As I often say, I haven’t been here long, but I notice a sort of political-esque conflict between empirical clusters of people that I privately refer to as the Nice People and the Forthright People. The Nice People think that being nice is pragmatic. The Forthright People think that too much niceness decreases the signal-to-noise ratio and also that there’s a slippery slope towards vacuous niceness that no longer serves its former pragmatic functions. A lot of it has to do with personality. Not everyone fits neatly, and there are Moderate People, but many fit pretty well.
I also notice policy preferences among these groups. The Nice don’t mind discussion of object-level things that people have been drawn towards as the result of purportedly rational thinking and deciding. The Forthright often prefer technical topics and more meta-level discussion of how to be rational, and many harken back to the Golden Age when LW was, as far as I can tell, basically a way to crowdsource hyperintelligent nerds (in the non-disparaging sense) to work past inadequate mainstream decision theories, and also to do cognitive-scientific philosophizing as opposed to the ceiling-gazing sort. The Nice think that new LW members should be welcomed with open arms and that this helps advance the Cause. The Forthright often profess that the Eternal September is long past and that new members that cannot tolerate their Forthrightness are only reducing the discussion quality further.
The current LW is a not-so-useful (certainly not useless, as far as I’m concerned) compromise between the two extremes. The Nice think that the Forthright are often rude and pedantic (often being from academia, as the Forthright are), and prefer not to post here. The Forthright think that the discussion quality has fallen too far, such that the content stream is too difficult to follow time-efficiently, and that to do so would have little value, and prefer not to post here.
I know that you specifically spoke out against subreddits, but I think subreddits would help. Last time I checked, the post was called Hold Off On Proposing Solutions, not Hold Off On Implementing Solutions Indefinitely. (Excuse my Forthrightness!) Tags are good for getting fed the right content, but subreddits encourage subcultures, and subcultures already exist on LW. If you posted in a more technical subreddit, you could expect more Forthright behavior, but also super-high discussion quality. Forthrightness really isn’t so bad in a semi-academic context; it’s the outside-LW norm. If you posted in a sub-reddit for object-level lifestyle stuff, or miscellaneous stuff, you could expect more Nice behavior; that’s also the outside-LW norm. This might actually be a case of LW collectively overestimating how atypical it is, which is, so ironically, very typical.
That’s an interesting distinction, but I think the worst problem at LW is just that people rarely think of interesting things to write about. I don’t know whether all the low-hanging fruit has been gathered, or if we should be thinking about ways to find good topics. Scott Alexander seems to manage.
whether all the low-hanging fruit has been gathered
Still there is the issue that it is a format of publishing sorted by publishing date. It is not like a library where it is just as easy to find a book published 5 years ago than the one published yesterday because they are sorted by topic or the author’s name or something. Sequences and the wiki help this, still, a timeless view of the whole thing would be IMHO highly useful. A good post should not be “buried” just because it is 4 years old.
There’s a tremendous amount of material on LW. Do you have ideas about how to identify good posts and make them easier to find?
I can think of a solutions, but they might just converge on a few posts. Have a regular favorite posts thread. Alternatively, encourage people to look at high-karma older posts.
There’s a tremendous amount of material on LW. Do you have ideas about how to identify good posts and make them easier to find?
Actually, we could probably use off-the-shelf (literally) product recommendation software. The DB knows what posts people have upvoted and downvoted, and which posts they haven’t looked at yet (in order to get the “new since last visit” colored comment border).
That’s the thing though. My hypothesis is that the ‘people who seem to manage’ have left because the site is a lukewarm compromise between the two extremes that they might prefer it to be. Thus, subreddits.
Like, what would a Class Project to make good contributors on LW look like? Does that sound feasible to you?
Oh man, I’m arguing that blogging ability is innate.
I hope I didn’t come off like I’m going to automatically shoot all suggestions to reinvigorate LW out of the sky. That’s most of the problem with the userbase! I genuinely wonder what such a Class Project would look like, and would also be willing to participate if I am able.
Since my comment was written in the context of Nancy_Lebovitz’s comment, I’m specifically curious about how one would go about molding current members into high-quality contributors. I see a lot of stuff above about finding ways to make the user experience more palatable, but that in itself doesn’t seem to ensure the sort of change that I think most people want to see.
I don’t believe I was against subreddits, just against the two virtually useless ones we have currently. Certainly subreddits work OK on, well, Reddit. Maybe a bit of a segmentation with different topics and different moderation rules is a good idea, but there is no budget for this, as far as I know, and there is little interest from those still nominally in charge. In fact, I am not sure why Trike doesn’t just pull the plug. It costs them money, there are no ads or any other revenue, I am guessing.
In my view, you’re asking the wrong question. The major contributors are doing great; they have attracted their own audiences. A better question might be: how can LW grow promising new posters in to future major contributors (who may later migrate off the platform)?
I had some ideas that don’t require changing the LW source that I’ll now create polls for:
Should Less Wrong encourage readers to write appreciative private messages for posts that they like?
[pollid:976]
Should we add something to the FAQ about how having people tear your ideas apart is normal and expected behavior and not necessarily a sign that you’re doing anything wrong?
[pollid:977]
Should we add something to the FAQ encouraging people to use smiley faces when they write critical comments? (Smiley faces take up very little space, so don’t affect the signal-to-noise-ratio much, and help reinforce the idea that criticism is normal and expected. The FAQ could explain this.)
[pollid:978]
We could start testing these ideas informally ASAP, make a FAQ change if polls are bullish on the ideas, and then announce them more broadly in a Discussion post if they seem to be working well. To keep track of how the ideas seem to be working out, people could post their experiences with them in this subthread.
In general, we could improve the onboarding experience of LW.
