I've previously talked about how I think Less Wrong's culture seems to be on a gradual trajectory towards posting less stuff and posting it in less visible places. For example, six years ago a post like this qualified as a featured post in Main. Nowadays it's the sort of thing that would go in an Open Thread. Vaniver's recent discussion post is the kind of thing that would have been a featured Main post in 2010.
Less Wrong is one of the few forums on the internet that actually discourages posting content. This is a feature of the culture that manifests in several ways:
One of the first posts on the site explained why it's important to downvote people. The post repeatedly references experiences with Usenet to provide support for this. But I think the internet has evolved a lot since Usenet. Subtle site mechanics have the potential to affect the culture of your community a lot. (I don't think it's a coincidence that Tumblr and 4chan have significantly different site mechanics and also significantly different cultures and even significantly different politics. Tumblr's "replies go to the writer's followers" mechanic leads to a concern with social desirability that 4
Within an hour, I have thought of so many potential criticisms or reasons that my post might come across as lame that I am totally demoralized. I save my post as a draft, close the tab, and never return to it.
It doesn't help that even the most offhand posting is generally treated as if it was an academic paper and reviewed skewered accordingly :-p.
It doesn't help that even the most offhand posting is generally treated as if it was an academic paper and reviewed skewered accordingly :-p.
I agree. There are definitely times for unfiltered criticism, but most people require a feeling of security to be their most creative.
Proposals for making LW upvote-only emerge every few months, most recently during the retributive downvoting fiasco. I said then, and I continue to believe now, that it's a terrible idea.
JMIV is right to say in the ancestor that subtle features of moderation mechanics have outsized effects on community culture; I even agree with him that Eliezer voiced an unrealistically rosy view of the downvote in "Well-Kept Gardens". But upvote-only systems have their own pitfalls, and quite severe ones. The reasons behind them are somewhat complex, but boil down to bad incentives.
Imagine posting as a game scored in utility. Upvotes gain you utility; downvotes lose you it; and for most people being downvoted costs you more than being upvoted gains you, though the exact ratio varies from person to person. You want to maximize your utility, and you have a finite amount of time to spend on it. If you spend that time researching new content to post, your output is low but it's very rarely downvoted. Debate takes a moderate amount of time; votes on debate are less reliable, especially if you're arguing for something like neoreaction or radical feminism or your own crackpot views on t...
I think this post misses a lot of the scope and timing of the Less Wrong diaspora. A lot of us are on Tumblr now; I've made a few blog posts at the much more open group blog Carcinisation, there's a presence on Twitter, and a lot of us just have made social friendships with enough other rationalists that the urge to post for strangers has a pressure release valve in the form of discussing whatever ideas with the contents of one's living room or one's Facebook friends.
The suggestions you list amount to "ask Scott to give up his private resource for a public good, even though if what he wanted to do was post on a group blog he still has a LW handle", "somehow by magic increase readership of the EA forum", and "restructure LW to entice the old guard back, even though past attempts have disintegrated into bikeshedding and a low level of technical assistance from the people behind the website's actual specs". These aren't really "solutions".
A lot of us are on Tumblr now; I've made a few blog posts at the much more open group blog Carcinisation, there's a presence on Twitter, and a lot of us just have made social friendships with enough other rationalists that the urge to post for strangers has a pressure release valve in the form of discussing whatever ideas with the contents of one's living room or one's Facebook friends.
I don't like this.
I do not have the time to engage in the social interactions required to even be aware of where all this posting elsewhere is going on, but I want to read it. I've been regularly reading OB/LW since before LW existed and this diaspora makes me feel left behind.
I started a thing back in March called the LessWrong Digest. First of all, to you and/or anyone else reading this who signed up for it, I'm sorry I've been neglecting it for so long. I ran it for a few weeks in March, but I was indisposed for most of April, and it's been fallow since then. It contains highlights from the blogs of rationalists who post off of Less Wrong. It doesn't contain Tumblrs yet. I'll restart it tonight. I intend to build upon it to have some sort of rationalist RSS feed. I don't know how many other rationalist Tumblrs or blogs it would include, but lots. Hopefully I can customize it.
Anyway, it's my goal to make bring such projects to fruition so no rationalist under the sun cannot be found, no matter how deep into the blogosphere they burrow.
This is undiplomatically expressed but may contain an important seed of useful information for anyone who would like to recentralize rationalism: meeting people's normal, boring, apey social needs is important for retention, especially at scale when it seems more tempting to split off with your favorite small percentage of the group and not put in the effort with the rest. If you want people to post on Less Wrong, what's in it for them, anymore?
