I actually suspect that the biggest market for this would be EA, not LW. There are already a large number of people who want to work in EA; and many organisations which would like to see certain questions answered.
I do expect a lot of the bounty money to come from the EA community, and for some of the value to come from the Q&A feature also getting use on the EA forum.
But I have reasons to be particularly optimistic about it on LW: The LessWrong community is about thinking, in a more direct way than the EA community is. (i.e. EA community filters for people who want to do good, and then it turns out answering hard questions is a thing you need for that, so you invest in that. Whereas LW community filters directly for the people who like thinking, and who improve their thinking-capacity as a hobby)
There’s also natural clusters, where even within EA space, work on AI Alignment and human rationality tends historically to have clustered on LW rather than in EA spaces. So insofar as those are areas that EA funders are interested in, that work is more likely to be happening on LW, (although it could also happen on the EA forum).
Just thought I’d add: I suspect that support for referencing/footnotes in LW articles would move the content that is posted further towards the direction that you seem to desire whilst depending on a lot less assumptions. You might want to try that first.
I agree that’s a good feature too (and it’s something we’re planning on getting to sooner or later. FYI we just added footnotes to the markdown editor, although they’re trickier to implement UI-wise in the rich editor)
One major thing the team had talked about for “why Q&A” though is generating more, and clearer, demand for content. I touched on this in another comment:
Right now on LW you might be vaguely interested in writing posts to contribute, but it’s not clear what topics people are interested in. If you have a clear idea of a blogpost to write you certainly can do that, but the generator for such posts are “what things are you already thinking about?”
By contrast, the Q&A system gives you clear visibility into “what topics do people actually want to know more about?” and the value is not just that you can answer specific questions, but that you can learn about topics as you do so that can lead to more generation of content. This seems potentially valuable to hedge against future years where “the people with lots of good ideas are mostly doing things other than write blogposts” (such as what happened in 2016 or so). I’m hoping the Q&A system makes the LW community more robust.
I actually suspect that the biggest market for this would be EA, not LW. There are already a large number of people who want to work in EA; and many organisations which would like to see certain questions answered.
I do expect a lot of the bounty money to come from the EA community, and for some of the value to come from the Q&A feature also getting use on the EA forum.
But I have reasons to be particularly optimistic about it on LW: The LessWrong community is about thinking, in a more direct way than the EA community is. (i.e. EA community filters for people who want to do good, and then it turns out answering hard questions is a thing you need for that, so you invest in that. Whereas LW community filters directly for the people who like thinking, and who improve their thinking-capacity as a hobby)
There’s also natural clusters, where even within EA space, work on AI Alignment and human rationality tends historically to have clustered on LW rather than in EA spaces. So insofar as those are areas that EA funders are interested in, that work is more likely to be happening on LW, (although it could also happen on the EA forum).
Just thought I’d add: I suspect that support for referencing/footnotes in LW articles would move the content that is posted further towards the direction that you seem to desire whilst depending on a lot less assumptions. You might want to try that first.
I agree that’s a good feature too (and it’s something we’re planning on getting to sooner or later. FYI we just added footnotes to the markdown editor, although they’re trickier to implement UI-wise in the rich editor)
One major thing the team had talked about for “why Q&A” though is generating more, and clearer, demand for content. I touched on this in another comment:
Is this documented anywhere? What is the syntax, etc.?
Syntax is based on the markdown-it footnotes plugin: https://github.com/markdown-it/markdown-it-footnote
I will add it to my to-do list to generally update our editor guides, and make them more discoverable. Currently not documented anywhere.