“Hello, I see you found LW. Here is your welcome package which consists of a first-aid trauma kit, a consent form for amputations, and a coupon for a PTSD therapy session...”
I imagine there are UI design best practices, like watching new users try out the site, that could be followed. A similarly serious approach I’ve seen is having a designated “help out the newbie” role, either as someone people are encouraged to approach or specifically pairing mentees with mentors.
Both of those probably cost more than they deliver. A more reasonable approach would be having two home pages: one for logged-in users that probably links to /r/all/new (or the list version), and one for new users that explains more about LW, and maybe has a flowchart about where to start reading based on interests.
So the homepage already explains some stuff about LW. What do you think is missing?
I’d guess we can get 80% of the value of a flowchart with some kind of bulleted question/recommendation list like the one at http://lesswrong.com/about/ Maybe each bullet should link to more posts though? Or recommend an entire sequence/tag/wiki page/something else? And the bullets could be better chosen?
It looks like the About page has been in approximately its current form since September 2012, including the placement of the FAQ link. For users who have discovered LW since September 2012, how have you interacted with the FAQ?
[pollid:981]
If you spent time reading it, did you find it useful?
[pollid:982]
Should we increase its prominence by linking to it from the home page too?
I figure an exhaustive FAQ isn’t that bad, since it’s indexed by question… you don’t have to read all the questions, just the ones you’re interested in.
No, it is not bad at all. But it does what it says on the tin, answers questions. When starting with LW from zero there are no questions yet or not many, but more like exploration.
I think that while appreciative messages are (I imagine) pleasant to get, I don’t think they are the highest form of praise that a poster can get. I imagine that if I wrote a LW post, the highest form of praise to me would be comments that take the ideas expressed in a post (provided they are actually interesting) and develop them further, perhaps create new ideas that would build upon them. I imagine that seeing other people synthesizing their ideas with your ideas would be perhaps the best praise a poster could get.
While comments that nitpick the edge cases of the ideas expressed in a post obviously have their value, often they barely touch the main thesis of the post. An author might find it annoying having to respond to people who mostly nitpick his/her offhand remarks, instead of engaging with the main ideas of the post which the author finds the most interesting (that’s why he/she wrote it). The situation when you write a comment and somehow your offhand remark becomes the main target of responses (whereas nobody comments on the main idea you’ve tried say) is quite common.
I am not saying that we should discourage people from commenting on remarks that are not central to the post or comment. I am trying to say that arguing about the main thesis is probably much more pleasant than arguing about offhand remarks, and, as I have said before, seeing other people take your ideas and develop them further is even more pleasant. Of course, only if those ideas are actually any good. That said, even if the idea is flawed, perhaps there is a grain of truth that can be salvaged? For example, maybe the idea works under some kind of very specific conditions? I think that most people would be more likely to post if they knew that even commenters discovered flaws in their ideas, the same commenters would be willing to help to identify whether something can be done to fix those flaws.
(This comments only covers LW posts (and comments) where posters present their own ideas. Not all posts are like that, e.g. many summarize arguments, articles and books by others)
Maybe it would be a good thing for the site if people were encouraged to write critical reviews of something in their fields, the way SSC does? It has been mentioned that criticizing is easier than creating.
I do have something specific in mind (about how plant physiology is often divorced from population research), but I am in a minority here, so it might be more interesting for most people to read about other stuff.
I am in a minority here, so it might be more interesting for most people to read about other stuff
You mean you are studying a field most LWers are unfamiliar with? Well that means we can learn more from your post, right? ;)
If people don’t find it interesting they won’t read it. Little harm done. Polls indicate that LWers want to see more content, and I think you’re displaying the exact sort of self-effacing attitude that is holding us back :)
I’m not guaranteeing that people will vote up your post or anything, but the entire point of the voting system is to help people find good content and ignore bad content. So upvoted posts are more valuable than downvoted posts are harmful.
Thank you, I will do it ASAP, I’m just a bit rushed by PhD schedule and some other work that can be done only in summer. Do you have similar observations? It would be great to compile them into a post, because my own experience is based more on literature and less on personal communication, for personal reasons.
I really don’t have any similar observations, since I mostly focused on biochem and computational bio in school.
I’m actually not entirely sure what details you’re thinking of—I’m imagining something like the influence of selective pressure from other members of the same species, which could cover things like how redwoods are so tall because other redwoods block out light below the canopy. On the other hand, insight into the dynamics of population biologists and those studying plant physiology would also be interesting.
According to the 2014 survey we have about 30 biologists on here, and there are considerably more people here who take an interest in such things. Go ahead and post—the community might say they want less of it, but I’d bet at 4:1 odds that the community will be receptive.
No, I meant rather what between-different-fields-of-biology observations you might have. It doesn’t matter what you study, specifically. It’s more like ‘but why did those biochists study the impact of gall on probiotics for a whole fortnight of cultivation, if every physiologist knows that the probiotic pill cannot possibly be stuck in the GI tract for so long? thing.’ Have you encountered this before?
I can come up with a few examples that seemed obvious that they wouldn’t work in retrospect, mostly having to do with gene insertion using A. tumefaciens, but none that I honestly predicted before I learned that they didn’t work. Generally, the biological research at my institution seemed to be pretty practical, if boring. On the other hand, I was an undergrad, so there may have been obvious mistakes I missed—that’s part of what I’d be interested in learning.
Oh, I really can’t tell you much about that:) In my field, it’s much more basic. Somehow, even though everyone knows that young ferns exist because adult ferns reproduce, there are very few studies that incorporate adult ferns into young ferns’ most crucial life choices (like, what to produce—sperm or eggs.) I have no idea why it is so beyond simple laboratory convenience. It is not even a mistake, it’s a complete orthogonality of study approaches.
Should we add something to the FAQ encouraging people to use smiley faces when they write critical comments?
