Thanks for the encouragement! Would you mind offering your opinion on a few things though?

1. How many people would a complete overhaul take, and how long would it take (roughly)?
2. Why are the site owners reluctant to change?
3. What do you think of my rough cost-benefit argument? The things I said are my intuition, but I could easily be overlooking certain things, and I don't understand it well enough to be too confident in the intuition. So what do you think? (you seem to share the belief in the value of the benefits, but don't seem to think they outweigh the costs)

Also, I don't want to get anyone's hopes up about my contributions. I'm still learning to code and I don't know how good I'll be in 13 weeks when I finish my bootcamp and I can't tell how long it'll be before I'm capable enough to contribute to something like this.

I am not sure if the ratio of insights is smaller these days, but I more feel like the spirit of "let's change the world" or even "let's do something" is gradually replaced by having merely a web debate club. The best debate club in the world, possibly, but still...

Maybe that's an inherent problem of internet debates. People who do something in the real world, stop spending so much time debating online. Also, the real world is rather slow... we all know that MIRI exists or that CFAR exists, but we can't keep talking about them all the time, we want something new and new and new. And at some moment, "new" becomes a lost purpose, just another form of entertainment, because as we keep reading the new insights, we keep forgetting the old ones.

I would like to see more "project"-type content. About people who are doing something. It could even be a purely online project, such as organizing parts of LW wiki. Collaborative projects in real world would be more awesome, but there are the geographical distances. You know, less debate, more action. Or at least an action-oriented debate.

強くなりたい

I don't want to propose any solutions because I don't understand what the source of the friction truly is. If you understand the real sources of friction, could you explain it in some more depth?

I sense that the lack of contribution to the codebase is because it's inconvenient, not necessarily difficult. It seems that it's inconvenient for the reasons you said: 1) the reddit fork is hard to modify and 2) the site owners are reluctant to change.

But I also sense that the proposed features aren't too difficult to implement (because they're relatively common) and that a handful of skilled volunteers could get it done in a few weeks (very rough estimate; I'm way too inexperienced to really say, but I do sense that it's very doable). Perhaps it wouldn't be compatible with the reddit codebase and it'd take a major overhaul.

But I really think the benefits would outweigh the costs. The costs would be a few weeks of a handful of programmers' time (or something like that, I don't really know). The benefits would be huge! Imagine LW users collaborating on new projects, brainstorming new ideas, contributing to and benefiting from the list of life hacks, studying together, having hack-a-thons, rooming together, having more productive discussions, summarizing the content to make it more accessible to common people etc. etc. Isn't that worth a few weeks of time from a handful of people? Even if only one or two projects emerged from the site overhaul, I think the benefits would outweigh the costs.

Sorry if my argument for why the benefits outweigh the costs isn't concrete enough. I tried.

Ahh, I see.

Regarding cost of implementation, 1) I'll probably be willing to work on it and 2) I sense that the benefits far outweigh the costs, and that we'll be able to get people to work on it. Especially if it's well thought out and some nice mockups are made that are convincing.

Regarding the owners of LW being reluctant to change, I don't know much about this issue so it's tough to say, but I sense that 1) if we get enough community support, they'll be pretty likely to go along with it and 2) I would think that they're smart enough to see the benefits would be large and if volunteers like me (and you?) would be willing to work on it, the costs could be pretty small.

is to set up a Hacker News clone

So what features would this have? HN and other blogs basically just have link posts, text posts and comment threads for each post.

The largest problem (and/or existential threat) I can see with LW is its stagnation/decline, both in content, and in new insights generated here.

I haven't been around long enough to agree or disagree with this, but I could believe it. You say you've spent a fair amount of time thinking about this. What do you think of things other than just aggregating content from similar sites? I sense that there are opportunities for some larger more fundamental changes. Some ideas:

• Increasing offline interaction (making it easy for LW users to room with each other, get rationality clubs set up in colleges, have hack-a-thons...)
• Rethinking the simple threaded comments system. Here's my raw thoughts - http://lesswrong.com/lw/jr4/a_medium_for_more_rational_discussion/.
• Encouraging more brainstorming. Right now I think people are hesitant to start a conversation unless they have pretty refined and insightful thoughts.
• Better categorize things. To use an example, I think there would be more talk about life hacks if there was a life hacks section and there was a list of useful life hacks maintained by the community.
• etc. etc.

