HPMoR is very very popular and broadly appealing (as rationality lit goes), so that seems to be our biggest leverage point for spreading LW to people who aren’t already academics or programmers, like the secularist and wider geeknerd communities.
Currently, we seem to be making only a little use of that resource for sustained, active, explicit community-building outreach. LW is not optimized for community discussions between any people who haven’t already spent a few months or years studying mathematics, programming, a very specific flavor of analytic philosophy, or past LW posts like the Sequences. We’re catching tons of fish friends, and throwing nearly all of them back in the ocean. The only non-LW community that seems targeted at HPMoR people is the reddit, but we’re doing almost nothing to make that reddit useful for rationality training, or appealing to any people who want to do more than geek out about the details of the plot of HPMoR itself. Plus reddit is not a great environment in general if we want to experiment, or to appeal to whoever LW doesn’t appeal to.
I suggest: Start a new website as a community hub for HPMoR fans, and more generally for the demographic ‘I’m not very mathy but I think science is neato and want advice and social support for self-improvement and for making the world a better place.’ Perhaps the website could be to CFAR what LW is to MIRI. Whereas (future-)LW focuses on high-level rationality techniques, speculative philosophical and mathematical innovation, and programming/AI, the MoR site focuses more on the low-hanging fruit of rationality, the stuff that’s relatively well-established or at least ready for beta or late-stage-alpha testing, with a stronger emphasis on community, niceness, skill cultivation, and MoR geekery.
We could call it, say, Reason Academy, and capitalize on the ‘I wish I were at Hogwarts!’ HP impulse without doing anything that explicitly raises copyright problems. (‘Rationality Academy’ makes sense for an HPMoR tie-in, but I think has limited crossover appeal because of the Spocky connotations and because it sounds clunky.) More message boards, more centralized easy-to-access low-barrier-to-understanding reads, a happier and friendlier aesthetic, more games and (eventually) a more structured, reward-centered learning environment. Is this a good thing to shoot for?
We can start small, maybe with just a message board (to replace and expand the functionality of the reddit, and perhaps of LW’s open threads). A few message boards aren’t hard to maintain. Then once the boards are active enough, start experimenting with expanding the functionality.
We can wait before doing much. Launching something like this right after (or right before) HPMoR concludes strikes me as a rather good idea. The site would then function as HPMoR’s Pottermore.
It’s worth thinking in more detail about what exactly we’d want out of something like this, and about risks (e.g., making LW look even more foreboding). Also, we should brainstorm features we’d implement on forums or games if we could, that aren’t easily implemented on LW or the reddit. E.g., rules that encourage people more to ask questions (and get answers where on LW we might just default to ‘go read the Sequences’), be friendly and goofy, express positive thoughts/feelings, and build strong emotional social connections, including ones that might be too cumbersome to make general practice on LW.
HPMoR is very very popular and broadly appealing (as rationality lit goes), so that seems to be our biggest leverage point for spreading LW to people who aren’t already academics or programmers, like the secularist and wider geeknerd communities.
Currently, we seem to be making only a little use of that resource for sustained, active, explicit community-building outreach. LW is not optimized for community discussions between any people who haven’t already spent a few months or years studying mathematics, programming, a very specific flavor of analytic philosophy, or past LW posts like the Sequences. We’re catching tons of fish friends, and throwing nearly all of them back in the ocean. The only non-LW community that seems targeted at HPMoR people is the reddit, but we’re doing almost nothing to make that reddit useful for rationality training, or appealing to any people who want to do more than geek out about the details of the plot of HPMoR itself. Plus reddit is not a great environment in general if we want to experiment, or to appeal to whoever LW doesn’t appeal to.
I suggest: Start a new website as a community hub for HPMoR fans, and more generally for the demographic ‘I’m not very mathy but I think science is neato and want advice and social support for self-improvement and for making the world a better place.’ Perhaps the website could be to CFAR what LW is to MIRI. Whereas (future-)LW focuses on high-level rationality techniques, speculative philosophical and mathematical innovation, and programming/AI, the MoR site focuses more on the low-hanging fruit of rationality, the stuff that’s relatively well-established or at least ready for beta or late-stage-alpha testing, with a stronger emphasis on community, niceness, skill cultivation, and MoR geekery.
We could call it, say, Reason Academy, and capitalize on the ‘I wish I were at Hogwarts!’ HP impulse without doing anything that explicitly raises copyright problems. (‘Rationality Academy’ makes sense for an HPMoR tie-in, but I think has limited crossover appeal because of the Spocky connotations and because it sounds clunky.) More message boards, more centralized easy-to-access low-barrier-to-understanding reads, a happier and friendlier aesthetic, more games and (eventually) a more structured, reward-centered learning environment. Is this a good thing to shoot for?
I think that this sounds like a great idea, though it also seems like one that would take a lot of effort to put together.
Two thoughts:
We can start small, maybe with just a message board (to replace and expand the functionality of the reddit, and perhaps of LW’s open threads). A few message boards aren’t hard to maintain. Then once the boards are active enough, start experimenting with expanding the functionality.
We can wait before doing much. Launching something like this right after (or right before) HPMoR concludes strikes me as a rather good idea. The site would then function as HPMoR’s Pottermore.
It’s worth thinking in more detail about what exactly we’d want out of something like this, and about risks (e.g., making LW look even more foreboding). Also, we should brainstorm features we’d implement on forums or games if we could, that aren’t easily implemented on LW or the reddit. E.g., rules that encourage people more to ask questions (and get answers where on LW we might just default to ‘go read the Sequences’), be friendly and goofy, express positive thoughts/feelings, and build strong emotional social connections, including ones that might be too cumbersome to make general practice on LW.