My current position is that sometime around now, or maybe in the next two or three months, is the time to experiment with getting more core engagement and generally reaching a broader audience. Q&A in particular is something that I can imagine productively scaling to a larger audience, in a way that actually causes the contributions from the larger audience to result in real intellectual progress.
Ben summarized a lot of my general thoughts on this, but overall I think I agree with a good chunk of your sentiment. I think all the four things you list seem like good things to try, though I am kind of holding off on doing them until I feel more comfortable with the scalability of our intellectual progress machine.
Q&A in particular is something that I can imagine productively scaling to a larger audience, in a way that actually causes the contributions from the larger audience to result in real intellectual progress.
Do you mean scaling it as is, or in the future?
I think there’s a lot of potential to innovate on the Q&A system, and I think it’d be valuable to make progress on that before trying to scale. In particular, I’d like to see some method of tracking (or taking advantage of) the structure behind questions—something to do with how they’re related to each other.
Maybe this is as simple as marking two questions as “related” (as I think you and I have discussed offline). Maybe you’d want more fine-grained relationships.
It’d also be cool to have some way of quickly figuring out what the major open questions are in some area (e.g. IDA, or value learning), or maybe what specific people consider to be important open questions.
I think it’s already a bit more scalable than what we had before, but I was mostly referring to a future version of the Q&A system, after we added some more related question functionality, and made it so that people notice questions for longer than they stick around on the frontpage, and some way to keep track of major open questions.
FWIW, I was thinking of the related relationship as a human-defined one. That is, the author (or someone else?) manually links another question as related.
My current position is that sometime around now, or maybe in the next two or three months, is the time to experiment with getting more core engagement and generally reaching a broader audience. Q&A in particular is something that I can imagine productively scaling to a larger audience, in a way that actually causes the contributions from the larger audience to result in real intellectual progress.
Ben summarized a lot of my general thoughts on this, but overall I think I agree with a good chunk of your sentiment. I think all the four things you list seem like good things to try, though I am kind of holding off on doing them until I feel more comfortable with the scalability of our intellectual progress machine.
Do you mean scaling it as is, or in the future?
I think there’s a lot of potential to innovate on the Q&A system, and I think it’d be valuable to make progress on that before trying to scale. In particular, I’d like to see some method of tracking (or taking advantage of) the structure behind questions—something to do with how they’re related to each other.
Maybe this is as simple as marking two questions as “related” (as I think you and I have discussed offline). Maybe you’d want more fine-grained relationships.
It’d also be cool to have some way of quickly figuring out what the major open questions are in some area (e.g. IDA, or value learning), or maybe what specific people consider to be important open questions.
I think it’s already a bit more scalable than what we had before, but I was mostly referring to a future version of the Q&A system, after we added some more related question functionality, and made it so that people notice questions for longer than they stick around on the frontpage, and some way to keep track of major open questions.
I would think related questions is something to put off until you have lots of question data on which to tune your relatedness metric.
FWIW, I was thinking of the related relationship as a human-defined one. That is, the author (or someone else?) manually links another question as related.
I think having it be automated will help posts avoid getting forgotten in the sands of time.