I have spent a fair amount of time thinking about this. Fundamentally in order to discuss improvements, it's necessary to identify the sources of pain. The largest problem (and/or existential threat) I can see with LW is its stagnation/decline, both in content, and in new insights generated here.

Charitably, I suspect LW was built with the assumption that it would always have great content coming in, so the target and focus of most design decisions, policies, implied norms, and ad hoc decisions (let's call all these 'constraints') was to restrict bad content. Even its name can be thought to point to this principle, but the infamous 'Well kept gardens' post is also a good pointer. Unfortunately, the side effects of these constraints plus the community as shaped these constraints has been to push out most of the best authors in the community, including the earliest active members, who have spiraled in many different directions, while being nominally still affiliated with LW and/or it's community. As a result, LW itself is a shadow of its former self. Currently, the community is in a process of concentrating in other venues, with Slate Star Codex probably having more comments/day than LW itself, and SSC is not the only alternate venue.

With the above problem statement in mind, the best ROI for a developer wanting to improve the experience of the broader LW community I can find, is to set up a Hacker News clone (e.g. an instance of telesc.pe) aimed at the issues the LW community cares about.

Having a central location that aggregates worthy content from LW, SSC, OB, the MIRI blog, most other rationlist-sphere blogs, plus an equal amount of content from the rest of the web that is of rationalist interest, collectively filtered by the community, would make my experience of the LW-sphere much, much better, and I suspect I am pretty typical in this regard.

The aggregator not being under MIRI/LW control would probably be a net positive, given the history of management of LW itself. The point would not be to replace the things LW does well (giving a venue for people to post relevant material), but to replace the things it does not do well (aggregating the wider rationality community, filtering quality in a quasi-democratic way)

The major problem for such an aggregator would of course be lack of adoption, so I would like to hear from other LW members if such a move would interest them. I am committing to set this up if convinced that there is indeed enough interest. I have provisionally bought distributedconspiracy.com for this purpose.

I wonder to what degree 'follow your dreams' is a counterbalance to Dunning-Kruger. I.e. the people that should follow their dreams are likely to underestimate themselves, so a general 'go for it against the odds' climate might be just enough to push them to actually follow through. This would still leave the less skilled to suffer in following dreams they can't succeed at, but there should be some thought as to whether the end result is positive for humanity-in-general or not.

There is also something to be said that some times the people that should follow their dreams are not apparent, and you only figure out they "had it in them" if indeed they go through the process of actually pushing through and improving themselves for it. This is why investment (and hiring) is so hard. All of a person's history isn't enough to tell you whether they will succeed in a new environment. You can select for an unbroken string of success, but that still leaves a huge amount of false negatives. Again, this lends credence as to whether it is better for humanity-in-general to contain the 'follow your dreams' meme.

And of course there is the related thought that the success cases of following your dreams might be wider than actually succeeding at them. In that case, following your dreams pushes you to strive for excellence, and that will push you to develop conscientiousness, a positive attitude towards learning, potentially improve your degree of agency. These characteristics are extremely valuable in many roles. Following something more conventional might not have motivated you enough to actually mould yourself into a more fierce agent. If this last thought is true, following your dreams, even in zero-sum games, might me a positive-sum game when looked at with a wide enough lens.

That's a good point, and probably applies to Mark Manson's guide too. It's similar to the well-known point that your friends are probably more popular than you are, because popular people have more friends.

When working with my clients I often tell them that there are only 4 types of job related skills they should focus on:

1. Minimum Viable Skills - The skills they absolutely need to get a job done, and/or get hired for a job.
2. Force Multipliers - Skills that will make their entire process more effective
3. Bottlenecks - Skills that are the slowest point in their whole process.
4. Competitive Advantages - Skills that make them less replaceable or more specialized.

Tangentially related, but as you're thinking about effective skills to focus on, a rather useful framework that my clients have used to great effect.

Well, congratulations. That sounds pretty great! Why move to the bay, was it a condition for investment or do you actually want to do that?