To be honest, I’m not too sure myself. I was thinking about times where, say, TIME writes a favorable piece on AI, then we can coordinate to get lots of people to upvote it on HN/reddit, or things like that, where having lots of people do a thing could be useful. Maybe it’ll be more relevant for people in the same geographical areas?
If we wanted to coordinate on such a matter, right now we would use email, email groups (NYC uses one of these), Facebook and Less Wrong in some combination. I would expect this to reach most of the people we would reach with an app?
Sure. There’s something about sending out emails, though, that doesn’t seem to guarantee contribution. What I’d like is a way to easily figure out how much help you can actually expect from your in-group.
Right now, for both FB / mailing lists, my priors are something like “maybe 10% of people will actually comment?” (Which seems to be generally true for people who aren’t Schelling points in the community, in my experience.)
I’d like a way to signal my willingness to expend some amount of effort to help with things that need add’l people, in a high-confidence environment, so people know that they can actually count on my support, if that makes sense?
I’d like a way to signal my willingness to expend some amount of effort to help with things that need add’l people, in a high-confidence environment, so people know that they can actually count on my support, if that makes sense?
I don’t think signing up to helping projects without knowing anything about the project beforehand leads to quality engagement with the project.
You might have people relatively blindly commit to upvoting reddit posts but the resulting impact of that kind of coordination is relatively low.
I don’t think signing up to helping projects without knowing anything about the project beforehand leads to quality engagement with the project.
This may well be true. I guess my question, then, is something like “how do we set up a system such that people can easily broadcast information on projects/things to those who care?”
My qualm with facebook for notices of this sort is that it’s not necessarily easy for others to see what’s happening, and posts are fairly transient, given its temporal nature.
If you have a task that you care to get done then posting it to Slack(goals of LessWrong)/Facebook/LW Discussion works for reaching people.
If it turns out that you have projects that you want to promote where the present system isn’t enough, that would be the time to build a new system.
Using the existing channels is much easier than convincing people to adopt a new channel. If you want a new channel then a google group mailing list seems optimal for reaching people.
Idea 2 seems very vague. Can you give an example of how I would use it?
To be honest, I’m not too sure myself. I was thinking about times where, say, TIME writes a favorable piece on AI, then we can coordinate to get lots of people to upvote it on HN/reddit, or things like that, where having lots of people do a thing could be useful. Maybe it’ll be more relevant for people in the same geographical areas?
As Zvi notes NYC has a mailing list.
In Berlin we have a general LW mailing list and a Dojo mailing list. I used the to get feedback on a draft for http://lesswrong.com/r/discussion/lw/oe0/predictionbased_medicine_pbm/ and got good feedback from four people.
If we wanted to coordinate on such a matter, right now we would use email, email groups (NYC uses one of these), Facebook and Less Wrong in some combination. I would expect this to reach most of the people we would reach with an app?
Sure. There’s something about sending out emails, though, that doesn’t seem to guarantee contribution. What I’d like is a way to easily figure out how much help you can actually expect from your in-group.
Right now, for both FB / mailing lists, my priors are something like “maybe 10% of people will actually comment?” (Which seems to be generally true for people who aren’t Schelling points in the community, in my experience.)
I’d like a way to signal my willingness to expend some amount of effort to help with things that need add’l people, in a high-confidence environment, so people know that they can actually count on my support, if that makes sense?
I don’t think signing up to helping projects without knowing anything about the project beforehand leads to quality engagement with the project.
You might have people relatively blindly commit to upvoting reddit posts but the resulting impact of that kind of coordination is relatively low.
There used to be a MIRI volunteer project that seems to run out of steam. http://lesswrong.com/lw/2g7/miri_call_for_volunteers/ It might be worthwhile to look into what happened with it.
This may well be true. I guess my question, then, is something like “how do we set up a system such that people can easily broadcast information on projects/things to those who care?”
My qualm with facebook for notices of this sort is that it’s not necessarily easy for others to see what’s happening, and posts are fairly transient, given its temporal nature.
If you have a task that you care to get done then posting it to Slack(goals of LessWrong)/Facebook/LW Discussion works for reaching people. If it turns out that you have projects that you want to promote where the present system isn’t enough, that would be the time to build a new system.
Using the existing channels is much easier than convincing people to adopt a new channel. If you want a new channel then a google group mailing list seems optimal for reaching people.