In general, I think there’s too high of a bar for what’s considered worth posting. The vibe of LW discussion is something like “post something you’ve written or a link to an article and we will discuss/appraise it”, but I think it might be nicer and foster a more active community to have more of a “chatting” sort of vibe, where people can freely bring up minor questions, topics only tangentially related to rationality, etc.
I think this would be best done by introducing a third “subreddit” with a low importance threshold for posting that serves the same function the open threads currently do. So essentially, there would be three subreddits: a high threshold one (Main), medium threshold one (Discussion), and a low threshold one (this new subreddit). I’m not sure if that was what you meant by introducing a new subreddit, or if you meant introducing a new subreddit merely to hold a bunch of individual Open Threads. The former seems like a more natural solution to me.
I kept the subreddit idea underspecified to make it more appealing and flexible. But this is the direction that I hoped it would go in. It would be really nice to have a more casual discussion place for rationalists, besides the meetups. The idea doesn’t seem to be very popular though.
The poll isn’t very useful because some of the ideas are orthogonal, and the consensus is pretty clearly for a sticky thread plus with threads more often if necessary.
I wonder why. There’s tons of subjects where I feel like I could gain utility just from chatting with other rationalists about them. I might go to a meetup soon, but hanging out with a bunch of strangers much older than me is something I don’t do that often.
It is likely that there would be people within a few years from your age at your local meetup (especially if it is a bigger one). And I thought you were all about minimizing your identity? Seems like you don’t want to go to a meetup because you are not the kind of dude to hang out with a bunch of strangers much older than you.
In general, I think there’s too high of a bar for what’s considered worth posting. The vibe of LW discussion is something like “post something you’ve written or a link to an article and we will discuss/appraise it”, but I think it might be nicer and foster a more active community to have more of a “chatting” sort of vibe, where people can freely bring up minor questions, topics only tangentially related to rationality, etc.
I think this would be best done by introducing a third “subreddit” with a low importance threshold for posting that serves the same function the open threads currently do. So essentially, there would be three subreddits: a high threshold one (Main), medium threshold one (Discussion), and a low threshold one (this new subreddit). I’m not sure if that was what you meant by introducing a new subreddit, or if you meant introducing a new subreddit merely to hold a bunch of individual Open Threads. The former seems like a more natural solution to me.
Anyway, poll:
[pollid:536]
I kept the subreddit idea underspecified to make it more appealing and flexible. But this is the direction that I hoped it would go in. It would be really nice to have a more casual discussion place for rationalists, besides the meetups. The idea doesn’t seem to be very popular though.
The poll isn’t very useful because some of the ideas are orthogonal, and the consensus is pretty clearly for a sticky thread plus with threads more often if necessary.
I wonder why. There’s tons of subjects where I feel like I could gain utility just from chatting with other rationalists about them. I might go to a meetup soon, but hanging out with a bunch of strangers much older than me is something I don’t do that often.
It is likely that there would be people within a few years from your age at your local meetup (especially if it is a bigger one). And I thought you were all about minimizing your identity? Seems like you don’t want to go to a meetup because you are not the kind of dude to hang out with a bunch of strangers much older than you.
Also there is #lesswrong