like "Stupid Questions Thread" and use some sort of community managed Google Doc for things like project ideas and social coordination. Idk, I actually haven't thought through what a hacky/MVP implementation would look like. But as far as making changes to the actual site, the code wouldn't be that hard.)

Edit: Some concrete steps to be taken for "version 1s" of the easy ideas. Not well thought out enough; needs vetting.

Have a "LessWrong Ideas" thread. Preferably link to it on the sidebar so we don't get too many repeat ideas, so the good ideas have enough time to be voted up, and so ideas don't get "lost in time".
Have a "Project Ideas" thread. Preferably link to it on the sidebar, for similar reasons.
Have a Project Ideas Google Doc. This would be a list of the more serious and vetted ideas, with brief summaries, skills required, and you could add your name to the list of people interested in working on it.
Link to the map of community members on the sidebar. Give, say 50 karma points for adding your data point. I'm not sure how the data would be used for social coordination though. It'd be incredible if there was an API.
- Actually, maybe it'd be a better idea to create a site that allows users to input their data point on the map, and it'd create the API for us. And you could add things like contact info, interested in finding a roommate? dating? friends/fun activities? On second thought, maybe this is getting too far from the idea of a version 1.
Discuss a) the idea of having subsections (ex. Personal Advice, Unrefined Thoughts), and b) which ones we'd like to see. Then create and manage threads based on interest and traction.
Have a Google Doc to help people learning the same things pair up. Potential information to include: what you want to learn, how much time per week you want to spend, how many months you'd like to spend learning, fields in which you're knowledgeable (ex. math, psychology, genetics...).

Edit: I didn't realize how reasonable the first steps would be. If after a discussion and vetting people agree on some of these things (or other ideas), I'd be willing to manage the Google Docs and/or threads. I'm also a web developer and would be willing to work with any code for the site. I only have about a year of experience though, so I wouldn't be able to lead any efforts.

Things in the "Harder" section seem, well... harder. It seems that it'd take a non-trivial amount of coding. Especially the debate tools stuff - that'd take an incredible amount of time, expertise and iteration. I think that they're absolutely worth the effort though.

Anyway, at this point I don't even think I'm even proposing anything (I haven't thought it through nearly enough). But I do sense that the ideas are thought out enough to start a conversation. Thoughts?

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