First, with regard to privacy, I think it took a remarkably long time to sink in that “I hope you know this goes down on your permanent record”. Internet activity is publishing, it is, in a large number of cases, both forever and searchable. And, of course, “anything you say can and will be used against you”.
For nobodies that’s not much of problem. But for people with something to lose it is. The net effect is evaporative cooling where smart, interesting, important people either withdraw from the open ’net or curate their online presence into sterility.
Second, “let’s play at discussions” vs sealioning and “randos in my mentions”—I think a major issue here is the value of time. There is a rather obvious inverse relationship between the value of someone’s time and how much that someone spends wandering the ’net and random-commenting things which catch his eye. So random comments are generally low-value and worthless—which means that people who value their time are not only going to not make them, they are also not going to pay much attention to them.
In the golden age covered by the mists of time (aka before the Eternal September) the barriers to entry were high and the people who made it inside were both smart and similar. Thus the early ’net was a very high-trust club. But that changed. Oh, how that changed.
The issue, of course, is discovery: how do you locate and identify new interesting people in the sea of hyperactive idiots? It’s an interesting problem. You can create walled gardens. You can set out bait and filter mercilessly, or just hang out in places where only interesting-to-you people are likely to wander into. You can try to follow connections from people you know piggybacking on their filtering skills. Any other ways come to mind?
Invite-only clubs. Perhaps this is a special case of “walled gardens”. If LW is too full of randos, one could make LW-Exclusive where you invite only people who meet some subjective criterion of rationality. This would even give you the ability to provisionally invite people you weren’t quite sure about, on a trial period, and kick them out if they don’t adapt quickly/aren’t rational enough/aren’t cool.
I thought about doing this, but I don’t think I rank highly enough in the community that {top five high-visibility rationalists} would even acknowledge my invitation. cries
I thought about doing this, but I don’t think I rank highly enough in the community that {top five high-visibility rationalists} would even acknowledge my invitation.
I think you may be looking at this from a wrong angle. What exactly would be your “garden”? If you simply create a private Slack channel and invite Eliezer and Anna Salamon there, I would understand if they either refuse, or say “uhm, this actually seems like a good idea” and then create their own official CFAR channel. But that’s simply because you did what anyone else could easily do. (And even then you actually would have a chance for success, only very small, if they decide that joining your channel is more convenient than creating their own.)
But if you would come with some kind of LW replacement which has all current LW features and none of its greatest problems… and you would start populating it with “cool, but not highest-status” writers first… and it would work… I think there is a big chance gradually everyone would switch to your solution.
I feel like I should put some kind of “epistemic status” tag on this indicating that I am arguing for a position that I don’t really hold so much as I find the idea of it interesting.
I think whether or not it’s the wrong angle depends on the goals.
Pretend for the moment that I am respected enough that Eliezer and Anna Salamon would accept my invitation to a private Slack channel or private forum. Further stipulate that we agree that we will only invite or accept a new member to the Slack channel if we all look over the candidate’s history and agree. We establish a constitution such that new members also gain some measure of voting power in admitting new members. Members who have been admitted but turn out to be jerks can be ejected by some method.
This allows all the uncontroversially good, smart, conscientious LWers and outlying rationalists to be admitted relatively quickly. At a certain point, perhaps LW-Exclusive members start sponsoring newer folks who don’t have established track records of good posts or accomplishments, and these people can be admitted on a provisional basis.
It’s true that “anybody could do this”, but anybody could create a new forum and call it Less Wrong 2.0 and imbue it with better features, and that wouldn’t necessarily be a stupid thing to do.
If you did that but didn’t actually make it a properly walled garden, and everyone indeed switched over, then that means all the lower-quality posters and randos also switch over, which somewhat defeats the purpose.
