A Child's Petrov Day Speech

15 James_Miller 28 September 2016 02:27AM

30 years ago, the Cold War was raging on. If you don’t know what that is, it was the period from 1947 to 1991 where both the U.S and Russia had large stockpiles of nuclear weapons and were threatening to use them on each other. The only thing that stopped them from doing so was the knowledge that the other side would have time to react. The U.S and Russia both had surveillance systems to know of the other country had a nuke in the air headed for them.

On this day, September 26, in 1983, a man named Stanislav Petrov was on duty in the Russian surveillance room when the computer notified him that satellites had detected five nuclear missile launches from the U.S. He was told to pass this information on to his superiors, who would then launch a counter-strike.


He refused to notify anyone of the incident, suspecting it was just an error in the computer system.


No nukes ever hit Russian soil. Later, it was found that the ‘nukes’ were just light bouncing off of clouds which confused the satellite. Petrov was right, and likely saved all of humanity by stopping the outbreak of nuclear war. However, almost no one has heard of him.

We celebrate men like George Washington and Abraham Lincoln who win wars. These were great men, but the greater men, the men like Petrov who stopped these wars from ever happening - no one has heard of these men.


Let it be known, that September 26 is Petrov Day, in honor of the acts of a great man who saved the world, and of who almost no one has heard the name of.

 

 

 

My 11-year-old son wrote and then read this speech to his six grade class.

Weekly LW Meetups

1 FrankAdamek 23 September 2016 03:52PM

[LINK] Collaborate on HPMOR blurbs; earn chance to win three-volume physical HPMOR

6 ete 07 September 2016 02:21AM

Collaborate on HPMOR blurbs; earn chance to win three-volume physical HPMOR.

 

I intend to print at least one high-quality physical HPMOR and release the files. There are printable texts which are being improved and a set of covers (based on e.b.'s) are underway. I have, however, been unable to find any blurbs I'd be remotely happy with.

 

I'd like to attempt to harness the hivemind to fix that. As a lure, if your ideas contribute significantly to the final version or you assist with other tasks aimed at making this book awesome, I'll put a proportionate number of tickets with your number on into the proverbial hat.

 

I do not guarantee there will be a winner and I reserve the right to arbitrarily modify this any point. For example, it's possible this leads to a disappointingly small amount of valuable feedback, that some unforeseen problem will sink or indefinitely delay the project, or that I'll expand this and let people earn a small number of tickets by sharing so more people become aware this is a thing quickly.

 

With that over, let's get to the fun part.

 

A blurb is needed for each of the three books. Desired characteristics:

 

* Not too heavy on ingroup signaling or over the top rhetoric.

* Non-spoilerish

* Not taking itself awkwardly seriously.

* Amusing / funny / witty.

* Attractive to the same kinds of people the tvtropes page is.

* Showcases HPMOR with fun, engaging, prose.

 

Try to put yourself in the mind of someone awesome deciding whether to read it while writing, but let your brain generate bad ideas before trimming back.

 

I expect that for each we'll want 

* A shortish and awesome paragraph

* A short sentence tagline

* A quote or two from notable people

* Probably some other text? Get creative.

 

Please post blurb fragments or full blurbs here, one suggestion per top level comment. You are encouraged to remix each other's ideas, just add a credit line if you use it in a new top level comment. If you know which book your idea is for, please indicate with (B1) (B2) or (B3).

 

Other things that need doing, if you want to help in another way:

 

* The author's foreword from the physical copies of the first 17 chapters needs to be located or written up

* At least one links page for the end needs to be written up, possibly a second based on http://www.yudkowsky.net/other/fiction/

* Several changes need to be made to the text files, including merging in the final exam, adding appendices, and making the style of both consistent with the rest of the files. Contact me for current files and details if you want to claim this.

 

I wish to stay on topic and focused on creating these missing parts rather than going on a sidetrack to debate copyright. If you are an expert who genuinely has vital information about it, please message me or create a separate post about copyright rather than commenting here.