Hmm. I typically see emoticons as tied to emotion, and am unsurprised to see that women use them more than men. While a LW that used emoticons well might be a warmer and more pleasant place, I’m worried about an uncanny valley.
Putting smiley faces on critical comments is likely to encourage putting smiley faces on anything that may be perceived as negative, which in turn will lead people to put smiley faces on actual hostility. Putting a smiley face on hostility just turns it into slightly more passive aggressive hostility (how dare you react to this as if it’s hostile, see, I put a smiley face on) and should be discouraged.
I also worry that if we start putting smiley faces on critical comments, we’ll get to the point where it’s expected and someone whose comments are perceived as hostile will be told “it’s your own fault—you should have put a smiley face on”.
Should we add something to the FAQ about how having people tear your ideas apart is normal and expected behavior and not necessarily a sign that you’re doing anything wrong?
Should we add something to the FAQ encouraging people to use smiley faces when they write critical comments?
I believe that the most LWers have some STEM background, so they are already familiar with such level of criticism, therefore criticism-is-normal disclaimers aren’t necessary. Am I wrong? :)
Should Less Wrong encourage readers to write appreciative private messages for posts that they like?
Positive reinforcement is a thing. But how are you going to efficiently encourage readers to do that? :) Also, we have karma system, which (partially?) solves the feedback problem.
I believe that the most LWers have some STEM background, so they are already familiar with such level of criticism, therefore criticism-is-normal disclaimers aren’t necessary. Am I wrong? :)
Possibly, given that lukeprog, Eliezer, and Yvain have all complained that writing LW posts is not very rewarding. Reframing criticism might do a bit to mitigate this effect on the margin :)
Positive reinforcement is a thing. But how are you going to efficiently encourage readers to do that? :) Also, we have karma system, which (partially?) solves the feedback problem.
One of the things that strikes me as interesting reading Eliezer’s old sequence posts is the positive comments that were heaped on him in the absence of a karma system. I imagine these were important in motivating him to write one post a day for several years straight. Nowadays we consider such comments low-signal and tell people to upvote instead. But getting upvotes is not as rewarding as getting appreciative comments in my view. I imagine that 10 verbal compliments would do much more for me than 10 upvotes. In terms of encouraging readers… like I said, put it in the FAQ and announce it in a discussion post. Every time someone sends me an encouraging PM, I get reminded to send others encouraging PMs when I like their work.
I recently wrote this, which would probably have been of interest to LW. But when I considered submitting it, my brain objected that someone would make a comment like “you shouldn’t have picked a name that already redirects to something else on wikipedia”, and… I just didn’t feel like bothering with that kind of trivia. (I know I’m allowed to ignore comments like that, but I still didn’t feel like bothering.)
I don’t know if that was fair or accurate of my brain, but Scott has also said that the comments on LW discourage him from posting, so it seems relevant to bring up.
The HN comments, and the comments on the post itself, weren’t all interesting, but they weren’t that particular kind of boring.
One of those HN comments made me realize that you’d perfectly described a business situation that I’d just been in (a B2B integration, where the counterparty defected scuttling the deal), so they were interesting to me. Maybe this argues that you should have included more examples, but it’s unlikely that it would have sparked that thought except that it was the perfect example.
I doubt there’s much to be done. I wouldn’t be surprised if MIRI shut down LessWrong soon. It’s something of a status drain because of the whole Roko thing and no one seems to use it anymore. Even the open threads seem to be losing steam.
We still get most of the former value from the SlateStarCodex, Gwern.net, and the tumblr scene. Even for rationality, I’m not sure LessWrong is needed now that we have CFAR.
I don’t think a shutdown is even remotely likely. LW is still the Schelling point for rationalist discussion; Roko-gate will follow us regardless; SSC/Gwern.net are personal blogs with discussion sections that are respectively unusable and nonexistent. CFAR is still an IRL thing, and almost all of MIRI/CFAR’s fans have come from the internet.
Agreed though that LW is slowly losing steam, though. Not sure what should be done about it.
Agreed though that LW is slowly losing steam, though. Not sure what should be done about it.
To have a website with content like the original Sequences, we need someone who (a) can produce enough great content, and (b) believes that producing content for a website is the best use of their time.
It already sounds like a paradox: the more rational and awesome a person is, the more likely it is that they can use their time much better than writing a blog.
Well, unless they use the blog to sell something...
I think Eliezer wrote the original Sequences pretty much to find people to cooperate with him at MIRI, and to make people more sympathetic and willing to send money to MIRI. Mission accomplished.
What would be the next mission (for someone else) which could be accomplished by writing interesting articles to LW?
If Less Wrong is, indeed, losing steam as a community (I wouldn’t have considered myself part of it until recently, and hadn’t kept up with it before then), there are options to deal with it.
First, we could create enjoyable media to be enjoyed by large quantities of people, with rationalistic principles, and link back to Less Wrong in it. HPMOR is already a thing, and certainly does well for its purpose of introducing people to and giving some basic instruction in applied rationality. However, as it’s over, the flow of people from the readership it generated has ceased.
Other media is a possibility. If people are interested in supporting Less Wrong and CFAR specifically, there could perhaps be a youtube channel made for it; maybe streaming live discussions and taking questions from the audience. Non-video means are also, obviously, possible. Webcomics are somewhat niche, but could drive readership if a high quality one was made. I’m loathe to suggest getting already-established content creators to read and support Less Wrong, partially because of my own reticence in such, and partially because of a host of problems that would come with that, as our community is somewhat insular, and though welcoming in our own way, Less Wrong often comes off to people as arrogant or elitist.