(I understand the desire to scare-quote the interestingness of my dinner parties but they are, in fact, parties at which dinner is served, in the most literal possible sense.)
I think LessWrong has a lot of annoying cultural problems and weird fixations, but despite those problems I think there really is something to be gained from having a central place for discussion.
The current "shadow of LessWrong + SSC comments + personal blogs + EA forum + Facebook + IRC (+ Tumblr?)" equilibrium seems to have in practice led to much less mutual knowledge of cool articles/content being written, and perhaps to less cool articles/content as well.
I'd really like to see a revitalization of LessWrong (ideally with a less nitpicky culture and a lack of weird fixations) or the establishment of another central hub site, but even failing that I think people going back to LW would probably be good on net.
In terms of weird fixations, there are quite a few strange things that the LW community seems to have as part of its identity - polyamory and cryonics are perhaps the best examples of things that seem to have little to do with rationality but are widely accepted as norms here.
If you think rationality leads you to poly or to cryo, I'm fine with that, but I'm not fine with it becoming such a point of fixation or an element of group identity.
For that matter, I think atheism falls into the same category. Religion is basically politics, and politics is the mind-killer, but people here love to score cheap points by criticizing religion. The fact that things like the "secular solstice" have become part of rationalist community norms and identity is indicative of serious errors IMO.
For me, one of the most appealing things about EA (as opposed to rationalist) identity is that it's not wrapped up in all this unnecessary weird stuff.
For me, one of the most appealing things about EA (as opposed to rationalist) identity is that it's not wrapped up in all this unnecessary weird stuff.
I'd consider EA itself to be one of those strange things that LW has as part of its identity. It's true that EA involves rationality, but the premises that EA is based on are profoundly weird. I have no desire to maximize utility for the entire human race in such a way that each person's utility counts equally, and neither does just about everyone else outside of the LW-sphere. I prefer to increase utility for myself, my family, friends, neighbors, and countrymen in preference to increasing the utility of arbitrary people. And you'll find that pretty much everyone else outside of here does too.
Note how all the exodus is to places where people own their particular space and have substantial control over what's happening there. Personal blogs, tumblrs, etc. Not, say, subreddits or a new shinier group blog.
Posting on LW involves a sink-or-swim feeling: will it be liked/disliked? upvoted/downvoted? many comments/tepid comments/no comments? In addition, you feel that your post stakes a claim on everybody's attention, so you inevitably imagine it'll be compared to other people's posts. After all, when you read the Discussion page, you frequently go "meh, could've done without that one", so you imagine other people thinking the same about your post, and that pre-discourages you. In addition, a few years' worth of status games and signalling in the comments have bred to some degree a culture of ruthlessness and sea-lawyering.
So, these three: fretting about reactions; fretting about being compared with other posts; fretting about mean or exhausting comments. One way to deal with it is to move to an ostensibly less demanding environment. So you post to Discussion, but then everyone starts doing that, Main languishes and the problem reoccurs on Discussion. So you post to...
So, I have lots of thoughts and feelings about this topic. But I should note that I am someone who has stayed on LessWrong, and who reads a sizable portion of everything that's posted here, and thus there's some difference between me and people who left.
In order to just get this comment out there, I'm going to intermingle observations with prescriptions, and not try to arrange this comment intelligently.
Individual branding. There are lots of benefits to having your own site. Yvain can write about whatever topics he wants without any concern about whether or not other people will think the subject matter is appropriate--it's his site, and so it's what he's interested in. As well, people will remember that they saw it on SSC, rather than on LW, and so they'll be much more likely to remember it as a post of his.
This could be recreated on LW either by giving post authors more control over the page appearance for things they post (a different page header?), having author / commenter images, or by shifting the "recent on rationality blogs" from a sidebar to a section of similar standing to Main and Discussion. I must admit I haven't used reddit much, but I'm of the impressio...
People seem to be complaining about community fracturing, and good writers going off onto their own blogs. Why not just accept that and encourage people to post links to the good content from these places?
Hacker News is successful mainly because they encourage people to post their own blog posts there, to get a wider audience and discussion. As opposed to reddit where self promotion is heavily discouraged.
Lesswrong is based on reddit's code. You could add a lesswrong.com/r/links, and just tell people it's ok to publish links to whatever they want there. This could be quite successful, given lesswrong already has a decent community to seed it with. As opposed to going off and starting another subreddit, where it's very hard to attract an initial user base (and you run into the self promotion problem I mentioned.)
