Yup, slow growth is better than fast growth for a community that wants to preserve and improve it’s core competencies and values. Fast growth breaks infrastructure and becomes an uncontrollable ship.
Also, if your community is good, it will naturally attract a lot of people. Successful intellectual communities need to invest a lot more money in selection than they need to invest in advertising. (I.e. see almost all top universities, top research institutes and top companies)
Not necessarily; the three sorts of excellent organizations you mention are organizations whose excellence is recognized by the rest of the world in some way, granting its members prestige, opportunities, and money. I suspect this is what attracts people to a large extent, not a general ability to detect organizational goodness. This sort of recognition may be very difficult to get without being very good at whatever it is the organization does, but that does not imply that all good organizations are attractive in this way.
Agree that it’s more nuanced, and think your objection is valid. I have some more thoughts on why I think that still applies to us, but it’s definitely a more complicated and less straightforward thing that I would want to have more time to explain.
FYI, when I proposed the greater karma gets you more upvotes mechanism, one of the main motivations was to let a site preserve its culture in the face of a big influx of new members.
Are we in any real danger of growing too quickly? If so, this is relevant advice; if not—if, for example, a doubling of our growth rate would bring no significant additional danger—I think this advice has negative value by making an improbable danger more salient.
I think the standard human incentive in groups and tribes is to go big, fast; this is the direction of entropy, and must be pushed against (or at least as a first order factor).
In the world where we’re growing very slowly already and this advice will not be helpful, it’s at least true that growth should at least never be in our top 5 metrics for success (to be contrasted with measures of how much intellectual progress we are making e.g. how often we’re having valuable insights, how efficient our communication is, how easy it is to find the best rebuttals to arguments, etc).
I agree that growth shouldn’t be a big huge marker of success (at least at this point), but even if it’s not a metric on which we place high terminal value, it can still be a very instrumentally valuable metric—for example, if our insight rate per person is very expensive to increase, and growth is our most effective way to increase total insight.
So while growth should be sacrificed for impact on other metrics—for example, if growth is has a strong negative impact on insight rate per person—I would say it’s still reasonable to assume it’s valuable until proven otherwise.
Yup, slow growth is better than fast growth for a community that wants to preserve and improve it’s core competencies and values. Fast growth breaks infrastructure and becomes an uncontrollable ship.
Also, if your community is good, it will naturally attract a lot of people. Successful intellectual communities need to invest a lot more money in selection than they need to invest in advertising. (I.e. see almost all top universities, top research institutes and top companies)
Not necessarily; the three sorts of excellent organizations you mention are organizations whose excellence is recognized by the rest of the world in some way, granting its members prestige, opportunities, and money. I suspect this is what attracts people to a large extent, not a general ability to detect organizational goodness. This sort of recognition may be very difficult to get without being very good at whatever it is the organization does, but that does not imply that all good organizations are attractive in this way.
Agree that it’s more nuanced, and think your objection is valid. I have some more thoughts on why I think that still applies to us, but it’s definitely a more complicated and less straightforward thing that I would want to have more time to explain.
FYI, when I proposed the greater karma gets you more upvotes mechanism, one of the main motivations was to let a site preserve its culture in the face of a big influx of new members.
Are we in any real danger of growing too quickly? If so, this is relevant advice; if not—if, for example, a doubling of our growth rate would bring no significant additional danger—I think this advice has negative value by making an improbable danger more salient.
I think the standard human incentive in groups and tribes is to go big, fast; this is the direction of entropy, and must be pushed against (or at least as a first order factor).
In the world where we’re growing very slowly already and this advice will not be helpful, it’s at least true that growth should at least never be in our top 5 metrics for success (to be contrasted with measures of how much intellectual progress we are making e.g. how often we’re having valuable insights, how efficient our communication is, how easy it is to find the best rebuttals to arguments, etc).
I agree that growth shouldn’t be a big huge marker of success (at least at this point), but even if it’s not a metric on which we place high terminal value, it can still be a very instrumentally valuable metric—for example, if our insight rate per person is very expensive to increase, and growth is our most effective way to increase total insight.
So while growth should be sacrificed for impact on other metrics—for example, if growth is has a strong negative impact on insight rate per person—I would say it’s still reasonable to assume it’s valuable until proven otherwise.
It’s not a matter of growing too quickly but a matter of growing by getting the wrong kind of people.