This is not directly addressing your point, just inspired by it:
If you make a private Slack channel, how will other potentially valuable members know there is something they should desire to join? I mean, at this moment we would be drawing on the knowledge existing outside the channel, but a few years later, to the outside world your private Slack channel would seem like some kind of a black hole, where smart people disappear and you never hear about them again.
Of course, unless there is also some kind of output—for example a blog without a comment section, where the members of the private Slack sometimes publish their wisdom—that other people can see. Now it’s about convincing the people on the channel that they should once in a while publish an article for the outside world, inside of just debating comfortably within their bubble.
Now a more direct answer:
Yes, it’s true that sometimes a very simple plan, executed well, has great value, while a grand design may be ruined by an unforeseen but fatal flaw. I still believe that, statistically speaking, doing some work upfront is a signal of being serious about something.
Like, there are two different issues here: (1) whether your plan will work well, on condition that people will join you, and (2) whether you can convince people about it, so they actually will join you. You could easily succeed in the first step and fail in the second one. Being a respected celebrity can make the second step easier. Doing some work upfront is solving the second step the hard way.
For nobodies that’s not much of problem. But for people with something to lose it is. The net effect is evaporative cooling where smart, interesting, important people either withdraw from the open ’net or curate their online presence into sterility.
I’m flagging this as a really important failure mode nobody noticed. It strikes me as very surprising this in hindsight seems so obvious when I know so many former top contributors not to have considered this as a failure mode. They didn’t anticipate as they got older and advanced in their social circles and their careers, they’d go from being nobodies to being somebodies. Scott Alexander is a psychiatrist now; he has to watch what he says on the internet more than Scott the pre-med/philosophy student needed to watch what he said several years ago. Many of the legacy contributors on LW, like Eliezer Yudkowsky, Anna Salamon, Carl Shulman, Luke Muehlhauser and Andrew Critch work for nonprofits with budgets over a million dollars a year, part of the EA community, which seems hyper-conscious of status and prestige, and in a way thrusts all of them into the limelight more.
I think it took a remarkably long time to sink in that “I hope you know this goes down on your permanent record”.
Yeah. I remember times where web pages mostly kept disappearing after a few years. Like, you would look at an old page you made 3 or 5 years ago, click on the hyperlinks, and most of them would show “404 not found”. That is not the case anymore.
The net effect is evaporative cooling where smart, interesting, important people either withdraw from the open ’net or curate their online presence into sterility.
Yeah, it seems like a binary choice: either you expect your online record to matter or not, but you cannot go halfway.
My children will not be allowed to ever use their real names online. They will thank me later. (Problem is, 20 years later, there will probably be technology to connect you even to texts you wrote under pseudonym.)
The problem is, too many websites today insist in you providing your real name. Yeah, you can provide a fake name. And be ready to lose you account at any random moment, if the website decides to ask you to provide some information to confirm your identity. But sometimes this is not an option, e.g. when you need someone to pay you money, for example Google Play. But the Google Play account is also linked to YouTube, and Google+, and… yeah, the “don’t be evil” days are gone, too.
You can create walled gardens.
There are different ways how to implement a garden. For example, it can be open to reading but closed to writing. Or it can have a public discussion, and a private chat. This way you can announce your existence to new people who may share your interests, but protect yourself from exposing too much. You could make pseudonyms mandatory. (For example, you could have a rule that a username is a five-digit number, and also display a gravatar-like picture to visually distinguish similar usernames. After a while, all insiders would know the persona of “red triangle 48873”, but to outsiders it would mean nothing.) You could have inner-circle and outer-circle membership, where new members go to the outer circle, and have to somehow prove their worth; for example on LW it could be by writing a few good articles. (There would be a private chat for all members, and a separate private chat for inner-circle members. Or maybe a rule that outer-circle members are anonymous, but inner-circle members must meet in person. Or whatever you consider best for your group.)
too many websites today insist in you providing your real name
The only one that I know of and which matters is Facebook. Google doesn’t ask for your real name—it used to for a while with Google+ and then gave up on this idea.