The barriers to the task

-7 Elo 18 August 2016 07:22AM

Original post: http://bearlamp.com.au/the-barriers-to-the-task/


For about two months now I have been putting in effort to run in the mornings.  To make this happen, I had to take away all the barriers to me wanting to do that.  There were plenty of them, and I failed to leave my house plenty of times.  Some examples are:

Making sure I don't need correct clothes - I leave my house shirtless and barefoot, and grab my key on the way out.  

Pre-commitment to run - I take my shirt off when getting into bed the night before, so I don't even have to consider the action in the morning when I roll out of bed.

Being busy in the morning - I no longer plan any appointments before 11am.  Depending on the sunrise (I don't use alarms), I wake up in the morning, spend some time reading things, then roll out of bed to go to the toilet and leave my house.  In Sydney we just passed the depths of winter and it's beginning to get light earlier and earlier in the morning.  Which is easy now; but was harder when getting up at 7 meant getting up in the dark.  

There were days when I would wake up at 8am, stay in bed until 9am, then realise if I left for a run (which takes around an hour - 10am), then came back to have a shower (which takes 20mins - 10:20), then left to travel to my first meeting (which can take 30mins 10:50).  That means if anything goes wrong I can be late to an 11am appointment.  But also - if I have a 10am meeting I have to skip my run to get there on time.

Going to bed at a reasonable hour - I am still getting used to deciding not to work myself ragged.  I decided to accept that sleep is important, and trust to let my body sleep as long as it needs.  This sometimes also means that I can successfully get bonus time by keeping healthy sleep habits.  But also - if I go to sleep after midnight I might not get up until later, which means I compromise my "time" to go running by shoving it into other habits.

Deciding where to run - google maps, look for local parks, plan a route with the least roads and least traffic.  I did this once and then it was done.  It was also exciting to measure the route and be able to run further and further each day/week/month.


What's in your way?

If you are not doing something that you think is good and right (or healthy, or otherwise desireable) there are likely things in your way.  If you just found out about an action that is good, well and right and there is nothing stopping you from doing it; great.  You are lucky this time - Just.Do.It.

If you are one of the rest of us; who know that:

  • daily exercise is good for you
  • The right amount of sleep is good for you
  • Eating certain foods are better than others
  • certain social habits are better than others
  • certain hobbies are more fulfilling (to our needs or goals) than others

And you have known this a while but still find yourself not taking the actions you want.  It's time to start asking what is in your way.  You might find it on someone else's list, but you are looking for the needle in the haystack.  

You are much better off doing this (System 2 exercise):

  1. take 15 minutes with pencil and paper.
  2. At the top write, "I want to ______________".
  3. If you know that's true you might not need this step - if you are not sure - write out why it might be true or not true.
  4. Write down the barriers that are in the way of you doing the thing.  think;
    • "can I do this right now?" (might not always be an action you can take while sitting around thinking about it - i.e. eating different foods)
    • "why can't I just do this at every opportunity that arises?"
    • "how do I increase the frequency of opportunities?"
  5. Write out the things you are doing instead of that thing.
    These things are the barriers in your way as well.
  6. For each point - consider what you are going to do about them.

Questions:

  • What actions have you tried to take on?
  • What barriers have you encountered in doing so?
  • How did you solve that barrier?
  • What are you struggling with taking on in the future?

Meta: this borrows from the Immunity to Change process, that can be best read about in the book, "right weight, right mind".  It also borrows from CFAR style techniques like resolve cycles (also known as focused grit), hamming questions, murphy-jitsu.

Meta: this took one hour to write.

Cross posted to lesswrong: http://lesswrong.com/lw/nuq

Deepmind Plans for Rat-Level AI

20 moridinamael 18 August 2016 04:26PM

Demis Hassabis gives a great presentation on the state of Deepmind's work as of April 20, 2016. Skip to 23:12 for the statement of the goal of creating a rat-level AI -- "An AI that can do everything a rat can do," in his words. From his tone, it sounds like this is more a short-term, not a long-term goal.