On that note, while I would not suggest lowering our standards for discourse, I think that in appealing to a larger community it’s necessary to realize that newer members of the community may not have the background necessary to take constructively the criticisms given. I’m not sure how to resolve this problem. Being told to “go and read such and such, then you’ll understand” comes off rudely. Perhaps some form of community primer link on the front page, regarding customs here? The about page is a little cluttered and not entirely helpful. That in addition to a marker next to someone’s name indicating they’re new to Less Wrong could do a lot to help. Furthermore, a section for the “younger” (in terms of account) posters with encouragement for the older ones to come in and help out may be of help.
Well, I could go on for a while longer, but I think that’s enough of a thought dump for now.
“It seems that, if you just present the correct information, five things happen,” he said. “One, students think they know it. Two, they don’t pay their utmost attention. Three, they don’t recognize that what was presented differs from what they were already thinking. Four, they don’t learn a thing. And five, perhaps most troublingly, they get more confident in the ideas they were thinking before.”
If the student feels confused by the video they are more likely to actually update.
The kind of informational videos that are popular aren’t useful for learning and vice versa.
I voted other. The reason I suggested nontextual formats is because I don’t believe that rationality can be taught solely through text, even if I personally prefer to learn that way. I have multiple friends who do not learn well at all in such a manner, but I believe that both of them would learn much more effectively from a video; I suspect this extends out to others, for whom the text dump nature of this site might be intimidating.
I’m not sure about webcomics or Youtube videos. LW is full of essays on abstract philosophical topics; if you don’t like reading, you’re probably not going to get much out of it. I think the biggest ways for people to help LW are:
Write quality posts. There are a bunch of suggestions in this FAQ question.
Share Less Wrong posts with thoughtful people who will find them interesting. Think Facebook friends, your favorite subreddit, etc. Ideally people who are even smarter than you are.
Improving the about page is also high-leverage. I encourage you to suggest concrete changes or simply ignore the existing one and write an alternative about page from scratch so we can take the best ideas from each.
Certainly, writing high quality posts is essential for improving on what we already do well, but as I mentioned in a reply above, not everyone learns best—or at all effectively—that way. To be clear, I’m not suggesting we do any less of that, but I think that we may be limiting ourselves somewhat by producing only that style of content. I think that we would be able to get more people interested in Less Wrong by producing non-textual content as well.
I will note, however, that when I suggested webcomics, I wasn’t specifically intending a webcomic about Less Wrong (although one about biases in general could work quite well!) so much as one written by someone from Less Wrong, with a rationalist bent, to get people interested in it. Although, admittedly, going at it with that goal in mind may produce less effective content.
Regarding improving the about page, the main thing that jumped out to me is that there seem to be far too many hyperlinks. My view of the About page is that it should be for someone just coming into Less Wrong, from some link out there on the net, with no clue what it is. Therefore, there should be less example in the form of a list of links, and more explanation as to what Less Wrong’s function is, and what its community is like.
If someone wants to create a rationalist webcomic, Youtube channel, etc. I’m all for that.
I did the current About page. I put in a lot of links because I remembered someone saying that it seems like people tend to get in to Less Wrong when they read a particular article that really resonates with them, so I figured I would put in lots of links so that people might find one that would resonate. Also, when I come across a new blog that seems interesting, I often look over a bunch of posts trying to find the gems, and providing lots of links seems like it would facilitate this behavior.
What important info about LW’s function/community would you like to see on the about page?
Part of the reason it is losing steam is there is a small quantity of posters that post wayyyy too much using up everyone’s time and they hardly contribute anything. Too many contrarians.
We have a lot of regular haters that could use some toning down.
It’s true that Less Wrong has a reputation for crazy ideas. But as long as it has that reputation, we might as well continue posting crazy ideas here, since crazy ideas can be quite valuable. If LW was “rebooted” in some other form, and crazy ideas were discussed there, the new forum would probably acquire its own reputation for crazy ideas soon enough.
The great thing about LW is that it allows a smart, dedicated, unknown person to share their ideas with a bunch of smart people who will either explain why it’s wrong or change their actions based on it relatively quickly. Many of LW’s former major contributors have now independently acquired large audiences that pay attention to their ideas, so they don’t need LW anymore. But it’s very valuable to leave LW open in order to net new contributors like Nate Soares (who started out writing book reviews for LW and was recently promoted to be MIRI’s executive director). (Come to think of it, lukeprog was also “discovered” through Less Wrong as well… he went from atheist blogger to LW contributor to MIRI visiting fellow to MIRI director.)
Consider also infrequent bloggers. Kaj Sotala’s LW posts seem to get substantially more comments than the posts on his personal blog. Building and retaining an audience on an independent blog requires frequent posting, self-promotion, etc… we shouldn’t require this of people who have something important to say.
I recently joined this site after lurking for awhile. Are blog contributions of that sort are the primary purpose of Less Wrong?
It seems like it fulfills a niche that the avenues you listed do not: specifically, in the capacity of a community rather than an individual, academic, or professional endeavor.
There are applications of rational thought present in these threads that I don’t see gathered anywhere else. I’m sure I’m missing something here, but could viewing Less Wrong as a potential breeding ground for contributors of that kind be useful?
I realize it’s a difficult line to follow without facing the problems inherent to any community, especially one that preaches a Way.
I haven’t encountered the rationalist tumblr scene. Is such a community there?
Eh, it is just useful to have a generic discussion forum on the Internet with a high average IQ and a certain culture of epistemic sanity / trying to avoid at least the worst fallacies and biases. If out of the many ideas in the sequences, at least “tabooing” would get out into the wild so people on other forums would get more used to discussing actual things instead of labels and categories, it could become bearable out there. For example you can hardly have a sane discussion in economics.reddit.com because labels like capitalism and socialism being used as rallying flags.
What changes would LW require to make itself attractive again to the major contributors who left and now have their own blogs?
