Much of the same is true of scientific journals. Creating a place to share and publish research is a pretty key piece of intellectual infrastructure, especially for researchers to create artifacts of their thinking along the way.
The point about being ‘cross-posted’ is where I disagree the most.
This is largely original content that counterfactually wouldn’t have been published, or occasionally would have been published but to a much smaller audience. What Failure Looks Like wasn’t crossposted, Anna’s piece on reality-revealing puzzles wasn’t crossposted. I think that Zvi would have still written some on mazes and simulacra, but I imagine he writes substantially more content given the cross-posting available for the LW audience. Could perhaps check his blogging frequency over the last few years to see if that tracks. I recall Zhu telling me he wrote his FAQ because LW offered an audience for it, and likely wouldn’t have done so otherwise. I love everything Abram writes, and while he did have the Intelligent Agent Foundations Forum, it had a much more concise, technical style, tiny audience, and didn’t have the conversational explanations and stories and cartoons that have been so excellent and well received on LW, and it wouldn’t as much have been focused on the implications for rationality of things like logical inductors. Rohin wouldn’t have written his coherence theorems piece or any of his value learning sequence, and I’m pretty sure about that because I personally asked him to write that sequence, which is a great resource and I’ve seen other researchers in the field physically print off to write on and study. Kaj has an excellent series of non-mystical explanations of ideas from insight meditation that started as a response to things Val wrote, and I imagine those wouldn’t have been written quite like that if that context did not exist on LW.
I could keep going, but probably have made the point. It seems weird to not call this collectively a substantial amount of intellectual progress, on a lot of important questions.
I am indeed focusing right now on how to do more ‘conversation’. I’m in the middle of trying to host some public double cruxes for events, for example, and some day we will finally have inline commenting and better draft sharing and so on. It’s obviously not finished.
Rohin wouldn’t have written his coherence theorems piece or any of his value learning sequence, and I’m pretty sure about that because I personally asked him to write that sequence
Yeah, that’s true, though it might have happened at some later point in the future as I got increasingly frustrated by people continuing to cite VNM at me (though probably it would have been a blog post and not a full sequence).
Reading through this comment tree, I feel like there’s a distinction to be made between “LW / AIAF as a platform that aggregates readership and provides better incentives for blogging”, and “the intellectual progress caused by posts on LW / AIAF”. The former seems like a clear and large positive of LW / AIAF, which I think Richard would agree with. For the latter, I tend to agree with Richard, though perhaps not as strongly as he does. Maybe I’d put it as, I only really expect intellectual progress from a few people who work on problems full time who probably would have done similar-ish work if not for LW / AIAF (but likely would not have made it public).
I’d say this mostly for the AI posts. I do read the rationality posts and don’t get a different impression from them, but I also don’t think enough about them to be confident in my opinions there.
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Much of the same is true of scientific journals. Creating a place to share and publish research is a pretty key piece of intellectual infrastructure, especially for researchers to create artifacts of their thinking along the way.
The point about being ‘cross-posted’ is where I disagree the most.
This is largely original content that counterfactually wouldn’t have been published, or occasionally would have been published but to a much smaller audience. What Failure Looks Like wasn’t crossposted, Anna’s piece on reality-revealing puzzles wasn’t crossposted. I think that Zvi would have still written some on mazes and simulacra, but I imagine he writes substantially more content given the cross-posting available for the LW audience. Could perhaps check his blogging frequency over the last few years to see if that tracks. I recall Zhu telling me he wrote his FAQ because LW offered an audience for it, and likely wouldn’t have done so otherwise. I love everything Abram writes, and while he did have the Intelligent Agent Foundations Forum, it had a much more concise, technical style, tiny audience, and didn’t have the conversational explanations and stories and cartoons that have been so excellent and well received on LW, and it wouldn’t as much have been focused on the implications for rationality of things like logical inductors. Rohin wouldn’t have written his coherence theorems piece or any of his value learning sequence, and I’m pretty sure about that because I personally asked him to write that sequence, which is a great resource and I’ve seen other researchers in the field physically print off to write on and study. Kaj has an excellent series of non-mystical explanations of ideas from insight meditation that started as a response to things Val wrote, and I imagine those wouldn’t have been written quite like that if that context did not exist on LW.
I could keep going, but probably have made the point. It seems weird to not call this collectively a substantial amount of intellectual progress, on a lot of important questions.
I am indeed focusing right now on how to do more ‘conversation’. I’m in the middle of trying to host some public double cruxes for events, for example, and some day we will finally have inline commenting and better draft sharing and so on. It’s obviously not finished.
Yeah, that’s true, though it might have happened at some later point in the future as I got increasingly frustrated by people continuing to cite VNM at me (though probably it would have been a blog post and not a full sequence).
Reading through this comment tree, I feel like there’s a distinction to be made between “LW / AIAF as a platform that aggregates readership and provides better incentives for blogging”, and “the intellectual progress caused by posts on LW / AIAF”. The former seems like a clear and large positive of LW / AIAF, which I think Richard would agree with. For the latter, I tend to agree with Richard, though perhaps not as strongly as he does. Maybe I’d put it as, I only really expect intellectual progress from a few people who work on problems full time who probably would have done similar-ish work if not for LW / AIAF (but likely would not have made it public).
I’d say this mostly for the AI posts. I do read the rationality posts and don’t get a different impression from them, but I also don’t think enough about them to be confident in my opinions there.
By “AN” do you mean the AI Alignment Forum, or “AIAF”?
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I did suspect you’d confused it with the Alignment Newsletter :)