Personally, the thing I think should change with Said is that we need more of him, preferably a dozen more people doing the same thing. If there were a competing site run according to Said’s norms, it would be much better for pursuing the art of rationality than modern LessWrong is; disagreeable challenges to question-framing and social moves are desperately necessary to keep discussion norms truth-tracking rather than convenience-tracking.
But this is not an argument I expect to be able to win without actually trying the experiment. And even then I would expect at least five years would be required to get unambiguous results.
It would definitely be an interesting experiment. Different people would make different predictions about its outcome, but that’s exactly what the experiments are good for.
(My bet would be that the participants would only discuss “safe” topics, such as math and programming.)
Personally, the thing I think should change with Said is that we need more of him, preferably a dozen more people doing the same thing. If there were a competing site run according to Said’s norms, it would be much better for pursuing the art of rationality than modern LessWrong is; disagreeable challenges to question-framing and social moves are desperately necessary to keep discussion norms truth-tracking rather than convenience-tracking.
But this is not an argument I expect to be able to win without actually trying the experiment. And even then I would expect at least five years would be required to get unambiguous results.
It would definitely be an interesting experiment. Different people would make different predictions about its outcome, but that’s exactly what the experiments are good for.
(My bet would be that the participants would only discuss “safe” topics, such as math and programming.)