As I often say, I haven’t been here long, but I notice a sort of political-esque conflict between empirical clusters of people that I privately refer to as the Nice People and the Forthright People. The Nice People think that being nice is pragmatic. The Forthright People think that too much niceness decreases the signal-to-noise ratio and also that there’s a slippery slope towards vacuous niceness that no longer serves its former pragmatic functions. A lot of it has to do with personality. Not everyone fits neatly, and there are Moderate People, but many fit pretty well.
I also notice policy preferences among these groups. The Nice don’t mind discussion of object-level things that people have been drawn towards as the result of purportedly rational thinking and deciding. The Forthright often prefer technical topics and more meta-level discussion of how to be rational, and many harken back to the Golden Age when LW was, as far as I can tell, basically a way to crowdsource hyperintelligent nerds (in the non-disparaging sense) to work past inadequate mainstream decision theories, and also to do cognitive-scientific philosophizing as opposed to the ceiling-gazing sort. The Nice think that new LW members should be welcomed with open arms and that this helps advance the Cause. The Forthright often profess that the Eternal September is long past and that new members that cannot tolerate their Forthrightness are only reducing the discussion quality further.
The current LW is a not-so-useful (certainly not useless, as far as I’m concerned) compromise between the two extremes. The Nice think that the Forthright are often rude and pedantic (often being from academia, as the Forthright are), and prefer not to post here. The Forthright think that the discussion quality has fallen too far, such that the content stream is too difficult to follow time-efficiently, and that to do so would have little value, and prefer not to post here.
I know that you specifically spoke out against subreddits, but I think subreddits would help. Last time I checked, the post was called Hold Off On Proposing Solutions, not Hold Off On Implementing Solutions Indefinitely. (Excuse my Forthrightness!) Tags are good for getting fed the right content, but subreddits encourage subcultures, and subcultures already exist on LW. If you posted in a more technical subreddit, you could expect more Forthright behavior, but also super-high discussion quality. Forthrightness really isn’t so bad in a semi-academic context; it’s the outside-LW norm. If you posted in a sub-reddit for object-level lifestyle stuff, or miscellaneous stuff, you could expect more Nice behavior; that’s also the outside-LW norm. This might actually be a case of LW collectively overestimating how atypical it is, which is, so ironically, very typical.
That’s an interesting distinction, but I think the worst problem at LW is just that people rarely think of interesting things to write about. I don’t know whether all the low-hanging fruit has been gathered, or if we should be thinking about ways to find good topics. Scott Alexander seems to manage.
Still there is the issue that it is a format of publishing sorted by publishing date. It is not like a library where it is just as easy to find a book published 5 years ago than the one published yesterday because they are sorted by topic or the author’s name or something. Sequences and the wiki help this, still, a timeless view of the whole thing would be IMHO highly useful. A good post should not be “buried” just because it is 4 years old.
There’s a tremendous amount of material on LW. Do you have ideas about how to identify good posts and make them easier to find?
I can think of a solutions, but they might just converge on a few posts. Have a regular favorite posts thread. Alternatively, encourage people to look at high-karma older posts.
Actually, we could probably use off-the-shelf (literally) product recommendation software. The DB knows what posts people have upvoted and downvoted, and which posts they haven’t looked at yet (in order to get the “new since last visit” colored comment border).
That’s the thing though. My hypothesis is that the ‘people who seem to manage’ have left because the site is a lukewarm compromise between the two extremes that they might prefer it to be. Thus, subreddits.
Like, what would a Class Project to make good contributors on LW look like? Does that sound feasible to you?
Oh man, I’m arguing that blogging ability is innate.
Obviously there’s an innate portion to blogging ability. We can still manipulate the environmental portion.
I hope I didn’t come off like I’m going to automatically shoot all suggestions to reinvigorate LW out of the sky. That’s most of the problem with the userbase! I genuinely wonder what such a Class Project would look like, and would also be willing to participate if I am able.
Since my comment was written in the context of Nancy_Lebovitz’s comment, I’m specifically curious about how one would go about molding current members into high-quality contributors. I see a lot of stuff above about finding ways to make the user experience more palatable, but that in itself doesn’t seem to ensure the sort of change that I think most people want to see.
I don’t believe I was against subreddits, just against the two virtually useless ones we have currently. Certainly subreddits work OK on, well, Reddit. Maybe a bit of a segmentation with different topics and different moderation rules is a good idea, but there is no budget for this, as far as I know, and there is little interest from those still nominally in charge. In fact, I am not sure why Trike doesn’t just pull the plug. It costs them money, there are no ads or any other revenue, I am guessing.
In my view, you’re asking the wrong question. The major contributors are doing great; they have attracted their own audiences. A better question might be: how can LW grow promising new posters in to future major contributors (who may later migrate off the platform)?
I had some ideas that don’t require changing the LW source that I’ll now create polls for:
Should Less Wrong encourage readers to write appreciative private messages for posts that they like?
[pollid:976]
Should we add something to the FAQ about how having people tear your ideas apart is normal and expected behavior and not necessarily a sign that you’re doing anything wrong?
[pollid:977]
Should we add something to the FAQ encouraging people to use smiley faces when they write critical comments? (Smiley faces take up very little space, so don’t affect the signal-to-noise-ratio much, and help reinforce the idea that criticism is normal and expected. The FAQ could explain this.)
[pollid:978]
We could start testing these ideas informally ASAP, make a FAQ change if polls are bullish on the ideas, and then announce them more broadly in a Discussion post if they seem to be working well. To keep track of how the ideas seem to be working out, people could post their experiences with them in this subthread.
Does anyone read the FAQ? Specifically, do the newbies look at the FAQ while being in the state of newbiedom?
