My impression is that activity begets more activity--if there were 0 posts today, having your self-post be the post for the day is more bothersome than if there were 10 posts today. But we can look at this in a month and see how it turned out.

Add a social norm where commenters make short summaries, or quote a couple sentences of new info, without the fluff.

Posting links should be low-friction, and so it should be fine to post links without comment. That said, writing summaries in comments is very useful, and you should feel willing to do that even on links you didn't post.

Maybe we should have subreddits on LW. I'm not sure about this one. Tags serve some of the same purposes, so perhaps what would be ideal would be to subscribe and unsubscribe from tags you're interested in. However, just copying the Reddit code for subreddits would be simpler. It would divide up the community though, so probably not desirable while we're still small.

Different subreddits seem best when used to separate norms / rules of discussion rather than topics. (Topics are often overlapping, and thus best dealt with using tags.) I think something like 'cold' and 'warm' subreddits, where the first has a more academic style and the second has a more friendly / improvisational style, might be sensible, but this remains to be seen.

I am worried that this change may reduce self-posts even further. After all, they will now have to compete with a host of other low effort links. I think that there should be separate sections for links and self-posts.

The more time that passes, the likelier it becomes that transhumanism and Singularity futurism will eventually find political expression. It's also likely that the various forms of rationalistic utilitarian altruism existing in certain corners of the Internet will eventually give rise to a distinctive ideology that will take its place in the spectrum of political views that count. It is even possible that some intersection of these two currents - the futurological rationalism on display at this site - will give rise to a politically minded movement or organization. This post, the earlier "Altruist Support" sequence by Giles, a few others show that there's some desire to do this. However, as things stand, this desire is still too weak and formless for anyone to actually do anything, and if anyone did become worked-up and fanatical enough to organize seriously, the result would most likely be an irrelevant farce, a psychodrama only meaningful to half a dozen people.

The current post combines: complete blindness with respect to what's involved in acquiring power at a national or international level; no sense of how embattled and precarious is the situation of futurist causes like cryonics and Friendly AI; and misplaced confidence in the correctness of the local belief system.

Let's start with the political naivete. Rather than taking over openly, it's proposed that the Conspiracy could settle for

a simple infiltration of the world's extant political systems

I love the word "simple". Look, politics isn't a game of hide and seek. Ideological groups have the cohesion that they do because membership in the group depends on openly espousing the ideology. If you get to be head of the politburo of the Tragic Soulfulness League after years of dutifully endorsing the party line, and then, once you're in charge, you announce to your colleagues that you actually believe in Maximum Happiness, what happens is that the next day, the media carry the tragically soulful news of the unfortunate accident which cut you down just at the beginning of your term in office, and your successor, the former deputy head, wiping away a tear, vows to uphold the principles of the tragic soul, just as you would have wanted.

the Conspiracy becomes the only major influence in world politics

A perfect picture of fanaticism... Apparently you think of political influence only in terms of belief systems. The perfect end state is that the one true belief system is triumphant! But political influence is also an expression just of the existence of a group of people; it means that the system knows about them, listens to them, contains their representatives. If the world still contains a billion Indians or three hundred million Americans, then India and America will continue to be major "influences" in world politics.

Now let's turn to the author's innocence regarding the situation of cryonics, etc, in the world.

we should devote fewer of our resources to cryonics and life extension, and focus on saving the lives of those to whom these technologies are currently beyond even a fevered dream

In other words, the microscopic number of highly embattled people who are currently working on these matters, should instead take on the causes which are already ubiquitously signposted as Good, and which already receive billions of dollars per year. The rationale proposed for this perspective is that when the Conspiracy is in charge, it will own all the resources of the world, so it will be able to afford to do both things at once.

Arandur, if you take this line of thought, you end up working neither on life extension nor on poverty alleviation, but simply on assuming power, with the plan of doing those promised good works at some unknown time in the future.

In passing, let's consider what specific proposals are offered here, regarding the solution of recognized problems like war and starvation (as opposed to unrecognized problems like ageing or unfriendly AI)? The answers I see are (1) spend even more money on them (2) trust us to think of a better approach, we're rationalists and that means we're better at problem-solving.

At least an explicitly transhumanist agenda would bring something concrete and new to politics. With respect to the existing concerns of politics, this proposal offers no-one any reason to offer you a share of power or to support your aspirations.

Finally, fanatical faith in the correctness of the local philosophy and the way that it is just destined to empower the true believer:

It is demonstrable that one's level of strength as a rationalist has a direct correlation to the probability that the one will make correct decisions.

It is even more demonstrable that one's level of self-identification as a rationalist has a direct correlation to the probability that one is irrelevant to anything of any significance, especially the sort of worldly affairs that you are talking about.

George Bernard Shaw wrote that

As far as writing style goes, the quote seems awkward and more relevant to the illusion of transparency than strawmanning.

I would suggest that a technique to avoid accidentally strawmanning someone

Could work. The old "break it so much that you can no longer overlook how broken it is".

Note that even if it works 100%, it certainly doesn't solve the problem of strawmanning. My guess is that if you manage to notice that the situation calls for some correction or technique in the first place, you're 90% of the way there anyway.

Of course every bit of help matters, so probably worth keeping this trick around - thanks.

(I've tried it now on your post and it wasn't all that helpful... maybe I'll have more luck with it the next time :D)

Meta thread

How much are you motivated by votes in the first place, though? I care a bit that a comment got any reaction, and a bit that it's positive, but I give a lot more weight to followups and responses than to votes. And I especially don't care about vote magnitude. 2 or 3 is as good as 10 or 12 to my happiness-at-posting response.

Excellent post. Agree with all major points.

I think Less Wrong experienced the reverse of the evaporative cooling EY feared, where people gradually left the arena as the proportional number of critics in the stands grew ever larger.

I'd think it was primarily not the proportional number of critics, but lower quality of criticism and great users getting tired of replying to/downvoting it. Most of the old crowd of lesswrongers welcomed well thought out criticism, but when people on the other side of an inferential distance gap try to imitate those high-criticism norms it is annoying to deal with, so they end up leaving. Especially if the lower quality users are loud and more willing to use downvotes as punishment for things they don't understand.

The incentives are currently a major problem. Looking at my posting history, my most upvoted posts are all light and fluffy things.

Try to tackle a difficult and controversial problem and you'll find it very hard to get upvotes, because these will mostly be balanced out by downvotes from people who strongly believe in the opposite.

Great to see some collaboration occurring between these institutes.