It doesn’t matter, we know your real name anyway
The contemporary trend is to insist on your phone number which is trivially connected to the real name, etc.
There are different ways how to implement a garden.
All true, though it’s a fair amount of work to set up something that customized—and if you’re a non-technical person, you’re pretty screwed here.
Couple of random observations.
First, with regard to privacy, I think it took a remarkably long time to sink in that “I hope you know this goes down on your permanent record”. Internet activity is publishing, it is, in a large number of cases, both forever and searchable. And, of course, “anything you say can and will be used against you”.
For nobodies that’s not much of problem. But for people with something to lose it is. The net effect is evaporative cooling where smart, interesting, important people either withdraw from the open ’net or curate their online presence into sterility.
Second, “let’s play at discussions” vs sealioning and “randos in my mentions”—I think a major issue here is the value of time. There is a rather obvious inverse relationship between the value of someone’s time and how much that someone spends wandering the ’net and random-commenting things which catch his eye. So random comments are generally low-value and worthless—which means that people who value their time are not only going to not make them, they are also not going to pay much attention to them.
In the golden age covered by the mists of time (aka before the Eternal September) the barriers to entry were high and the people who made it inside were both smart and similar. Thus the early ’net was a very high-trust club. But that changed. Oh, how that changed.
The issue, of course, is discovery: how do you locate and identify new interesting people in the sea of hyperactive idiots? It’s an interesting problem. You can create walled gardens. You can set out bait and filter mercilessly, or just hang out in places where only interesting-to-you people are likely to wander into. You can try to follow connections from people you know piggybacking on their filtering skills. Any other ways come to mind?
Invite-only clubs. Perhaps this is a special case of “walled gardens”. If LW is too full of randos, one could make LW-Exclusive where you invite only people who meet some subjective criterion of rationality. This would even give you the ability to provisionally invite people you weren’t quite sure about, on a trial period, and kick them out if they don’t adapt quickly/aren’t rational enough/aren’t cool.
I thought about doing this, but I don’t think I rank highly enough in the community that {top five high-visibility rationalists} would even acknowledge my invitation. cries
I think you may be looking at this from a wrong angle. What exactly would be your “garden”? If you simply create a private Slack channel and invite Eliezer and Anna Salamon there, I would understand if they either refuse, or say “uhm, this actually seems like a good idea” and then create their own official CFAR channel. But that’s simply because you did what anyone else could easily do. (And even then you actually would have a chance for success, only very small, if they decide that joining your channel is more convenient than creating their own.)
But if you would come with some kind of LW replacement which has all current LW features and none of its greatest problems… and you would start populating it with “cool, but not highest-status” writers first… and it would work… I think there is a big chance gradually everyone would switch to your solution.
I feel like I should put some kind of “epistemic status” tag on this indicating that I am arguing for a position that I don’t really hold so much as I find the idea of it interesting.
I think whether or not it’s the wrong angle depends on the goals.
Pretend for the moment that I am respected enough that Eliezer and Anna Salamon would accept my invitation to a private Slack channel or private forum. Further stipulate that we agree that we will only invite or accept a new member to the Slack channel if we all look over the candidate’s history and agree. We establish a constitution such that new members also gain some measure of voting power in admitting new members. Members who have been admitted but turn out to be jerks can be ejected by some method.
This allows all the uncontroversially good, smart, conscientious LWers and outlying rationalists to be admitted relatively quickly. At a certain point, perhaps LW-Exclusive members start sponsoring newer folks who don’t have established track records of good posts or accomplishments, and these people can be admitted on a provisional basis.
It’s true that “anybody could do this”, but anybody could create a new forum and call it Less Wrong 2.0 and imbue it with better features, and that wouldn’t necessarily be a stupid thing to do.
If you did that but didn’t actually make it a properly walled garden, and everyone indeed switched over, then that means all the lower-quality posters and randos also switch over, which somewhat defeats the purpose.
