You make a good point, and I am very tempted to agree with you. You are certainly correct in that even a completely non-centralized community with no stated goals can be exclusionary. And I can see “community goals” serving a positive role, guiding collective behavior towards communal improvement, whether that comes in the form of non-exclusiveness or other values.
With that said, I find myself strangely disquieted by the idea of Less Wrong being actively directed, especially by a singular individual. I’m not sure what my intuition is stuck on, but I do feel that it might be important. My best interpretation right now is that having an actively directed community may lend itself to catastrophic failure (in the same way that having a dictatorship lends itself to catastrophic failure).
If there is a single person or group of people directing the community, I can imagine them making decisions which anger the rest of the community, making people take sides or split from the group. I’ve seen that happen in forums where the moderators did something controversial, leading to considerable (albeit usually localized) disruption. If the community is directed democratically, I again see people being partisan and taking sides, leading to (potentially vicious) internal politics; and politics is both a mind killer and a major driver of divisiveness (which is typically bad for the community).
Now, to be entirely fair, these are somewhat “worst case” scenarios, and I don’t know how likely they are. However, I am having trouble thinking of any successful online communities which have taken this route. That may just be a failure of imagination, or it could be that something like this hasn’t been tried yet, but it is somewhat alarming. That is largely why I urge caution in the instance.
“With that said, I find myself strangely disquieted by the idea of Less Wrong being actively directed, especially by a singular individual.”—the proposal wasn’t that a single individual would choose the direction, but that there would be a group.
You make a good point, and I am very tempted to agree with you. You are certainly correct in that even a completely non-centralized community with no stated goals can be exclusionary. And I can see “community goals” serving a positive role, guiding collective behavior towards communal improvement, whether that comes in the form of non-exclusiveness or other values.
With that said, I find myself strangely disquieted by the idea of Less Wrong being actively directed, especially by a singular individual. I’m not sure what my intuition is stuck on, but I do feel that it might be important. My best interpretation right now is that having an actively directed community may lend itself to catastrophic failure (in the same way that having a dictatorship lends itself to catastrophic failure).
If there is a single person or group of people directing the community, I can imagine them making decisions which anger the rest of the community, making people take sides or split from the group. I’ve seen that happen in forums where the moderators did something controversial, leading to considerable (albeit usually localized) disruption. If the community is directed democratically, I again see people being partisan and taking sides, leading to (potentially vicious) internal politics; and politics is both a mind killer and a major driver of divisiveness (which is typically bad for the community).
Now, to be entirely fair, these are somewhat “worst case” scenarios, and I don’t know how likely they are. However, I am having trouble thinking of any successful online communities which have taken this route. That may just be a failure of imagination, or it could be that something like this hasn’t been tried yet, but it is somewhat alarming. That is largely why I urge caution in the instance.
“With that said, I find myself strangely disquieted by the idea of Less Wrong being actively directed, especially by a singular individual.”—the proposal wasn’t that a single individual would choose the direction, but that there would be a group.
Do you think the words ”...Less Wrong being actively directed, especially by a committee” would cause less apprehension? X-)
Maybe. It’s hard to say.