Thanks for this analysis Yvain. I’m glad you’re interested in this even if you are (rightfully) pessimistic.
I agree that the ongoing community dynamic is a terrible place to “jump into” LW. I’ve been wanting help from someone (any volunteers out there??) to help design a more friendly, more Wikipedia-ish homepage for LessWrong which could actually help non-hardcore LW users navigate the site in a way that makes sense. The promoted stream is such a horrible resource for that. If someone could make a mock-up of a potential LW homepage (on the LW wiki perhaps?), I could get it implemented for you if it’s even halfway respectable. Nothing could be worse than what we currently have. A good homepage would probably have a few stable pointers to the important sequences, a portion of the current promoted feed, a video or other tutorial explaining what LW is all about… I dunno. Just anything that isn’t an opaque listing of “Open threads!”, “Cryonics!”, “Torture scenarios!”, “Rationality Quotes!”, “Omega!”, “Meetups!”, “Cake!”
For what it’s worth, the thing that got me visiting here regularly was the list of EY’s OB posts.
I know y’all love the sequences as such, and I can understand why, but the fact remains that I was motivated to work my way through much of that material relatively systematically in a chronological format, but once I got to the end of that list—that is, the time of the OB-to-LW migration—I bogged down (1). The sequence/wiki style is less compelling to me than the chronological style, especially given the degree to which the posts themselves really are blog posts and not articles.
I suspect that having some sense of where the process terminates is a key aspect of that. If I don’t know how long the process is going to be, it’s harder to get up the energy to work through it.
Anyway, to the extent that appealing to people like me is a valuable subgoal(2), it seems what you should do is assemble a simple chronological list of LW posts from the dawn of the site that are most representative of what you’d like the site content to look like. (3)
==
(1) To be fair, that was also the start of the Fun Theory sequence, which I am finding less compelling than some of its predecessors, so the content may bear some of the responsibility for my bogged-down-ness… but not all of it, nor even (I think) most of it.
(2) Which isn’t intended as false modesty; I just mean there’s no particular reason to believe that what appeals to me will appeal to anyone else.
(3) It may be sufficient to take the highest-voted tier of posts for each month, say, and string them together chronologically… though you’d probably want to backfill other posts that they depend on.
This is one of the few places on the net where cryonics related topics are discussed in a coherent manner, particularly by people in my age bracket. And I like that while it’s cryonics friendly, it’s not about cryonics. It’s about the (supposed) rational benefit of cryonics. Not just any cryonics related topic gets discussed, and not just in any way.
I can see how the community might grow to a point where the different topics cannot all be discussed in the same place. The current division between discussion and main is already helpful for distinguishing formal versus informal discussions. Perhaps sub-groups for cryonics, decision theory, existential risk, etc. are good ideas. But separating them out runs the risk of creating trivial inconvenience to cross-pollination of ideas.
Thanks for this analysis Yvain. I’m glad you’re interested in this even if you are (rightfully) pessimistic.
I agree that the ongoing community dynamic is a terrible place to “jump into” LW. I’ve been wanting help from someone (any volunteers out there??) to help design a more friendly, more Wikipedia-ish homepage for LessWrong which could actually help non-hardcore LW users navigate the site in a way that makes sense. The promoted stream is such a horrible resource for that. If someone could make a mock-up of a potential LW homepage (on the LW wiki perhaps?), I could get it implemented for you if it’s even halfway respectable. Nothing could be worse than what we currently have. A good homepage would probably have a few stable pointers to the important sequences, a portion of the current promoted feed, a video or other tutorial explaining what LW is all about… I dunno. Just anything that isn’t an opaque listing of “Open threads!”, “Cryonics!”, “Torture scenarios!”, “Rationality Quotes!”, “Omega!”, “Meetups!”, “Cake!”
For what it’s worth, the thing that got me visiting here regularly was the list of EY’s OB posts.
I know y’all love the sequences as such, and I can understand why, but the fact remains that I was motivated to work my way through much of that material relatively systematically in a chronological format, but once I got to the end of that list—that is, the time of the OB-to-LW migration—I bogged down (1). The sequence/wiki style is less compelling to me than the chronological style, especially given the degree to which the posts themselves really are blog posts and not articles.
I suspect that having some sense of where the process terminates is a key aspect of that. If I don’t know how long the process is going to be, it’s harder to get up the energy to work through it.
Anyway, to the extent that appealing to people like me is a valuable subgoal(2), it seems what you should do is assemble a simple chronological list of LW posts from the dawn of the site that are most representative of what you’d like the site content to look like. (3)
== (1) To be fair, that was also the start of the Fun Theory sequence, which I am finding less compelling than some of its predecessors, so the content may bear some of the responsibility for my bogged-down-ness… but not all of it, nor even (I think) most of it.
(2) Which isn’t intended as false modesty; I just mean there’s no particular reason to believe that what appeals to me will appeal to anyone else.
(3) It may be sufficient to take the highest-voted tier of posts for each month, say, and string them together chronologically… though you’d probably want to backfill other posts that they depend on.
This is one of the few places on the net where cryonics related topics are discussed in a coherent manner, particularly by people in my age bracket. And I like that while it’s cryonics friendly, it’s not about cryonics. It’s about the (supposed) rational benefit of cryonics. Not just any cryonics related topic gets discussed, and not just in any way.
I can see how the community might grow to a point where the different topics cannot all be discussed in the same place. The current division between discussion and main is already helpful for distinguishing formal versus informal discussions. Perhaps sub-groups for cryonics, decision theory, existential risk, etc. are good ideas. But separating them out runs the risk of creating trivial inconvenience to cross-pollination of ideas.
Yes. Who is promoting these things, and why? What is their rationale?