The look and feel of LW is awesome. I tried to figure out what software you use for it but couldn't. I'd be grateful for any information. Thanks and please keep up the great work.
Thanks! I'm not quite sure which thing you mean by 'software', but the LessWrong 2.0 codebase is opensource, available here. There's also a sequence which explains an overview of how the codebase fits together here.
To add some detail, LessWrong doesn't use "off the shelf" forum software like WordPress or phpBB. It's a custom codebase originally built on a forum framework called Vulcan, but since then extensively developed and customized by the dev team.
It occurred to me yesterday that maybe LessWrong should be 'formalized' a bit. I'm happy to have found this page (and others) that are strong evidence that some parts of civilization are pretty adequate!
Thank you all for your hard work. I love this site. I think you've done an excellent job keeping it going!
I'm glad you like the site! You're welcome.
I'm curious though, what do you mean by "formalized"?
The original context in which I started thinking about this was a discussion of a new site feature. I knew there was a small team of developers, I was pretty sure they weren't being paid full-time developer salaries, and was thinking about rules or systems to decide on things like that.
(I'm a big fan of a loose 'whatever the developers are willing to implement and maintain' as the sole filter on what gets done for non-commercial projects.)
Thinking bigger picture, I realized I didn't know how the LW team was being funded, if (or how much) it's being funded, how it's organized 'formally' (e.g. as a non-profit), etc..
I also realized I didn't know how or whether the site data was being backed-up, whether those backups were publicly available, etc.. (I'd still like to know about this, if only so I can archive my own copy of the site's contents.)
This page lists the team of people actively working on LessWrong. Though Eliezer founded LessWrong and will occasionally advise, he no longer actively helps run the site. As for why, I don't have any privileged information. I would guess that Eliezer judges that it's best for him to focus on his research at MIRI. We do have the hypothesis that we should form a board for LessWrong, and if we did, Eliezer would be on it if he wanted to be.
Oliver Habryka is the current project lead for LessWrong.com, where he tries to build infrastructure for making intellectual progress on global catastrophic risks, cause prioritization and the art of rationality. He used to work at the Centre for Effective Altruism US as strategic director, ran the EA Global conferences for 2015 and 2016 and is an instructor for the Center for Applied Rationality. He has generally been involved with community organizing for the Effective Altruism and Rationality communities in a large variety of ways. He studied Computer Science and Mathematics at UC Berkeley, and his primary interests are centered around understanding how to develop communities and systems that can make scalable progress on difficult philosophical and scientific problems.
I found LessWrong in 2012 after googling "singularity" and finding facingthesingularity.com (since renamed). Among the first posts I read was Philosophy: A Diseased Discipline, which pissed me off because I was philosophy major. But then I read it realized I agreed with all of it. Since then, I've been deep in the LW community. I became a local organizer in Melbourne, mentored at a dozen CFAR workshops, and eventually made my way to the Bay Area. Before joining the LessWrong team in 2019, I studied electrical engineering and philosophy, and worked as a Data Scientist and Product Manager.
I found LessWrong through HPMOR in 2012, briefly interned at MIRI in 2013 (which didn't accomplish much except convince me to not enter academia as a post-grad, which was good), and started attending meetups in Los Angeles shortly thereafter. In 2017 I took over running those meetups. In 2022 Eliezer posted MIRI announces new "Death With Dignity" strategy, which was the sharp poke I needed to go do something about the whole x-risk thing.
By trade, I'm a software engineer. I'm responsible for technical leadership at LessWrong.
I've been a LessWrong organizer since 2011, with roughly equal focus on the cultural, practical and intellectual aspects of the community. My first project was creating the Secular Solstice and helping groups across the world run their own version of it. More recently I've been interested in improving my own epistemic standards and helping others to do so as well.
I guess also I code? I worked at Spotify. Now I don’t.
I read The Sequences when I was 14 (in 2011, after the sequences were written) and I've read and contributed to LessWrong and the broader rationality community since then. When I was 19 I ran an EA Global conference with jacobjacob. I have a CS degree from Oxford, but I learned more from running the conference. jacobjacob and I do various things on the LessWrong Team – recently we professionally published some cute books of the best new content. If you're interested in how I think you can read these two LessWrong posts that I wrote (1, 2).
Deschlepifier. I believe that there's glory at the end of the struggle, at least temporarily. Also fly tiny planes sometimes.
Vaniver describing Vaniver:
I’ve had forum-posting as a hobby since I was young, first on a D&D forum, then on the xkcd forums, and then finally on LW, which I found through a link to HPMOR on the xkcd forums. I studied physics, economics, and operations research (which I sometimes describe as ‘industrial rationality’), and worked as a data scientist before moving to the Bay to work for MIRI.
Raemon describing Vaniver:
Once upon a time, LessWrong almost died. There were numerous half-hearted attempts to revitalize the community. Eventually someone noticed that part of the problem was there was no particular person who actually had the mandate to make sweeping changes. Someone said “I vote for Vaniver” and then a bunch of people said “me too!” and in a highly unsuspect, democratic process, Vaniver became king.
Nowadays Vaniver is the meta-king, and his gentle authority flows through us.
The LessWrong team operates legally as part of the Center for Applied Rationality while retaining full autonomy over both internal decision-making and decisions concerning the LessWrong website. The lesswrong.com domain is owned by the Machine Intelligence Research Institute.