You become the UI you use
Epistemic status: exploration
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People instinctively copy other people they interact with. But the communication tools we use determine what we see and don’t see (what we can copy and what we cannot copy) and often also who we interact with (whom we copy).
Written communication is a filter that lets you know that someone disagreed with you, but doesn’t let you see their kind smile. Thus people get more quarrelsome.
Reading someone’s article or a book lets your see the presentation of their ideas, but not all the hard work they put into figuring all that out. Thus people get overconfident and assume that any idea they can present is equally valuable.
Advertising is a way to interact with many people. Each one of them will only copy a little bit of your message, but there are thousands of them, so it may be worth it. Even better, the communication is one-sided, so you do not instinctively copy their opinions in turn. (As opposed to a salesman, who must learn to ignore other people’s feedback, which is difficult for most people.)
Banning and blocking people are ways to prevent copying. Voting is a way to encourage copying of content that appeals to people who vote.
Before internet, people copied those they saw on TV, and those who succeeded to write books. On social networks they copy those who write most (unless they are so annoying they get blocked).
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...this all feels like something we could pay attention to, and maybe use to improve the ways we communicate, and thus who we become by communicating to each other...
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As a random crazy thought, most of us probably prefer reading text to watching videos, but what if we required every article to start with a 10 second video that would play automatically when you open the article? For example, the video of the author reading the summary.
That would probably be annoying for many reasons, both for the authors and the audience. So this is not an actual proposal. But I wonder if it would somehow change the emotional background of the website.
(I specifically say a 10 second video, because my objection against videos is that they take too much time, so I would instinctively try to avoid them. But if I knew that on this website, each introductory video is exactly 10 seconds long, I probably wouldn’t mind as a reader.)
Another crazy idea is to integrate the website with something like Khan Academy or Duolingo. Like, every time you read an article, it would offer short educational videos on the same topics in the sidebar, or tell you how to translate the words and sentences in the article to the language you are learning.
I have no idea how to achieve that technically, but I imagine that the experience of reading LessWrong (or any other website that implemented this) would become much less passive. Or, if every article about a topic started with a short optional test on the topic… maybe it would make readers less overconfident.
An article on effective altruism might contain a link to donate to given cause.
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Well, the proposed ideas are probably not good, but I feel that this space is worth exploring anyway, because something very useful could be hidden there. (Maybe not useful for LessWrong, but some other kind of website.)
IDK where else to say this, so I’ll say it here. I find many LW articles hard to follow because they use terms I don’t know. I assume everyone else knows, but I’m a newbie. Ergo I request a kindness: if your article uses a term that’s not common English use (GT3, alignment, etc.), define it the first time you use it.
Not sure if this is a good idea, but some of those links could be added automatically—then we do not need to worry about authors forgetting.
All we need is to maintain a list of [keyword, canonical link] and add a hyperlink to the first occurence of the keyword (or any of its synonyms) in the article. Perhaps these automatic links should look differently from the manually added ones (I imagine a small question mark symbol after the keyword), and perhaps the registered users should have an option to turn this off.
In the meanwhile, you can find most of those things in the list of tags.
Looking at your examples, “GPT” (and “ChatGPT”) is there. “Alignment” is apparently considered too general—it essentially means “making the AI want exactly what you want” (as opposed to making an AI that wants to do some random thing, and maybe obeys you while it is weak, but then starts doing its own thing when it becomes strong) -- so we only have pages on “inner/outer alignment”, “deceptive alignment”, and less frequently used “internal (human) alignment”, “chain of thought alignment” and “general alignment properties”.
Have you heard that the medium is the message? It was written before the internet happened, and said that society becomes tv-like or radio-like if it watches a lot of tv or radio.
It is interesting to see how this idea applies to the internet. I agree with you on that we should not handle the internet as a block, because each side has it’s artifacts. I think there should be more explaration of ideas, but on other sites. LW in it’s current form suited for long essay type posts, which I think is good for it’s stated purpose, methodical discussion of ideas.
There is lots of interesting thinking in the tools for thought space that intersect with your idea.
A few people with interesting, thoughtful ideas;
Michael Nielsen: https://michaelnielsen.org—eg, https://numinous.productions/ttft/
Andy Matuschak: https://andymatuschak.org—eg, https://notes.andymatuschak.org/zJrfPCbY7GcpV9asEc8NTVzXTAV4TvRFMuY6
Linus: https://thesephist.com—https://thesephist.com/posts/materials/
Every year we choose the best articles written on LW and make a book out of them.
Maybe we should also choose a subset of them, with the additional criterium “this would make sense to a person outside the rationalist community who doesn’t know the context” and make videos out of them. Perhaps with the author reading (unless the author wants to remain pseudonymous), plus some illustrations. Not longer than 10 minutes; maybe shorter. Then make a YouTube channel out of them. I wonder how people would react to this. We would probably get some new audience.
It seems like adding a quiz feature that authors can put at the beginning and/or end of a post would boost interactivity by making it more of a game and a challenge (and a very engaging challenge given the usual LW posts). It would probably be a good bet on encouraging more people to read and properly ingest at least one LW article each day. There’s no need for any input at all, let alone data collection; just establish a norm where people put Q&A at the beginning/end and the answers are behind some sort of spoiler barrier.
I want to note that this kind of thing can go horribly wrong in a lot of very different ways, but right now I’m drawing a blank for that.
I miss the old forums. (LW is on the way to this, but the format is a little more social-media.) When I moved from reading novels, and discussing things on threads, to social media posts, my concentration was shot. Maybe coincidence, but when I dumped FB (I never did Twitter) my concentration improved slightly as I recall. Point is that it seems that reading longer things helps me concentrate longer, and reading 5-second things does the opposite. FWIW.