I don't think Hassabis is prone to making unrealistic plans or stating overly bold predictions. I strongly encourage you to scan through Deepmind's publication list to get a sense of how quickly they're making progress. (In fact, I encourage you to bookmark that page, because it seems like they add a new paper about twice a month.) The outfit seems to be systematically knocking down all the "Holy Grail" milestones on the way to GAI, and this is just Deepmind. The papers they've put out in just the last year or so concern successful one-shot learning, continuous control, actor-critic architectures, novel memory architectures, policy learning, and bootstrapped gradient learning, and these are just the most stand-out achievements. There's even a paper co-authored by Stuart Armstrong concerning Friendliness concepts on that list.

If we really do have a genuinely rat-level AI within the next couple of years, I think that would justify radically moving forward expectations of AI development timetables. Speaking very naively, if we can go from "sub-nematode" to "mammal that can solve puzzles" in that timeframe, I would view it as a form of proof that "general" intelligence does not require some mysterious ingredient that we haven't discovered yet.

The Future of Humanity Institute is hiring!

13 crmflynn 18 August 2016 01:09PM

FHI is accepting applications for a two-year position as a full-time Research Project Manager. Responsibilities will include coordinating, monitoring, and developing FHI’s activities, seeking funding, organizing workshops and conferences, and effectively communicating FHI’s research. The Research Program Manager will also be expected to work in collaboration with Professor Nick Bostrom, and other researchers, to advance their research agendas, and will additionally be expected to produce reports for government, industry, and other relevant organizations. 

Applicants will be familiar with existing research and literature in the field and have excellent communication skills, including the ability to write for publication. He or she will have experience of independently managing a research project and of contributing to large policy-relevant reports. Previous professional experience working for non-profit organisations, experience with effectiv altruism, and a network in the relevant fields associated with existential risk may be an advantage, but are not essential. 

To apply please go to https://www.recruit.ox.ac.uk and enter vacancy #124775 (it is also possible to find the job by searching choosing “Philosophy Faculty” from the department options). The deadline is noon UK time on 29 August. To stay up to date on job opportunities at the Future of Humanity Institute, please sign up for updates on our vacancies newsletter at https://www.fhi.ox.ac.uk/vacancies/.

Non-Fiction Book Reviews

9 SquirrelInHell 11 August 2016 05:05AM

Time start 13:35:06

For another exercise in speed writing, I wanted to share a few book reviews.

These are fairly well known, however there is a chance you haven't read all of them - in which case, this might be helpful.

 

Good and Real - Gary Drescher ★★★★★

This is one of my favourite books ever. Goes over a lot of philosophy, while showing a lot of clear thinking and meta-thinking. Number one replacement for Eliezer's meta-philosophy, if it had not existed. The writing style and language is somewhat obscure, but this book is too brilliant to be spoiled by that. The biggest takeaway is the analysis of ethics of non-causal consequences of our choices, which is something that actually has changed how I act in my life, and I have not seen any similar argument in other sources that would do the same. This book changed my intuitions so much that I now pay $100 in counterfactual mugging without second thought.

 

59 Seconds - Richard Wiseman ★★★

A collection of various tips and tricks, directly based on studies. The strength of the book is that it gives easy but detailed descriptions of lots of studies, and that makes it very fun to read. Can be read just to check out the various psychology results in an entertaining format. The quality of the advice is disputable, and it is mostly the kind of advice that only applies to small things and does not change much in what you do even if you somehow manage to use it. But I still liked this book, and it managed to avoid saying anything very stupid while saying a lot of things. It counts for something.

