Sure, LW could be better, but what are you comparing to? Every time I try to have a conversation outside LW/OB I am slapped in the face by how much worse other communities tend to be.
Yes, Less Wrong is better than all other places. But I hope you will agree that this is not an optimistic prognostication. I do not think we are doing particularly well, if you just look at us and look at how we are doing rather than comparing this place to other places.
But it is useless to be superior: Life is not graded on a curve. The best physicist in ancient Greece could not calculate the path of a falling apple. There is no guarantee that adequacy is possible given your hardest effort; therefore spare no thought for whether others are doing worse.
I do not think we are doing the best we possibly can, and I think that is very bad.
Yvain, myself, Anna Salamon, and many others have written hundreds of useful and well-liked posts since The Sequences. In what sense is it “Eliezer’s blog”?
I agree, but these are salient exceptions, not the rule. It is “Eliezer’s blog” in the sense that The Sequences are the most important thing here, but people are barely reading them (or so I hear)
It’s also untrue that Eliezer no longer writes updates.
They are so very, very rare, though. And the others you listed, indeed many of the others who made good contributions at all, have all but stopped.
Yes, Less Wrong is better than all other places. But I hope you will agree that this is not an optimistic prognostication. I do not think we are doing particularly well, if you just look at us and look at how we are doing rather than comparing this place to other places.
I’d like to remind you of some of the words from my favorite essay, which is also one of your favorite essays:
I do not think we are doing the best we possibly can, and I think that is very bad.
I agree, but these are salient exceptions, not the rule. It is “Eliezer’s blog” in the sense that The Sequences are the most important thing here, but people are barely reading them (or so I hear)
They are so very, very rare, though. And the others you listed, indeed many of the others who made good contributions at all, have all but stopped.