I don’t know how to phrase the question but, basically, “what does that mean”?
Assume a new user comes to LW, reads the New User’s Guide to LessWrong first, then starts browsing the latest posts/recommandations, they will quickly notice that, in practice, LW is mostly about AI or, at least, most posts are about AI, and this has been the case for a while already.
And that is despite the positive karma bias towards Rationality and World modeling by default, which I assume is an effort from you (the LW team) to make LW about rationality, and not about AI (I appreciate the effort).
So, the sentence “What LW is about: “Rationality” ”, is it meant to describe the website, in which case it seems like a fairly inaccurate description ; is it meant to be a promise made to new users, that is “we know that, right now, discussions are focused on AI, but we, the LW team, know that they will come back to rationality / are commited to make them come back to rationality”?
I don’t want to criticize the actions of the LW team, I understand that your are aware of this situation, and that there might not exist a better equilibrium between wanting LW to be about rationality, not wanting to shut down AI discussions because they have some value, not wanting to prevent users from posting about anything (including AI) as long as some quality standards are met. Still, I am worried about the gap a new user would observe between the description of LW written here, and what they will find on the site.
This might be conflating “what this site is about” with “what is currently discussed”. The way I see it, LW is primarily its humungous and curated archives, and only secondarily or tertiarily its feed. The New User experience includes stuff like the Sequence Highlights, for example. If there’s too much AI content for someone’s taste (there certainly is for mine), then a simple solution is to a) focus on the enduring archives, rather than the ephemeral feed; and b) to further downweight the AI tag (-25 karma is nowhere near enough).
That said, it might be warranted for the LW team to adjust the default tag weights for new users, going forward.
Rationality is closely related to cognition and intelligence, so I don’t think it’s as far or distinct from AI as would be implied by your comment. AI features prominently in the original Sequences, for example.
You registered in 2020. Back then, a new user might have asked whether the site is supposed to be about rationality, or rather about Covid.
I’m not sure I share your view, I believe that new user care more about active discussions than reading already established content. I may very much be wrong here.
I agree with you
I think there is more posts about AI now than posts about Covid back then, but I see your point. There were indeed a lot of posts about Covid.
You may be right regarding what new users care about—usually one registers on a site to comment on a discussion, for example -, but the problem is that from that perspective, LW is definitely about AI, no matter what the New User’s Guide or the mods or the long-term users say. After all, AI-related news is the primary reason behind the increased influx of new users to LW, so those users are presumably here for AI content.
One way in which the guide and mod team try to counteract that impression is by showing new users curated stuff from the archives, but it might also be warranted to further deemphasize the feed.
I’m a new member here and curious about the site’s view on responding to really old threads. My first comment was on a post that turned out to be four years old. It was a post by Wei Dai and appeared at the top of the page today, so I assumed it was new. I found the content to be relevant, but I’d like to know if there is a shared notion of “don’t reply to posts that are more than X amount in the past.”
I love getting comments on old posts! (There would be less reason to write if all writing were doomed to be ephemera; the reverse-chronological format of blogs shouldn’t be a straitjacket or death sentence for ideas.)
Absolutely. I’ve just gotten a 30-day trial for Matt Yglesias’ SlowBoring substack, and figured I’d look through the archives… But then I immediately realized that Substack, just like reddit etc., practically doesn’t care about preserving, curating or resurfacing old content. Gwern has a point here on internet communities prioritizing content on different timescales by design, and in that context, LessWrong’s attempts to preserve old content are extremely rare.
I’m very confident that there is no norm of pushing people away from posting on old threads. I’m generally confident that most people appreciate comments on old posts. However, I think it is also true that comments on old posts are unlikely to be seen, voted on, or responded to.
(actually your comment here makes me realize we should probably somehow indicate when there are new comments on the top-of-the-page spotlight post, so people can more easily see and continue the convo)
So does LessWrong, but they quickly disappear (because there’s a high volume of comments). GreaterWrong doesn’t have Spotlight Items so the point is a bit moot, but the idea here is that everyone is nudged more to see new comments on the current Spotlight Item on LessWrong.
I don’t know how to phrase the question but, basically, “what does that mean”?
