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Are you lost and adrift, looking at the looming danger from AI and wondering how you can help? Are you feeling overwhelmed by the size and complexity of the problem, not sure where to start or what to do next?
I can't promise a lot, but if you reach out to me personally I commit to doing SOMETHING to help you help the world. Furthermore, if you are looking for specific things to do, I also have a long list of projects that need doing and questions that need answering.
I spent so many years of my life just upskilling, because I thought I needed to be an expert to help. The truth is, there are no experts, and no time to become one. Please don't hesitate to reach out <3
Try out The Most Dangerous Writing App if you are looking for ways to improve your babble. It forces you to keep writing continuously for a set amount of time, or else the text will fade and you will lose everything.
I've noticed that a lot of LW comments these days will start by thanking the author, or expressing enthusiasm or support before getting into the substance. I have the feeling that this didn't use to be the case as much. Is that just me?
Not sure if I do that, but if I did, it probably would be if the author has the green symbol after their name and my response is going to be some kind of disagreement or criticism, and I want to reduce the "Less Wrong can feel very threatening for newcomers" effect.
Long ago, we didn't have those green symbols.
First I'd like to thank you for raising this important issue for discussion...
For real though, I don't think I've seen this effect you're talking about, but I've been avoiding the latest feed on LW lately. I looked at roughly 8 articles written in the past week or so and one article had a lot of enthusiastic, thankful comments. Another article had one such comment. Then I looked at like 5-6 posts from 3-8 years ago and saw some a couple of comments which were appreciative of the post but they felt a bit less so. IDK if my perception is biased because of your comment though. This seems like a shift but IDK if it is a huge shift.
I wish there were an option in the settings to opt out of seeing the LessWrong reacts. I personally find them quite distracting, and I'd like to be able to hover over text or highlight it without having to see the inline annotations.
If you use ublock (or adblock, or adguard, or anything else that uses EasyList syntax), you can add a custom rule
lesswrong.com##.NamesAttachedReactionsCommentBottom-footerReactionsRow
lesswrong.com##.InlineReactHoverableHighlight-highlight:remove-class(InlineReactHoverableHighlight-highlight)
which will remove the reaction section underneath comments and the highlights corresponding to those reactions.
The former of these you can also do through the element picker.
I use GreaterWrong as my front-end to interface with LessWrong, AlignmentForum, and the EA Forum. It is significantly less distracting and also doesn't make my ~decade old laptop scream in agony when multiple LW tabs are open on my browser.