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.

Evan_Gaensbauer comments on Open thread, Nov. 16 - Nov. 22, 2015 - Less Wrong Discussion

7 Post author: MrMind 16 November 2015 08:03AM

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

Comments (185)

You are viewing a single comment's thread.

Comment author: Evan_Gaensbauer 16 November 2015 09:11:35AM 5 points [-]

I found out about Omnilibrium a couple months ago, and I was thinking of joining in eventually. I was also thinking of telling some friends of mine who might want to get in on it even more than I do about it. However, I've been thinking if I told lots of people, or they themselves told lots of people, then suddenly Omnilibrium might get flooded with dozens of new users at once. I don't know how big that is compared to the whole community, but I was thinking Omnilibrium would be averse to it growing it too big, as well-kempt gardens die by pacificism and all that. But then, Slate Star Codex linked to it a few weeks ago. So, that's plausibly hundreds of new users flooding it.

I'm wondering, how do the admins of Omnilibrium feel about this? Are you happy to have many new users? Are you upset SSC linked to Omnilibrium, bringing it to the attention of so many people who may not necessarily maintain the quality of discourse current users of Omnilibrium have gotten accustomed to?

Comment author: Douglas_Knight 16 November 2015 07:15:33PM 5 points [-]

The whole point of the site is to do automated moderation and curation. At the moment, it is so small that it is serving no purpose better than a human dictator would. The whole point is that algorithms can scale. Maybe the algorithms aren't yet ready for prime time and maybe it's better if it grows slowly so that they have time to understand how to modify the algorithms. In particular, I believe that it currently grades users on a single political axis, while with more users it would probably be better to have a more complicated clustering scheme. But you probably won't cause it to grow rapidly, anyhow.