Assume a new user comes to LW, reads the New User’s Guide to LessWrong first, then starts browsing the latest posts/recommandations, they will quickly notice that, in practice, LW is mostly about AI or, at least, most posts are about AI, and this has been the case for a while already.
And that is despite the positive karma bias towards Rationality and World modeling by default, which I assume is an effort from you (the LW team) to make LW about rationality, and not about AI (I appreciate the effort).
So, the sentence “What LW is about: “Rationality” ”, is it meant to describe the website, in which case it seems like a fairly inaccurate description ; is it meant to be a promise made to new users, that is “we know that, right now, discussions are focused on AI, but we, the LW team, know that they will come back to rationality / are commited to make them come back to rationality”?
I don’t want to criticize the actions of the LW team, I understand that your are aware of this situation, and that there might not exist a better equilibrium between wanting LW to be about rationality, not wanting to shut down AI discussions because they have some value, not wanting to prevent users from posting about anything (including AI) as long as some quality standards are met. Still, I am worried about the gap a new user would observe between the description of LW written here, and what they will find on the site.
A few points.
This might be conflating “what this site is about” with “what is currently discussed”. The way I see it, LW is primarily its humungous and curated archives, and only secondarily or tertiarily its feed. The New User experience includes stuff like the Sequence Highlights, for example. If there’s too much AI content for someone’s taste (there certainly is for mine), then a simple solution is to a) focus on the enduring archives, rather than the ephemeral feed; and b) to further downweight the AI tag (-25 karma is nowhere near enough).
That said, it might be warranted for the LW team to adjust the default tag weights for new users, going forward.
Rationality is closely related to cognition and intelligence, so I don’t think it’s as far or distinct from AI as would be implied by your comment. AI features prominently in the original Sequences, for example.
You registered in 2020. Back then, a new user might have asked whether the site is supposed to be about rationality, or rather about Covid.
Good points
I’m not sure I share your view, I believe that new user care more about active discussions than reading already established content. I may very much be wrong here.
I agree with you
I think there is more posts about AI now than posts about Covid back then, but I see your point. There were indeed a lot of posts about Covid.
Thank you
You may be right regarding what new users care about—usually one registers on a site to comment on a discussion, for example -, but the problem is that from that perspective, LW is definitely about AI, no matter what the New User’s Guide or the mods or the long-term users say. After all, AI-related news is the primary reason behind the increased influx of new users to LW, so those users are presumably here for AI content.
One way in which the guide and mod team try to counteract that impression is by showing new users curated stuff from the archives, but it might also be warranted to further deemphasize the feed.
I’m a new member here and curious about the site’s view on responding to really old threads. My first comment was on a post that turned out to be four years old. It was a post by Wei Dai and appeared at the top of the page today, so I assumed it was new. I found the content to be relevant, but I’d like to know if there is a shared notion of “don’t reply to posts that are more than X amount in the past.”
I love getting comments on old posts! (There would be less reason to write if all writing were doomed to be ephemera; the reverse-chronological format of blogs shouldn’t be a straitjacket or death sentence for ideas.)
Absolutely. I’ve just gotten a 30-day trial for Matt Yglesias’ SlowBoring substack, and figured I’d look through the archives… But then I immediately realized that Substack, just like reddit etc., practically doesn’t care about preserving, curating or resurfacing old content. Gwern has a point here on internet communities prioritizing content on different timescales by design, and in that context, LessWrong’s attempts to preserve old content are extremely rare.
I’m very confident that there is no norm of pushing people away from posting on old threads. I’m generally confident that most people appreciate comments on old posts. However, I think it is also true that comments on old posts are unlikely to be seen, voted on, or responded to.
I agree that if at all there is a counternorm to that, and also with the observation that such comments are often (sadly) ignored.
It’s totally normal to comment on old posts. We deliberate design the forum to make it easier to do and for people to see that you have.
(actually your comment here makes me realize we should probably somehow indicate when there are new comments on the top-of-the-page spotlight post, so people can more easily see and continue the convo)
GreaterWrong shows new comments regardless.
So does LessWrong, but they quickly disappear (because there’s a high volume of comments). GreaterWrong doesn’t have Spotlight Items so the point is a bit moot, but the idea here is that everyone is nudged more to see new comments on the current Spotlight Item on LessWrong.
(i.e. this thing at the top:
)