 

What You Can Change and What You Can't - Martin Seligman ★★★

It is a heartwarming to see that the author puts his best effort towards figuring out what psychology treatments work, and which don't, as well as builiding more general models of how people work that can predict what treatments have a chance in the first place. Not all of the content is necessarily your best guess, after updating on new results (the book is quite old). However if you are starting out, this book will serve excellently as your prior, on which you can update after checking out the new results. And also in some cases, it is amazing that the author was right about them 20 years ago, and mainstream psychology is STILL not caught up (like the whole bullshit "go back to your childhood to fix your problems" approach, which is in wide use today and not bothered at all by such things as "checking facts").

 

Thinking, Fast and Slow - Daniel Kahneman ★★★★★

A classic, and I want to mention it just in case. It is too valuable not to read. Period. It turns out some of the studies the author used for his claims have been later found not to replicate. However the details of those results is not (at least for me) a selling point of this book. The biggest thing is the author's mental toolbox for self-analysis and analysis of biases, as well concepts that he created to describe the mechanisms of intuitive judgement. Learn to think like the author, and you are 10 years ahead in your study of rationality.

 

Crucial Conversations - Al Switzler, Joseph Grenny, Kerry Patterson, Ron McMillan ★★★★

I have almost dropped this book. When I saw the style, it reminded me so much of the crappy self-help books without actual content. But fortunately I have read on a litte more, and it turns out that even while the style is the same in the whole book and it has litte content for the amount of text you read, it is still an excellent book. How is that possible? Simple: it only tells you a few things, but the things it tells you are actually important and they work and they are amazing when you put them into practice. Also on the concept and analysis side, there is precious little but who cares as long as there are some things that are "keepers". The authors spend most of the book hammering the same point over and over, which is "conversation safety". And it is still a good book: if you get this one simple point than you have learned more than you might from reading 10 other books.

 

How to Fail at Almost Everything and Still Win Big - Scott Adams ★★★

I don't agree with much of the stuff that is in this book, but that's not the point here. The author says what he thinks, and also he himself encourages you to pass it through your own filters. Around one third of the book, I thought it was obviously true; another one third, I had strong evidence that told me the author made a mistake or got confused about something; and the remaining one third gave me new ideas, or points of view that I could use to produce more ideas for my own use. This felt kind of like having a conversation with any intelligent person you might know, who has different ideas from you. It was a healthy ratio of agreement and disagreement, such that leads to progress for both people. Except of course in this case the author did not benefit, but I did.

 

Time end: 14:01:54

Total time to write this post: 26 minutes 48 seconds

Average writing speed: 31.2 words/minute, 169 characters/minute

The same data calculated for my previous speed-writing post: 30.1 words/minute, 167 characters/minute

Consider having sparse insides

12 AnnaSalamon 01 April 2016 12:07AM

It's easier to seek true beliefs if you keep your (epistemic) identity small. (E.g., if you avoid beliefs like "I am a democrat", and say only "I am a seeker of accurate world-models, whatever those turn out to be".)

It seems analogously easier to seek effective internal architectures if you also keep non-epistemic parts of your identity small -- not "I am a person who enjoys nature", nor "I am someone who values mathematics" nor "I am a person who aims to become good at email" but only "I am a person who aims to be effective, whatever that turns out to entail (and who is willing to let much of my identity burn in the process)".

There are obviously hazards as well as upsides that come with this; still, the upsides seem worth putting out there.

The two biggest exceptions I would personally make, which seem to mitigate the downsides: "I am a person who keeps promises" and "I am a person who is loyal to [small set of people] and who can be relied upon to cooperate more broadly -- whatever that turns out to entail".

 

Thoughts welcome.

Two forms of procrastination

10 Viliam 16 July 2016 08:30PM

I noticed something about myself when comparing two forms of procrastination:

a) reading online discussions,
b) watching movies online.

Reading online discussions (LessWrong, SSC, Reddit, Facebook) and sometimes writing a comment there, is a huge sink of time for me. On the other hand, watching movies online is almost harmless, at least compared with the former option. The difference is obvious when I compare my productivity at the end of the day when I did only the former, or only the latter. The interesting thing is that at the moment it feels the other way round.