This is not directly addressing your point, just inspired by it:
If you make a private Slack channel, how will other potentially valuable members know there is something they should desire to join? I mean, at this moment we would be drawing on the knowledge existing outside the channel, but a few years later, to the outside world your private Slack channel would seem like some kind of a black hole, where smart people disappear and you never hear about them again.
Of course, unless there is also some kind of output—for example a blog without a comment section, where the members of the private Slack sometimes publish their wisdom—that other people can see. Now it’s about convincing the people on the channel that they should once in a while publish an article for the outside world, inside of just debating comfortably within their bubble.
Now a more direct answer:
Yes, it’s true that sometimes a very simple plan, executed well, has great value, while a grand design may be ruined by an unforeseen but fatal flaw. I still believe that, statistically speaking, doing some work upfront is a signal of being serious about something.
Like, there are two different issues here: (1) whether your plan will work well, on condition that people will join you, and (2) whether you can convince people about it, so they actually will join you. You could easily succeed in the first step and fail in the second one. Being a respected celebrity can make the second step easier. Doing some work upfront is solving the second step the hard way.
I’m flagging this as a really important failure mode nobody noticed. It strikes me as very surprising this in hindsight seems so obvious when I know so many former top contributors not to have considered this as a failure mode. They didn’t anticipate as they got older and advanced in their social circles and their careers, they’d go from being nobodies to being somebodies. Scott Alexander is a psychiatrist now; he has to watch what he says on the internet more than Scott the pre-med/philosophy student needed to watch what he said several years ago. Many of the legacy contributors on LW, like Eliezer Yudkowsky, Anna Salamon, Carl Shulman, Luke Muehlhauser and Andrew Critch work for nonprofits with budgets over a million dollars a year, part of the EA community, which seems hyper-conscious of status and prestige, and in a way thrusts all of them into the limelight more.
Yeah. I remember times where web pages mostly kept disappearing after a few years. Like, you would look at an old page you made 3 or 5 years ago, click on the hyperlinks, and most of them would show “404 not found”. That is not the case anymore.
Yeah, it seems like a binary choice: either you expect your online record to matter or not, but you cannot go halfway.
My children will not be allowed to ever use their real names online. They will thank me later. (Problem is, 20 years later, there will probably be technology to connect you even to texts you wrote under pseudonym.)
The problem is, too many websites today insist in you providing your real name. Yeah, you can provide a fake name. And be ready to lose you account at any random moment, if the website decides to ask you to provide some information to confirm your identity. But sometimes this is not an option, e.g. when you need someone to pay you money, for example Google Play. But the Google Play account is also linked to YouTube, and Google+, and… yeah, the “don’t be evil” days are gone, too.
There are different ways how to implement a garden. For example, it can be open to reading but closed to writing. Or it can have a public discussion, and a private chat. This way you can announce your existence to new people who may share your interests, but protect yourself from exposing too much. You could make pseudonyms mandatory. (For example, you could have a rule that a username is a five-digit number, and also display a gravatar-like picture to visually distinguish similar usernames. After a while, all insiders would know the persona of “red triangle 48873”, but to outsiders it would mean nothing.) You could have inner-circle and outer-circle membership, where new members go to the outer circle, and have to somehow prove their worth; for example on LW it could be by writing a few good articles. (There would be a private chat for all members, and a separate private chat for inner-circle members. Or maybe a rule that outer-circle members are anonymous, but inner-circle members must meet in person. Or whatever you consider best for your group.)
The only one that I know of and which matters is Facebook. Google doesn’t ask for your real name—it used to for a while with Google+ and then gave up on this idea.
It doesn’t matter, we know your real name anyway
The contemporary trend is to insist on your phone number which is trivially connected to the real name, etc.
All true, though it’s a fair amount of work to set up something that customized—and if you’re a non-technical person, you’re pretty screwed here.