Hey all,
As the admin of the effective altruism forum, it seems potentially useful to chip in here, or at least to let everyone know that I'm aware of and interested in this kind of conversation, since it seems like mostly everything that needs to has already been said.
The statement of the problem - online rationalist discourse is more fractured than is optimal - seems plausible to me.
I think that SSC and Scott's blogging persona is becoming quite a bit bigger than LessWrong curently is - it's got to the stage where he's writing articles that are getting thousands of shares, republished in the New Statesman, etc. I think SSC's solo blogging is striking a winning formula and shouldn't be changed.
For the EA Forum, the risk has always been that it would merely fracture existing discussion rather than generating anew any of its own. People usually think enough about how their project could become a new competing standard because they have a big glorious vision of how it would be. The people who are enthusiastic enough to start a project tend to be way out on the bell curve in terms of estimating how successful it is likely to be, so it can be unthinkable that it would end up as 'just an...
FYI: I've just made this: www.reddit.com/r/RationalistDiaspora.
A possible dark explanation:
-The main reason people cared about lesswrong was that Scott and Elizier posted on lesswrong. Neither posts on lesswrong anymore. Unless some equally impressive thinkers can be recruited to post on LW the site will not recover.
mm.., I think and agregator from less wrong, SSC , EA forum and OB posts, would be great,only if all of the formers have an easy (visible) link to it. It could allow more traffic to flow between those gravity centers. it may be better than crossposting.
Pros of having it on Reddit:
Cons of having it on Reddit, instead of on LW (see this other comment of mine for suggestions on how that could be done):
I agree with the comments (like John Maxwell's) that suggest that Less Wrong effectively discourages comments and posts. My karma score for the past 30 days is currently +29, 100% positive. This isn't because I don't have anything controversial to say. It is because I mostly stopped posting the controversial things here. I am much more likely to post them on Scott's blog instead, since there is no voting on that blog. I think this is also the reason for the massive numbers of comments on Scott's posts -- there is no negative incentive to prevent that there...
I think "LW type" rationalists should learn to be colleagues rather than friends. In other words, I think the win condition is if you agree on the ideals, but possibly bicker on a personal level (successful academic communities are often like this).
Honestly, my maginal returns of spending time on LW dropped drastically since I finished reading the sequences. Attending local meetups was kinda fun to meet some like-minded people, but they inevitably were far behind in the sequences and for the most part always struck me as trying to identify as a rationalist rather than trying to become more rationalist. This strikes me as the crux of the issue: LW has become (slash might have always been) an attractor of nerd social status, which is fine if that's its stated goal, though this doesn't seem to be the is...
If you have drafts you think are not good enough for LW, then polish them, include the criticisms of which you can think, make a falsifiable prediction and GO POST THEM ON YOUR OWN BLOG. Link to LW articles on specific biases that could have guided your thoughts if you can identify them. You do not owe anyone anything, and if you write well enough, you will have readers. Make your own rules, change them when you need to, hell, STOP BLOGGING if you don't feel the need.
It does not mean that you have to leave LW. Comment, post, IGNORE KARMA HITS, comment on Y...
I'm surprised by this idea of treating SSC as a rationalist hub. I love Scott, Scott's blog, and Scott's writing. Still, it doesn't seem like it is a "rationality blog" to me. Not directly at least. Scott is applying a good deal of epistemic rationality to his topics of interest, but the blog isn't about epistemic rationality, and even less so about practical rationality. (I would say that Brienne's and Nate's 'self-help' posts are much closer to that.) By paying attention, one might extract the rationality principles Scott is using, but they're ...
A few tangential ideas off the top of my head:
If the moderation and self selection of Main was changed into something that attracts those who have been on LW for a long time, and discussion was changed to something like Newcomers discussion, LW could go back to being the main space, with a two tier system (maybe one modulated by karma as well).
People have been proposing for a while that we create a third section of LW for open threads and similar content.
We could have a section without any karma scores for posts/upvote only, though we could still ke
People enjoy writing elsewhere more because they don't have to write about "refining the art of human rationality," which is the stated topic and purpose of LW. Actually making progress on this topic is difficult and fairly dry. If you're concerned that we're missing out on the rationality-relevant content they post elsewhere, just ask them for permission to repost on LW. I know this is already happening with some Slate Star Codex posts.
I'm not exactly a top-tier contributor, but my writings here tend to get positive responses, and the reason I don't write more is chiefly lack of ideas. One thing I'm doing is resolving right now to try to write more on LW; another is resolving to be willing to post a broader variety of things until I actually get some negative feedback that I should narrow.