When I start watching a movie that is 1:30:00 long, or start watching a series where each part is 40:00 long but I know I will probably watch more than one part a day, I am aware from the beginning that I am going to lose more than one hour of time; possibly several hours. On the other hand, when I open the "Discussion" tab on LessWrong, the latest "Open Thread" on SSC, my few favorite subreddits, and/or my Facebook "Home" page, it feels like it will only take a few minutes -- I will click on the few interesting links, quickly skim through the text, and maybe write a comment or two -- it certainly feels like much less than an hour.

But the fact is, when I start reading the discussions, I will probably click on at least hundred links. Most of the pages I will read just as quickly as I imagined, but there will be a few that will take disproportionally more time; either because they are interesting and long, or because they contain further interesting links. And writing a comment sometimes takes more time than it seems; it can easily be a half an hour for a three-paragraphs-long comment. (Ironically, this specific article gets written rather quickly, because I know what I want to write, and I write it directly. But there are comments where I think a lot, and keep correcting my text, to avoid misunderstanding when debating a sensitive topic, etc.) And when I stop doing it, because I want to make something productive for a change, I will feel tired. Reading many different things, trying to read quickly, and formulating my answers, that all makes me mentally exhausted. So after I close the browser, I just wish I could take a nap.

On the other hand, watching a movie does not make me tired in that specific way. The movies runs at its own speed and doesn't require me to do anything actively. Also, there is no sense of urgency; none of the "if I reply to this now, people will notice and respond, but if I do it a week later, no one will care anymore". So I feel perfectly comfortable pausing the movie at any moment, doing something productive for a while, then unpausing the movie and watching more. I know I won't miss anything.

I think it's the mental activity during my procrastination that both makes me tired and creates the illusion that it will take less time than it actually does. When the movie says 1:30:00, I know it will be 1:30:00 (or maybe a little less because of the final credits). With a web page, I can always tell myself "don't worry, I will read this one really fast", so there is the illusion that I have it under control, and can reduce the time waste. The fact that I am reading an individual page really fast makes me underestimate how much time it took to read all those pages.

On the other hand, sometimes I do inverse procrastination -- I start watching a movie, pause it a dozen times and do some useful work during the breaks -- and at the end of the day I spent maybe 90% of the time working productively, while my brain tells me I just spent the whole day watching a movie, so I almost feel like I had a free day.

Okay, so how could I use this knowledge to improve my productivity?

1) Knowing the difference between the two forms of procrastination, whenever I feel a desire to escape to the online world, I should start watching a movie instead of reading some debate, because thus I will waste less time, even if it feels the other way round.

2) Integrate it with pomodoro? 10 minutes movie, 50 minutes work, then again, and at the end of the day my lying brain will tell me "dude, you didn't work at all today, you were just watching movies, of course you should feel awesome!".

Do you have a similar experience? No idea how typical is this. No need to hurry with responding, I am going to watch a movie now. ;-)

Revitalizing Less Wrong seems like a lost purpose, but here are some other ideas

19 John_Maxwell_IV 12 June 2016 07:38AM

This is a response to ingres' recent post sharing Less Wrong survey results. If you haven't read & upvoted it, I strongly encourage you to--they've done a fabulous job of collecting and presenting data about the state of the community.

So, there's a bit of a contradiction in the survey results.  On the one hand, people say the community needs to do more scholarship, be more rigorous, be more practical, be more humble.  On the other hand, not much is getting posted, and it seems like raising the bar will only exacerbate that problem.