At least some do. In general, we could improve the onboarding experience of LW.
“Hello, I see you found LW. Here is your welcome package which consists of a first-aid trauma kit, a consent form for amputations, and a coupon for a PTSD therapy session...”
X-)
...and a box of paperclips.
...please don’t use it to tease resident AIs, it’s likely to end very very badly...
What concrete actions could we take to improve the onboarding experience?
I imagine there are UI design best practices, like watching new users try out the site, that could be followed. A similarly serious approach I’ve seen is having a designated “help out the newbie” role, either as someone people are encouraged to approach or specifically pairing mentees with mentors.
Both of those probably cost more than they deliver. A more reasonable approach would be having two home pages: one for logged-in users that probably links to /r/all/new (or the list version), and one for new users that explains more about LW, and maybe has a flowchart about where to start reading based on interests.
So the homepage already explains some stuff about LW. What do you think is missing?
I’d guess we can get 80% of the value of a flowchart with some kind of bulleted question/recommendation list like the one at http://lesswrong.com/about/ Maybe each bullet should link to more posts though? Or recommend an entire sequence/tag/wiki page/something else? And the bullets could be better chosen?
...yes.
It’s linked to from the About page. Scroll to the bottom and you can see it has over 40,000 views: http://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/FAQ But it’s not among the top 10 most viewed pages on the LW wiki: http://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Special:Statistics So it seems as though the FAQ is not super discoverable.
It looks like the About page has been in approximately its current form since September 2012, including the placement of the FAQ link. For users who have discovered LW since September 2012, how have you interacted with the FAQ?
[pollid:981]
If you spent time reading it, did you find it useful?
[pollid:982]
Should we increase its prominence by linking to it from the home page too?
[pollid:983]
I went directly to the sequences, not sure why. Probably the sheer size of the list of contents was kind of intimidating.
“the sheer size of the list of contents”—hm? What are you referring to?
The FAQ
I figure an exhaustive FAQ isn’t that bad, since it’s indexed by question… you don’t have to read all the questions, just the ones you’re interested in.
No, it is not bad at all. But it does what it says on the tin, answers questions. When starting with LW from zero there are no questions yet or not many, but more like exploration.
I think that while appreciative messages are (I imagine) pleasant to get, I don’t think they are the highest form of praise that a poster can get. I imagine that if I wrote a LW post, the highest form of praise to me would be comments that take the ideas expressed in a post (provided they are actually interesting) and develop them further, perhaps create new ideas that would build upon them. I imagine that seeing other people synthesizing their ideas with your ideas would be perhaps the best praise a poster could get.
While comments that nitpick the edge cases of the ideas expressed in a post obviously have their value, often they barely touch the main thesis of the post. An author might find it annoying having to respond to people who mostly nitpick his/her offhand remarks, instead of engaging with the main ideas of the post which the author finds the most interesting (that’s why he/she wrote it). The situation when you write a comment and somehow your offhand remark becomes the main target of responses (whereas nobody comments on the main idea you’ve tried say) is quite common.
I am not saying that we should discourage people from commenting on remarks that are not central to the post or comment. I am trying to say that arguing about the main thesis is probably much more pleasant than arguing about offhand remarks, and, as I have said before, seeing other people take your ideas and develop them further is even more pleasant. Of course, only if those ideas are actually any good. That said, even if the idea is flawed, perhaps there is a grain of truth that can be salvaged? For example, maybe the idea works under some kind of very specific conditions? I think that most people would be more likely to post if they knew that even commenters discovered flaws in their ideas, the same commenters would be willing to help to identify whether something can be done to fix those flaws.
(This comments only covers LW posts (and comments) where posters present their own ideas. Not all posts are like that, e.g. many summarize arguments, articles and books by others)
Maybe it would be a good thing for the site if people were encouraged to write critical reviews of something in their fields, the way SSC does? It has been mentioned that criticizing is easier than creating.
Sounds like a good idea. Do it!
I do have something specific in mind (about how plant physiology is often divorced from population research), but I am in a minority here, so it might be more interesting for most people to read about other stuff.
You mean you are studying a field most LWers are unfamiliar with? Well that means we can learn more from your post, right? ;)
If people don’t find it interesting they won’t read it. Little harm done. Polls indicate that LWers want to see more content, and I think you’re displaying the exact sort of self-effacing attitude that is holding us back :)
I’m not guaranteeing that people will vote up your post or anything, but the entire point of the voting system is to help people find good content and ignore bad content. So upvoted posts are more valuable than downvoted posts are harmful.
I, for one, would be interested in such a post.
Thank you, I will do it ASAP, I’m just a bit rushed by PhD schedule and some other work that can be done only in summer. Do you have similar observations? It would be great to compile them into a post, because my own experience is based more on literature and less on personal communication, for personal reasons.
I really don’t have any similar observations, since I mostly focused on biochem and computational bio in school.
I’m actually not entirely sure what details you’re thinking of—I’m imagining something like the influence of selective pressure from other members of the same species, which could cover things like how redwoods are so tall because other redwoods block out light below the canopy. On the other hand, insight into the dynamics of population biologists and those studying plant physiology would also be interesting.
According to the 2014 survey we have about 30 biologists on here, and there are considerably more people here who take an interest in such things. Go ahead and post—the community might say they want less of it, but I’d bet at 4:1 odds that the community will be receptive.
...you know, this is actually odd. I would expect ten biologists to take over a free discussion board. Where are those people?
No, I meant rather what between-different-fields-of-biology observations you might have. It doesn’t matter what you study, specifically. It’s more like ‘but why did those biochists study the impact of gall on probiotics for a whole fortnight of cultivation, if every physiologist knows that the probiotic pill cannot possibly be stuck in the GI tract for so long? thing.’ Have you encountered this before?
