Assuming this revival works, how long do you expect the site to be actively used before a 3.0 requiring a similar level of effort as this project becomes necessary? 5 years? 10? (My prediction is 5 years.)
There’s a lot of writing about how to make predictions for the future on LessWrong and this is a poor one. Good predictions have probabilities attached to them.
Is your concern that it’s not clear whether PDV’s estimate is a mean, median, or mode? “Median and mode” seems like a reasonable guess (though have to be careful when defining mode etc.)
Being ambiguous about your prediction leaves wiggle room, but that’s typical for english sentences; giving an estimate without saying what exactly it means is still less ambiguous than the default.
The question is a bit like “When will you stop beating your wife?”. It assumes that some time in the future there will be a need to invest resources in a LW 3.0.
That’s a bad way to think about the future. It’s much better to think about the future by thinking that different event might happen and those have probabilities attached to them.
I mean, I mostly agree with PDVs prediction here. Very few things on the internet survive for more than 5 years, and so yeah, I think it’s likely you will need a group of at least two or three full-time people to work on it to ensure that it stays active and healthy and up-to-date with the way people use the internet in 5 years.
There’s a lot of writing about how to make predictions for the future on LessWrong and this is a poor one. Good predictions have probabilities attached to them.
Is your concern that it’s not clear whether PDV’s estimate is a mean, median, or mode? “Median and mode” seems like a reasonable guess (though have to be careful when defining mode etc.)
Being ambiguous about your prediction leaves wiggle room, but that’s typical for english sentences; giving an estimate without saying what exactly it means is still less ambiguous than the default.
The question is a bit like “When will you stop beating your wife?”. It assumes that some time in the future there will be a need to invest resources in a LW 3.0.
That’s a bad way to think about the future. It’s much better to think about the future by thinking that different event might happen and those have probabilities attached to them.
I mean, I mostly agree with PDVs prediction here. Very few things on the internet survive for more than 5 years, and so yeah, I think it’s likely you will need a group of at least two or three full-time people to work on it to ensure that it stays active and healthy and up-to-date with the way people use the internet in 5 years.