Basically, I’m claiming that there are competing access needs, here, such as can be found in a classroom in which some students need things to be still and silent, and other students need to fidget and stim.
The Socrati and the Athenians are not entirely in a zero-sum game, but their dynamic has nonzero zero-sum nature. The thing that Socrates needs is inimical to the thing the Athenians need, and vice versa.
I think that’s just … visibly, straightforwardly true, here on LW; you can actually just see how, as the culture has shifted Socratesward, many authors have left.
Other authors have arrived! Socrates had many followers! There were a lot of people who liked his whole deal, and were enjoying the vibe!
But I’m claiming that the current tradeoff leans in the direction of “make things optimal for mesaoptimizer and suboptimal for Duncan_Sabien,” and separately that “things being optimal for mesaoptimizer actually makes LessWrong as a whole more likely to dry up and shut down, since LW depends on people being willing to write essays.”
(The Socrati mode being better for commenters than authors, and the Athenian mode being better for authors than for (some) commenters (such as mesaoptimizer).)
Pulling up a thought from another subthread:
Basically, I’m claiming that there are competing access needs, here, such as can be found in a classroom in which some students need things to be still and silent, and other students need to fidget and stim.
The Socrati and the Athenians are not entirely in a zero-sum game, but their dynamic has nonzero zero-sum nature. The thing that Socrates needs is inimical to the thing the Athenians need, and vice versa.
I think that’s just … visibly, straightforwardly true, here on LW; you can actually just see how, as the culture has shifted Socratesward, many authors have left.
Other authors have arrived! Socrates had many followers! There were a lot of people who liked his whole deal, and were enjoying the vibe!
But I’m claiming that the current tradeoff leans in the direction of “make things optimal for mesaoptimizer and suboptimal for Duncan_Sabien,” and separately that “things being optimal for mesaoptimizer actually makes LessWrong as a whole more likely to dry up and shut down, since LW depends on people being willing to write essays.”
(The Socrati mode being better for commenters than authors, and the Athenian mode being better for authors than for (some) commenters (such as mesaoptimizer).)