I can come up with a few examples that seemed obvious that they wouldn’t work in retrospect, mostly having to do with gene insertion using A. tumefaciens, but none that I honestly predicted before I learned that they didn’t work. Generally, the biological research at my institution seemed to be pretty practical, if boring. On the other hand, I was an undergrad, so there may have been obvious mistakes I missed—that’s part of what I’d be interested in learning.
Oh, I really can’t tell you much about that:) In my field, it’s much more basic. Somehow, even though everyone knows that young ferns exist because adult ferns reproduce, there are very few studies that incorporate adult ferns into young ferns’ most crucial life choices (like, what to produce—sperm or eggs.) I have no idea why it is so beyond simple laboratory convenience. It is not even a mistake, it’s a complete orthogonality of study approaches.
I don’t recommend smiley faces—I don’t think they add much.
I do recommend that people be explicit if they like something about a post or comment.
Hmm. I typically see emoticons as tied to emotion, and am unsurprised to see that women use them more than men. While a LW that used emoticons well might be a warmer and more pleasant place, I’m worried about an uncanny valley.
Putting smiley faces on critical comments is likely to encourage putting smiley faces on anything that may be perceived as negative, which in turn will lead people to put smiley faces on actual hostility. Putting a smiley face on hostility just turns it into slightly more passive aggressive hostility (how dare you react to this as if it’s hostile, see, I put a smiley face on) and should be discouraged.
I also worry that if we start putting smiley faces on critical comments, we’ll get to the point where it’s expected and someone whose comments are perceived as hostile will be told “it’s your own fault—you should have put a smiley face on”.
I believe that the most LWers have some STEM background, so they are already familiar with such level of criticism, therefore criticism-is-normal disclaimers aren’t necessary. Am I wrong? :)
Positive reinforcement is a thing. But how are you going to efficiently encourage readers to do that? :) Also, we have karma system, which (partially?) solves the feedback problem.
Possibly, given that lukeprog, Eliezer, and Yvain have all complained that writing LW posts is not very rewarding. Reframing criticism might do a bit to mitigate this effect on the margin :)
One of the things that strikes me as interesting reading Eliezer’s old sequence posts is the positive comments that were heaped on him in the absence of a karma system. I imagine these were important in motivating him to write one post a day for several years straight. Nowadays we consider such comments low-signal and tell people to upvote instead. But getting upvotes is not as rewarding as getting appreciative comments in my view. I imagine that 10 verbal compliments would do much more for me than 10 upvotes. In terms of encouraging readers… like I said, put it in the FAQ and announce it in a discussion post. Every time someone sends me an encouraging PM, I get reminded to send others encouraging PMs when I like their work.
I recently wrote this, which would probably have been of interest to LW. But when I considered submitting it, my brain objected that someone would make a comment like “you shouldn’t have picked a name that already redirects to something else on wikipedia”, and… I just didn’t feel like bothering with that kind of trivia. (I know I’m allowed to ignore comments like that, but I still didn’t feel like bothering.)
I don’t know if that was fair or accurate of my brain, but Scott has also said that the comments on LW discourage him from posting, so it seems relevant to bring up.
The HN comments, and the comments on the post itself, weren’t all interesting, but they weren’t that particular kind of boring.
One of those HN comments made me realize that you’d perfectly described a business situation that I’d just been in (a B2B integration, where the counterparty defected scuttling the deal), so they were interesting to me. Maybe this argues that you should have included more examples, but it’s unlikely that it would have sparked that thought except that it was the perfect example.
I doubt there’s much to be done. I wouldn’t be surprised if MIRI shut down LessWrong soon. It’s something of a status drain because of the whole Roko thing and no one seems to use it anymore. Even the open threads seem to be losing steam.
We still get most of the former value from the SlateStarCodex, Gwern.net, and the tumblr scene. Even for rationality, I’m not sure LessWrong is needed now that we have CFAR.
I don’t think a shutdown is even remotely likely. LW is still the Schelling point for rationalist discussion; Roko-gate will follow us regardless; SSC/Gwern.net are personal blogs with discussion sections that are respectively unusable and nonexistent. CFAR is still an IRL thing, and almost all of MIRI/CFAR’s fans have come from the internet.
Agreed though that LW is slowly losing steam, though. Not sure what should be done about it.
To have a website with content like the original Sequences, we need someone who (a) can produce enough great content, and (b) believes that producing content for a website is the best use of their time.
It already sounds like a paradox: the more rational and awesome a person is, the more likely it is that they can use their time much better than writing a blog.
Well, unless they use the blog to sell something...
I think Eliezer wrote the original Sequences pretty much to find people to cooperate with him at MIRI, and to make people more sympathetic and willing to send money to MIRI. Mission accomplished.
What would be the next mission (for someone else) which could be accomplished by writing interesting articles to LW?
If Less Wrong is, indeed, losing steam as a community (I wouldn’t have considered myself part of it until recently, and hadn’t kept up with it before then), there are options to deal with it.
First, we could create enjoyable media to be enjoyed by large quantities of people, with rationalistic principles, and link back to Less Wrong in it. HPMOR is already a thing, and certainly does well for its purpose of introducing people to and giving some basic instruction in applied rationality. However, as it’s over, the flow of people from the readership it generated has ceased.
Other media is a possibility. If people are interested in supporting Less Wrong and CFAR specifically, there could perhaps be a youtube channel made for it; maybe streaming live discussions and taking questions from the audience. Non-video means are also, obviously, possible. Webcomics are somewhat niche, but could drive readership if a high quality one was made. I’m loathe to suggest getting already-established content creators to read and support Less Wrong, partially because of my own reticence in such, and partially because of a host of problems that would come with that, as our community is somewhat insular, and though welcoming in our own way, Less Wrong often comes off to people as arrogant or elitist.
