LW2.0 is trying to solve intellectual progress online. As Oli pointed out above, creativity and original thinking is a bottleneck. However, I believe there are much better ways of supporting this than having threads of the kind “let’s just get together and be creative and throw out all our half-baked ideas”.
Via metaphor. If we want more black swan startups, we must increase the variance in startups that get funded. If you had 1 million to try to achieve this, I think you’d be better off providing actual seed funding to just 2-3 projects that are actually creative, thereby changing norms and creating incentives for creativity; as opposed to funding regular meetings for random people to jot down and discuss whatever unfinished ideas are on their mind.
Hence, to support creativity on LW2.0, I think the right thing would be to strongly encourage and support people who spend effort developing contrarian arguments or exploring underexplored areas, and do so in a somewhat rigorous/serious manner, rather than just lower the signal-to-noise ratio and effort threshold of some posts and comments.
This view derives from models I find hard-to-verbalize given the time I have available to write this. Happy to double-crux though.
LW2.0 is trying to solve intellectual progress online. As Oli pointed out above, creativity and original thinking is a bottleneck. However, I believe there are much better ways of supporting this than having threads of the kind “let’s just get together and be creative and throw out all our half-baked ideas”.
Via metaphor. If we want more black swan startups, we must increase the variance in startups that get funded. If you had 1 million to try to achieve this, I think you’d be better off providing actual seed funding to just 2-3 projects that are actually creative, thereby changing norms and creating incentives for creativity; as opposed to funding regular meetings for random people to jot down and discuss whatever unfinished ideas are on their mind.
Hence, to support creativity on LW2.0, I think the right thing would be to strongly encourage and support people who spend effort developing contrarian arguments or exploring underexplored areas, and do so in a somewhat rigorous/serious manner, rather than just lower the signal-to-noise ratio and effort threshold of some posts and comments.
This view derives from models I find hard-to-verbalize given the time I have available to write this. Happy to double-crux though.