I did a query against the survey database to find the complaints of top Less Wrong contributors and figure out how best to serve their needs.  (Note: it's a bit hard to read the comments because some of them should start with "the community needs more" or "the community needs less", but adding that info would have meant constructing a much more complicated query.)  One user wrote:

[it's not so much that there are] overly high standards,  just not a very civil or welcoming climate . why write content for free and get trashed when I can go write a grant application or a manuscript instead?

ingres emphasizes that in order to revitalize the community, we would need more content.  Content is important, but incentives for producing content might be even more important.  Social status may be the incentive humans respond most strongly to.  Right now, from a social status perspective, the expected value of creating a new Less Wrong post doesn't feel very high.  Partially because many LW posts are getting downvotes and critical comments, so my System 1 says my posts might as well.  And partially because the Less Wrong brand is weak enough that I don't expect associating myself with it will boost my social status.

When Less Wrong was founded, the primary failure mode guarded against was Eternal September.  If Eternal September represents a sort of digital populism, Less Wrong was attempting a sort of digital elitism.  My perception is that elitism isn't working because the benefits of joining the elite are too small and the costs are too large.  Teddy Roosevelt talked about the man in the arena--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.

Given where Less Wrong is at, however, I suspect the goal of revitalizing Less Wrong represents a lost purpose.

ingres' survey received a total of 3083 responses.  Not only is that about twice the number we got in the last survey in 2014, it's about twice the number we got in 20132012, and 2011 (though much bigger than the first survey in 2009).  It's hard to know for sure, since previous surveys were only advertised on the LessWrong.com domain, but it doesn't seem like the diaspora thing has slowed the growth of the community a ton and it may have dramatically accelerated it.

Why has the community continued growing?  Here's one possibility.  Maybe Less Wrong has been replaced by superior alternatives.

  • CFAR - ingres writes: "If LessWrong is serious about it's goal of 'advancing the art of human rationality' then it needs to figure out a way to do real investigation into the subject."  That's exactly what CFAR does.  CFAR is a superior alternative for people who want something like Less Wrong, but more practical.  (They have an alumni mailing list that's higher quality and more active than Less Wrong.)  Yes, CFAR costs money, because doing research costs money!
  • Effective Altruism - A superior alternative for people who want something that's more focused on results.
  • Facebook, Tumblr, Twitter - People are going to be wasting time on these sites anyway.  They might as well talk about rationality while they do it.  Like all those phpBB boards in the 00s, Less Wrong has been outcompeted by the hot new thing, and I think it's probably better to roll with it than fight it.  I also wouldn't be surprised if interacting with others through social media has been a cause of community growth.
  • SlateStarCodex - SSC already checks most of the boxes under ingres' "Future Improvement Wishlist Based On Survey Results".  In my opinion, the average SSC post has better scholarship, rigor, and humility than the average LW post, and the community seems less intimidating, less argumentative, more accessible, and more accepting of outside viewpoints.
  • The meatspace community - Meeting in person has lots of advantages.  Real-time discussion using Slack/IRC also has advantages.

Less Wrong had a great run, and the superior alternatives wouldn't exist in their current form without it.  (LW was easily the most common way people heard about EA in 2014, for instance, although sampling effects may have distorted that estimate.)  But that doesn't mean it's the best option going forward.

Therefore, here are some things I don't think we should do:

  • Try to be a second-rate version of any of the superior alternatives I mentioned above.  If someone's going to put something together, it should fulfill a real community need or be the best alternative available for whatever purpose it serves.
  • Try to get old contributors to return to Less Wrong for the sake of getting them to return.  If they've judged that other activities are a better use of time, we should probably trust their judgement.  It might be sensible to make an exception for old posters that never transferred to the in-person community, but they'd be harder to track down.
  • Try to solve the same sort of problems Arbital or Metaculus is optimizing for.  No reason to step on the toes of other projects in the community.