On that note, while I would not suggest lowering our standards for discourse, I think that in appealing to a larger community it’s necessary to realize that newer members of the community may not have the background necessary to take constructively the criticisms given. I’m not sure how to resolve this problem. Being told to “go and read such and such, then you’ll understand” comes off rudely. Perhaps some form of community primer link on the front page, regarding customs here? The about page is a little cluttered and not entirely helpful. That in addition to a marker next to someone’s name indicating they’re new to Less Wrong could do a lot to help. Furthermore, a section for the “younger” (in terms of account) posters with encouragement for the older ones to come in and help out may be of help.
Well, I could go on for a while longer, but I think that’s enough of a thought dump for now.
Your attitude to informational videos is: [pollid:979]
There’s some research that suggests that videos that actually help people to learn aren’t pleasant to watch. http://chronicle.com/article/Confuse-Students-to-Help-Them/148385/
If the student feels confused by the video they are more likely to actually update.
The kind of informational videos that are popular aren’t useful for learning and vice versa.
I voted other. The reason I suggested nontextual formats is because I don’t believe that rationality can be taught solely through text, even if I personally prefer to learn that way. I have multiple friends who do not learn well at all in such a manner, but I believe that both of them would learn much more effectively from a video; I suspect this extends out to others, for whom the text dump nature of this site might be intimidating.
I’m not sure about webcomics or Youtube videos. LW is full of essays on abstract philosophical topics; if you don’t like reading, you’re probably not going to get much out of it. I think the biggest ways for people to help LW are:
Write quality posts. There are a bunch of suggestions in this FAQ question.
Share Less Wrong posts with thoughtful people who will find them interesting. Think Facebook friends, your favorite subreddit, etc. Ideally people who are even smarter than you are.
Improving the about page is also high-leverage. I encourage you to suggest concrete changes or simply ignore the existing one and write an alternative about page from scratch so we can take the best ideas from each.
Certainly, writing high quality posts is essential for improving on what we already do well, but as I mentioned in a reply above, not everyone learns best—or at all effectively—that way. To be clear, I’m not suggesting we do any less of that, but I think that we may be limiting ourselves somewhat by producing only that style of content. I think that we would be able to get more people interested in Less Wrong by producing non-textual content as well.
I will note, however, that when I suggested webcomics, I wasn’t specifically intending a webcomic about Less Wrong (although one about biases in general could work quite well!) so much as one written by someone from Less Wrong, with a rationalist bent, to get people interested in it. Although, admittedly, going at it with that goal in mind may produce less effective content.
Regarding improving the about page, the main thing that jumped out to me is that there seem to be far too many hyperlinks. My view of the About page is that it should be for someone just coming into Less Wrong, from some link out there on the net, with no clue what it is. Therefore, there should be less example in the form of a list of links, and more explanation as to what Less Wrong’s function is, and what its community is like.
If someone wants to create a rationalist webcomic, Youtube channel, etc. I’m all for that.
I did the current About page. I put in a lot of links because I remembered someone saying that it seems like people tend to get in to Less Wrong when they read a particular article that really resonates with them, so I figured I would put in lots of links so that people might find one that would resonate. Also, when I come across a new blog that seems interesting, I often look over a bunch of posts trying to find the gems, and providing lots of links seems like it would facilitate this behavior.
What important info about LW’s function/community would you like to see on the about page?
Part of the reason it is losing steam is there is a small quantity of posters that post wayyyy too much using up everyone’s time and they hardly contribute anything. Too many contrarians.
We have a lot of regular haters that could use some toning down.
It’s true that Less Wrong has a reputation for crazy ideas. But as long as it has that reputation, we might as well continue posting crazy ideas here, since crazy ideas can be quite valuable. If LW was “rebooted” in some other form, and crazy ideas were discussed there, the new forum would probably acquire its own reputation for crazy ideas soon enough.
The great thing about LW is that it allows a smart, dedicated, unknown person to share their ideas with a bunch of smart people who will either explain why it’s wrong or change their actions based on it relatively quickly. Many of LW’s former major contributors have now independently acquired large audiences that pay attention to their ideas, so they don’t need LW anymore. But it’s very valuable to leave LW open in order to net new contributors like Nate Soares (who started out writing book reviews for LW and was recently promoted to be MIRI’s executive director). (Come to think of it, lukeprog was also “discovered” through Less Wrong as well… he went from atheist blogger to LW contributor to MIRI visiting fellow to MIRI director.)
Consider also infrequent bloggers. Kaj Sotala’s LW posts seem to get substantially more comments than the posts on his personal blog. Building and retaining an audience on an independent blog requires frequent posting, self-promotion, etc… we shouldn’t require this of people who have something important to say.
I recently joined this site after lurking for awhile. Are blog contributions of that sort are the primary purpose of Less Wrong?
It seems like it fulfills a niche that the avenues you listed do not: specifically, in the capacity of a community rather than an individual, academic, or professional endeavor.
There are applications of rational thought present in these threads that I don’t see gathered anywhere else. I’m sure I’m missing something here, but could viewing Less Wrong as a potential breeding ground for contributors of that kind be useful?
I realize it’s a difficult line to follow without facing the problems inherent to any community, especially one that preaches a Way.
I haven’t encountered the rationalist tumblr scene. Is such a community there?
Eh, it is just useful to have a generic discussion forum on the Internet with a high average IQ and a certain culture of epistemic sanity / trying to avoid at least the worst fallacies and biases. If out of the many ideas in the sequences, at least “tabooing” would get out into the wild so people on other forums would get more used to discussing actual things instead of labels and categories, it could become bearable out there. For example you can hardly have a sane discussion in economics.reddit.com because labels like capitalism and socialism being used as rallying flags.