Same! LW is an outstanding counterexample to my belief that resurrections are impossible. But I haven’t incorporated it into my gears-level model yet, and I’m unsure how to. What did LW do differently, or which gear in my head caused me to fail to predict this?
The original LW was a clone of Reddit. The Reddit source code was quite complex. I am a software developer, I have looked at that code myself, tried to figure out some things, then gave up.
I do not remember whether I made any predictions at that time. But ignoring what I know now, I probably would have said the following:
Creating a website with all functionality of LessWrong 1.0 is a lot of work. Only a few LessWrong readers are capable of building such complex project. And it would take them a lot of time. Most of people with the required skills could probably get a job at Google, so the opportunity cost of building LessWrong 2.0 is very high.
Is anyone going to pay them, or are they supposed to do it in their free time? If it’s the former, it is going to be very expensive. Is it really a good way to spend so much money? If it’s the latter, it is very unlikely that the project will ever get finished, because it will progress very slowly.
If I understand it correctly, what happened is that some people got paid to work on this full-time. And they turned out to be very good at their job. They rewrote everything from scratch, which was probably the easier way, but it required a lot of time, and a lot of trust because it was “either complete success, or nothing” (as opposed to gradually adding new features to Reddit code).
If I understand it correctly, what happened is that some people got paid to work on this full-time.
This is about what I was going to say in response, before reading your comment.
I think the key factor that makes it different from other examples is that it was a competent person’s full time job.
There are some other things that need to go right in addition to that, but I suspect that there are lots of things that people are correctly outside view gloomy about which can just be done, if someone makes it their first priority.
it must be a competent person (as opposed to merely overconfident)
who really cares about the project (more than about other possible projects)
can convince other people of their competence (the ones who have money)
gets sufficient funding (doesn’t waste their time and energy working a second job)
has autonomy (no manager who would override or second-guess their decisions)
no unexpected disasters (e.g. getting hit by a bus, patent trolls suing the project,...)
Other than the unexpected disasters, it seems like something that a competent civilization should easily do. Once you have competent people, allow them to demonstrate their competence, look for intersection between what they want to do and what you need (or if you are sufficiently rich, just an intersection between what they want to do and what you believe is a good thing), give them money, and let them work.
In real life, having the right skills and sending the right signals is not the same thing; people who do things are not the same as people who decide things; time is wasted on meetings and paperwork.
Just to be clear. There were people working on it who had both agency and competence, but they were working on it as a side project. I think having something be someone’s only priority and full-time job makes a large difference on how much agency someone can bring to bear on a project.
Same! LW is an outstanding counterexample to my belief that resurrections are impossible. But I haven’t incorporated it into my gears-level model yet, and I’m unsure how to. What did LW do differently, or which gear in my head caused me to fail to predict this?
The original LW was a clone of Reddit. The Reddit source code was quite complex. I am a software developer, I have looked at that code myself, tried to figure out some things, then gave up.
I do not remember whether I made any predictions at that time. But ignoring what I know now, I probably would have said the following:
If I understand it correctly, what happened is that some people got paid to work on this full-time. And they turned out to be very good at their job. They rewrote everything from scratch, which was probably the easier way, but it required a lot of time, and a lot of trust because it was “either complete success, or nothing” (as opposed to gradually adding new features to Reddit code).
This is about what I was going to say in response, before reading your comment.
I think the key factor that makes it different from other examples is that it was a competent person’s full time job.
There are some other things that need to go right in addition to that, but I suspect that there are lots of things that people are correctly outside view gloomy about which can just be done, if someone makes it their first priority.
Things that need to go right:
it must be a competent person (as opposed to merely overconfident)
who really cares about the project (more than about other possible projects)
can convince other people of their competence (the ones who have money)
gets sufficient funding (doesn’t waste their time and energy working a second job)
has autonomy (no manager who would override or second-guess their decisions)
no unexpected disasters (e.g. getting hit by a bus, patent trolls suing the project,...)
Other than the unexpected disasters, it seems like something that a competent civilization should easily do. Once you have competent people, allow them to demonstrate their competence, look for intersection between what they want to do and what you need (or if you are sufficiently rich, just an intersection between what they want to do and what you believe is a good thing), give them money, and let them work.
In real life, having the right skills and sending the right signals is not the same thing; people who do things are not the same as people who decide things; time is wasted on meetings and paperwork.
That anyone with any agency and competence was working on it as their primary goal, as opposed to nobody doing so.
Just to be clear. There were people working on it who had both agency and competence, but they were working on it as a side project. I think having something be someone’s only priority and full-time job makes a large difference on how much agency someone can bring to bear on a project.