I think you have correctly pin-pointed one reason for the decline of LW: That the ratio of actually practically useful stuff is low. But that is because the most useful stuff has been already said. It may be somewhat hard to find because it doesn’t appear prominently each day new. And saying it twice in the same form isn’t such a good idea (but see the sequence rerun; I got something from that).
What remains? things that are not yet said. And these are mostly in the area of a) LW core topics esp. AI safety, b) community stability (with this I mean some kind of echo chamber where people keep the spirit of the posts if not the amazing insightfulness) and c) news—and probably some lesser d) and e).
There is still a lot to find e.g. in the media thread.
PS. I think you should remove the Downfall thing from the title. It will just net you downvotes.
OK, so let’s look at the “ratio” problem: it only exists if you assume that every new addition lands in the same “pool” as the rest, right?
So the way to solve this would by introducing some organisation. Anything rigid probably wouldn’t work, but what could is maybe something I would call “organic organisation”. For example:
make it easy for each user to leave a “trail” of concepts, ideas, articles, links etc. that were useful to him at different stages of progress in a given topic,
make it easy to follow trails of other users, esp. those bookmarked in the past,
(maybe later) use the data for auto-organizing the content, but in a way that adapts as the community discovers new paths that lead to the same knowledge and skills.
This way you don’t have to say the same thing twice, you can say once what was your individual approach to a given topic, and only add a new item/page when you can’t find anything appropriate in the existing material.
Anyways in the meantime, the rationality blogs kinda work in this way, but they are “heavy” in the sense they require a lot of resources from one author, so there aren’t many of them.
I think you have correctly pin-pointed one reason for the decline of LW: That the ratio of actually practically useful stuff is low. But that is because the most useful stuff has been already said. It may be somewhat hard to find because it doesn’t appear prominently each day new. And saying it twice in the same form isn’t such a good idea (but see the sequence rerun; I got something from that).
What remains? things that are not yet said. And these are mostly in the area of a) LW core topics esp. AI safety, b) community stability (with this I mean some kind of echo chamber where people keep the spirit of the posts if not the amazing insightfulness) and c) news—and probably some lesser d) and e).
There is still a lot to find e.g. in the media thread.
PS. I think you should remove the Downfall thing from the title. It will just net you downvotes.
OK, so let’s look at the “ratio” problem: it only exists if you assume that every new addition lands in the same “pool” as the rest, right?
So the way to solve this would by introducing some organisation. Anything rigid probably wouldn’t work, but what could is maybe something I would call “organic organisation”. For example:
make it easy for each user to leave a “trail” of concepts, ideas, articles, links etc. that were useful to him at different stages of progress in a given topic,
make it easy to follow trails of other users, esp. those bookmarked in the past,
(maybe later) use the data for auto-organizing the content, but in a way that adapts as the community discovers new paths that lead to the same knowledge and skills.
This way you don’t have to say the same thing twice, you can say once what was your individual approach to a given topic, and only add a new item/page when you can’t find anything appropriate in the existing material.
Anyways in the meantime, the rationality blogs kinda work in this way, but they are “heavy” in the sense they require a lot of resources from one author, so there aren’t many of them.