But as far methods external to myself, I wonder if something like a topic of the month could seed participation. Maybe do posts with discussion questions--I actually really enjoyed these on the Superintelligence reading group posts.
This is not a well thought out post, in keeping with the nature of the subject matter. Less Wrong does seem to encourage solidified thoughts rather than subconscious reactions. A good thing, I think, but difficult all the same. Ideas follow.
I feel the need to go a bit meta.
A bunch of people here expressed discomfort with downvoting. Essentially, they are saying that the likelihood of criticism -- either overt (the post gets skewered) or covert (the post gets silently downvoted) -- discourages them from doing things such as posting content.
Let me agree that this is a problem. It's a problem of being thin-skinned and it's a big problem for these people. The thing is, real life is not a support group full of nice boys and girls with gold stars for everyone and no criticism ever because it migh s...
Nate Soares' blog seems excellent, of what I've read. I don't read all of it. He posts approximately once or twice per week, and writes his blog posts in the form of sequences, like Eliezer or Luke have done in the past. He doesn't seemed to have slowed in recent weeks in coming into his role as executive director of MIRI. I'm unsure if he'll blog less frequently as he comes into his new role at MIRI in full. Anyway, if he intends to keep blogging every couple weeks, you/we could ask him to cross-post as many blog posts as he feels like to Less Wrong, as m...
Another piece of the rationalist diaspora is neoreaction. They left LW because it wasn't a good place for talking about anything politically incorrect, an ever expanding set. LW's "politics is the mindkiller" attitude was good for social cohesion, but bad for epistemic rationality, because so many of our priors are corrupted by politics and yesterday's equivalent of social justice warriors.
Neoreaction is free of political correctness and progressive moral signaling, and it takes into account history and historical beliefs when forming priors abo...
Cross Posted at the EA Forum
At Event Horizon (a Rationalist/Effective Altruist house in Berkeley) my roommates yesterday were worried about Slate Star Codex. Their worries also apply to the Effective Altruism Forum, so I'll extend them.
The Problem:
Lesswrong was for many years the gravitational center for young rationalists worldwide, and it permits posting by new users, so good new ideas had a strong incentive to emerge.
With the rise of Slate Star Codex, the incentive for new users to post content on Lesswrong went down. Posting at Slate Star Codex is not open, so potentially great bloggers are not incentivized to come up with their ideas, but only to comment on the ones there.
The Effective Altruism forum doesn't have that particular problem. It is however more constrained in terms of what can be posted there. It is after all supposed to be about Effective Altruism.
We thus have three different strong attractors for the large community of people who enjoy reading blog posts online and are nearby in idea space.
Possible Solutions:
(EDIT: By possible solutions I merely mean to say "these are some bad solutions I came up with in 5 minutes, and the reason I'm posting them here is because if I post bad solutions, other people will be incentivized to post better solutions)
If Slate Star Codex became an open blog like Lesswrong, more people would consider transitioning from passive lurkers to actual posters.
If the Effective Altruism Forum got as many readers as Lesswrong, there could be two gravity centers at the same time.
If the moderation and self selection of Main was changed into something that attracts those who have been on LW for a long time, and discussion was changed to something like Newcomers discussion, LW could go back to being the main space, with a two tier system (maybe one modulated by karma as well).
The Past:
In the past there was Overcoming Bias, and Lesswrong in part became a stronger attractor because it was more open. Eventually lesswrongers migrated from Main to Discussion, and from there to Slate Star Codex, 80k blog, Effective Altruism forum, back to Overcoming Bias, and Wait But Why.
It is possible that Lesswrong had simply exerted it's capacity.
It is possible that a new higher tier league was needed to keep post quality high.
A Suggestion:
I suggest two things should be preserved:
Interesting content being created by those with more experience and knowledge who have interacted in this memespace for longer (part of why Slate Star Codex is powerful), and
The opportunity (and total absence of trivial inconveniences) for new people to try creating their own new posts.
If these two properties are kept, there is a lot of value to be gained by everyone.
The Status Quo:
I feel like we are living in a very suboptimal blogosphere. On LW, Discussion is more read than Main, which means what is being promoted to Main is not attractive to the people who are actually reading Lesswrong. The top tier quality for actually read posting is dominated by one individual (a great one, but still), disincentivizing high quality posts by other high quality people. The EA Forum has high quality posts that go unread because it isn't the center of attention.