I agree that I would like to see LessWrong be a place for rationality, not just for AI. A concern: The listed ways you try to encourage rationality discussion seem to be too little dakka to me.
People are busy and writing up ideas takes a lot of time. If you want to encourage people to post, you’ll probably have to provide a lot of value for posting to LessWrong. Commissioning is the straightforward approach, but as you mention it is expensive. I like the proofreading service and it’s probably one of the main things that’s made me post to LessWrong.
I’m not sure if there are other good opportunities; perhaps some sort of advertising/pairing system where you go out of your way to find the rationalists most interested in the relevant topics for new posts, to ensure it generates discussion, as it’s generally nice to have people discuss your ideas with you. But people might be pretty good at finding posts for themselves, so that might not make much of a difference.
Perhaps one potential related low-hanging fruit is, people seem to be spending a lot of time in various other spaces, like Discords. Maybe tighter integration with some of those, such that e.g. LessWrong posts automatically got linked in the relevant rationalist discords, would be a good option?
Perhaps a cheap potential source of posts would be question-type posts. People probably have lots of questions; maybe LessWrong could be a place where people go to get answers for such questions. It might be easier to encourage, though I’m not sure about the extent to which you want to focus on question posts, as they are not the highest quality possible.
I agree that I would like to see LessWrong be a place for rationality, not just for AI. A concern: The listed ways you try to encourage rationality discussion seem to be too little dakka to me.
People are busy and writing up ideas takes a lot of time. If you want to encourage people to post, you’ll probably have to provide a lot of value for posting to LessWrong. Commissioning is the straightforward approach, but as you mention it is expensive. I like the proofreading service and it’s probably one of the main things that’s made me post to LessWrong.
I’m not sure if there are other good opportunities; perhaps some sort of advertising/pairing system where you go out of your way to find the rationalists most interested in the relevant topics for new posts, to ensure it generates discussion, as it’s generally nice to have people discuss your ideas with you. But people might be pretty good at finding posts for themselves, so that might not make much of a difference.
Perhaps one potential related low-hanging fruit is, people seem to be spending a lot of time in various other spaces, like Discords. Maybe tighter integration with some of those, such that e.g. LessWrong posts automatically got linked in the relevant rationalist discords, would be a good option?
Perhaps a cheap potential source of posts would be question-type posts. People probably have lots of questions; maybe LessWrong could be a place where people go to get answers for such questions. It might be easier to encourage, though I’m not sure about the extent to which you want to focus on question posts, as they are not the highest quality possible.