But that doesn't mean there's nothing to be done.  Here are some possible weaknesses I see with our current setup:

  • If you've got a great idea for a blog post, and you don't already have an online presence, it's a bit hard to reach lots of people, if that's what you want to do.
  • If we had a good system for incentivizing people to write great stuff (as opposed to merely tolerating great stuff the way LW culture historically has), we'd get more great stuff written.
  • It can be hard to find good content in the diaspora.  Possible solution: Weekly "diaspora roundup" posts to Less Wrong.  I'm too busy to do this, but anyone else is more than welcome to (assuming both people reading LW and people in the diaspora want it).

ingres mentions the possibility of Scott Alexander somehow opening up SlateStarCodex to other contributors.  This seems like a clearly superior alternative to revitalizing Less Wrong, if Scott is down for it:

  • As I mentioned, SSC already seems to have solved most of the culture & philosophy problems that people complained about with Less Wrong.
  • SSC has no shortage of content--Scott has increased the rate at which he creates open threads to deal with an excess of comments.
  • SSC has a stronger brand than Less Wrong.  It's been linked to by Ezra Klein, Ross Douthat, Bryan Caplan, etc.

But the most important reasons may be behavioral reasons.  SSC has more traffic--people are in the habit of visiting there, not here.  And the posting habits people have acquired there seem more conducive to community.  Changing habits is hard.

As ingres writes, revitalizing Less Wrong is probably about as difficult as creating a new site from scratch, and I think creating a new site from scratch for Scott is a superior alternative for the reasons I gave.

So if there's anyone who's interested in improving Less Wrong, here's my humble recommendation: Go tell Scott Alexander you'll build an online forum to his specification, with SSC community feedback, to provide a better solution for his overflowing open threads.  Once you've solved that problem, keep making improvements and subfora so your forum becomes the best available alternative for more and more use cases.

And here's my humble suggestion for what an SSC forum could look like:

As I mentioned above, Eternal September is analogous to a sort of digital populism.  The major social media sites often have a "mob rule" culture to them, and people are increasingly seeing the disadvantages of this model.  Less Wrong tried to achieve digital elitism and it didn't work well in the long run, but that doesn't mean it's impossible.  Edge.org has found a model for digital elitism that works.  There may be other workable models out there.  A workable model could even turn in to a successful company.  Fight the hot new thing by becoming the hot new thing.

My proposal is based on the idea of eigendemocracy.  (Recommended that you read the link before continuing--eigendemocracy is cool.)  In eigendemocracy, your trust score is a composite rating of what trusted people think of you.  (It sounds like infinite recursion, but it can be resolved using linear algebra.)

Eigendemocracy is a complicated idea, but a simple way to get most of the way there would be to have a forum where having lots of karma gives you the ability to upvote multiple times.  How would this work?  Let's say Scott starts with 5 karma and everyone else starts with 0 karma.  Each point of karma gives you the ability to upvote once a day.  Let's say it takes 5 upvotes for a post to get featured on the sidebar of Scott's blog.  If Scott wants to feature a post on the sidebar of his blog, he upvotes it 5 times, netting the person who wrote it 1 karma.  As Scott features more and more posts, he gains a moderation team full of people who wrote posts that were good enough to feature.  As they feature posts in turn, they generate more co-moderators.

Why do I like this solution?

  • It acts as a cultural preservation mechanism.  On reddit and Twitter, sheer numbers rule when determining what gets visibility.  The reddit-like voting mechanisms of Less Wrong meant that the site deliberately kept a somewhat low profile in order to avoid getting overrun.  Even if SSC experienced a large influx of new users, those users would only gain power to affect the visibility of content if they proved themselves by making quality contributions first.
  • It takes the moderation burden off of Scott and distributes it across trusted community members.  As the community grows, the mod team grows with it.
  • The incentives seem well-aligned.  Writing stuff Scott likes or meta-likes gets you recognition, mod powers, and the ability to control the discussion--forms of social status.  Contrast with social media sites where hyperbole is a shortcut to attention, followers, upvotes.  Also, unlike Less Wrong, there'd be no punishment for writing a low quality post--it simply doesn't get featured and is one more click away from the SSC homepage.

TL;DR - Despite appearances, the Less Wrong community is actually doing great.  Any successor to Less Wrong should try to offer compelling advantages over options that are already available.

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