It fundamentally needs to be a positive process, figuring out techniques to systematically pursue better directions, not just a process of avoiding bad or useless directions. Nearly all the directions are useless; avoiding them is like sweeping sand from a beach.
I think this depends on the nature of the bad direction. A usual bad direction might just up some smallish chunk of a single person’s time, which on its own isn’t that big of a problem (but it does add up, leading to the importance of the things you mentioned). However, one problem with certain topics like drama (sorry Ruby, I don’t have a better word even though I realize it’s problematic) is that it is highly motivating. This means that it easily attracts attention from many more people, that these people will spend much more time proportionally engaging with it, and that it has much more lasting consequences on the community. Thus getting it right seems to matter more than the typical topic.
Yup, I’m glad someone brought this up. I think the right model here is Demons in Imperfect Search. Transposons are a particularly good analogy—they’re genes whose sole function is to copy-and-paste themselves into the genome. If you don’t keep the transposons under control somehow, they’ll multiply and quickly overrun everything else, killing the cell.
So keeping the metaphorical transposons either contained or subcritical is crucial. I think LessWrong handled that basically-successfully with respect to recent events: keeping demon threads at least contained is exactly what the frontpage policy is supposed to do, and the demon threads indeed stayed off the frontpage. It was probably supercritical for a while, but it was localized, so it died down in the end and the rest of the site and community are still basically intact.
(Again, as I mentioned in response to Ruby’s comment, none of this is to say that the recent discussions didn’t serve any useful functional role. Even transposons serve a functional role in some organisms. But the discussions certainly seemed to grow in a way decoupled from any plausible estimate of their usefulness.)
Important thing to note from this model: the goal with demons is just to keep them subcritical and/or contained. Pushing them down to zero doesn’t add much.
I think this depends on the nature of the bad direction. A usual bad direction might just up some smallish chunk of a single person’s time, which on its own isn’t that big of a problem (but it does add up, leading to the importance of the things you mentioned). However, one problem with certain topics like drama (sorry Ruby, I don’t have a better word even though I realize it’s problematic) is that it is highly motivating. This means that it easily attracts attention from many more people, that these people will spend much more time proportionally engaging with it, and that it has much more lasting consequences on the community. Thus getting it right seems to matter more than the typical topic.
Yup, I’m glad someone brought this up. I think the right model here is Demons in Imperfect Search. Transposons are a particularly good analogy—they’re genes whose sole function is to copy-and-paste themselves into the genome. If you don’t keep the transposons under control somehow, they’ll multiply and quickly overrun everything else, killing the cell.
So keeping the metaphorical transposons either contained or subcritical is crucial. I think LessWrong handled that basically-successfully with respect to recent events: keeping demon threads at least contained is exactly what the frontpage policy is supposed to do, and the demon threads indeed stayed off the frontpage. It was probably supercritical for a while, but it was localized, so it died down in the end and the rest of the site and community are still basically intact.
(Again, as I mentioned in response to Ruby’s comment, none of this is to say that the recent discussions didn’t serve any useful functional role. Even transposons serve a functional role in some organisms. But the discussions certainly seemed to grow in a way decoupled from any plausible estimate of their usefulness.)
Important thing to note from this model: the goal with demons is just to keep them subcritical and/or contained. Pushing them down to zero doesn’t add much.
Agreement on the distinction between subcritical/contained and zero, and that there’s usually not value in going all the way to zero.