Naturally many individuals will update. But as memories fade I think over time the influence of articles like the cited ones will mostly only remain in thick hard to communicate ways such as how they calibrate some rationalist’s heuristics. My complaint isn’t that we fail to note or bring up interesting ideas, my complaint is we fail to propagate them in the community in the same way we propagated original articles. We as a subculture don’t update. I also mention we don’t propagate the original articles as well as we should. Ideas originating off site on average get less debate and are seldom further built on. As several readers have pointed out this might be ameliorated by better indexing. I suspect a big reason for this may be that posts not in a sequence that are of high quality tend to be orphaned and more seldom read.
Concerning cited productivity. Reading the sequences and reading everything since the sequences is a disappointing exercise. I do especially enjoy your work and say Yvains and yes Eliezer’s core is the result of several years perhaps even a decade of low intensity independent research and thought. It is enhanced by several early high quality community members filling in the gaps and extending it, but still. If find it surprising that a much larger LessWrong has been unable to leverage enough crowd-sourcing or even mine enough talent from its readers who are already spending large amounts of time on it, to manage to make as much progress as EY did. To give an specific example of a failure to leverage brains the LessWrong wiki is very useful but it does not match EY’s original hopes by a long-shot.
Did EY eat all the low hanging fruit? Seem unlikely but maybe he did. Regardless we don’t seem to be in the process of standing up on his shoulders.
Naturally many individuals will update. But as memories fade I think over time the influence of articles like the cited ones will mostly only remain in thick hard to communicate ways such as how they calibrate some rationalist’s heuristics. My complaint isn’t that we fail to note or bring up interesting ideas, my complaint is we fail to propagate them in the community in the same way we propagated original articles. We as a subculture don’t update. I also mention we don’t propagate the original articles as well as we should. Ideas originating off site on average get less debate and are seldom further built on. As several readers have pointed out this might be ameliorated by better indexing. I suspect a big reason for this may be that posts not in a sequence that are of high quality tend to be orphaned and more seldom read.
Concerning cited productivity. Reading the sequences and reading everything since the sequences is a disappointing exercise. I do especially enjoy your work and say Yvains and yes Eliezer’s core is the result of several years perhaps even a decade of low intensity independent research and thought. It is enhanced by several early high quality community members filling in the gaps and extending it, but still. If find it surprising that a much larger LessWrong has been unable to leverage enough crowd-sourcing or even mine enough talent from its readers who are already spending large amounts of time on it, to manage to make as much progress as EY did. To give an specific example of a failure to leverage brains the LessWrong wiki is very useful but it does not match EY’s original hopes by a long-shot.
Did EY eat all the low hanging fruit? Seem unlikely but maybe he did. Regardless we don’t seem to be in the process of standing up on his shoulders.