0. Are “we” the sort of thing that can have goals? It looks to me like there are a lot of goals going around, and LW isn’t terribly likely to agree on One True Set of Goals, whether ultimate or proximate.
I think one of the neglected possible roles for LW is as a beacon—a (relatively) highly visible institution that draws in people like-minded enough that semirandom interactions are more likely to be productive than semirandom interactions in the ‘hub world’, and allows them to find people sufficiently like-minded that they can then go off and do their own thing, while maintaining a link to LW itself, if only to search it for potential new members of this own thing.
My impression of internet communities in general is that they tend to be like this, and I don’t see any reason to expect LW to be different. Take Newgrounds, another site formed explicitly around productive endeavors (which has the desirable (for my purposes here) property that I spent my middle school years on it): it spawned all sorts of informal friend groups and formal satellite forums, each with its own sort of productive endeavor it was interested in. There was an entire ecosystem of satellite forums (and AIM/MSN group chats, which sometimes spawned satellite forums), from prolific NG forum posters realizing they had enough clout to start their own forum so why not, to forums for people interested in operating within the mainstream tradition of American animation, to a vast proliferation of forums for ‘spammers’ who were interested in playing with NG itself as a medium, to forums for people who were interested in making one specific form of movie—wacky music videos, video game sprite cartoons, whatever. And any given user could be in multiple of these groups, depending on their interests—I was active on at least one forum in each of the categories I’ve listed.
(As an aside: I say ‘spammers’ because that’s what they were called, but later on I developed enough interest in the art world to realize that there’s really no difference between what we did and what they’re doing. (The ‘art game’ people would do well to recognize this—they’re just trolls, but trolling is a art, so what the hell.) There were also ‘anti-spam’ forums, but I brought some of them around.)
1. As for classical LW goals, the AI problem does seem to have benefited quite a bit by ethos arguments. I’m not sure if “our goals” is even the type of noun phrase that *can* have semantic content, but cultivating general quality seems like a fairly broad goal. A movement that wants to gain appeal in the ways I’ve outlined will want its members to be visibly successful at instrumental rationality, and be fine upstanding citizens and so on.
2. I don’t think I’m smarter than Ben Franklin, so my advice for now would be to just do what he did. At a higher level: study successful people with well-known biographies and see if there’s anything that can be abstracted out. I notice (because Athrelon pointed it out a while ago) that Ben Franklin, C.S. Lewis, Tolkien, Thiel, and Musk have one thing in common: the benefit of a secret society or something like it—the Junto, the Inklings, or the Paypal Mafia.
These are good questions.
0. Are “we” the sort of thing that can have goals? It looks to me like there are a lot of goals going around, and LW isn’t terribly likely to agree on One True Set of Goals, whether ultimate or proximate.
I think one of the neglected possible roles for LW is as a beacon—a (relatively) highly visible institution that draws in people like-minded enough that semirandom interactions are more likely to be productive than semirandom interactions in the ‘hub world’, and allows them to find people sufficiently like-minded that they can then go off and do their own thing, while maintaining a link to LW itself, if only to search it for potential new members of this own thing.
My impression of internet communities in general is that they tend to be like this, and I don’t see any reason to expect LW to be different. Take Newgrounds, another site formed explicitly around productive endeavors (which has the desirable (for my purposes here) property that I spent my middle school years on it): it spawned all sorts of informal friend groups and formal satellite forums, each with its own sort of productive endeavor it was interested in. There was an entire ecosystem of satellite forums (and AIM/MSN group chats, which sometimes spawned satellite forums), from prolific NG forum posters realizing they had enough clout to start their own forum so why not, to forums for people interested in operating within the mainstream tradition of American animation, to a vast proliferation of forums for ‘spammers’ who were interested in playing with NG itself as a medium, to forums for people who were interested in making one specific form of movie—wacky music videos, video game sprite cartoons, whatever. And any given user could be in multiple of these groups, depending on their interests—I was active on at least one forum in each of the categories I’ve listed.
(As an aside: I say ‘spammers’ because that’s what they were called, but later on I developed enough interest in the art world to realize that there’s really no difference between what we did and what they’re doing. (The ‘art game’ people would do well to recognize this—they’re just trolls, but trolling is a art, so what the hell.) There were also ‘anti-spam’ forums, but I brought some of them around.)
1. As for classical LW goals, the AI problem does seem to have benefited quite a bit by ethos arguments. I’m not sure if “our goals” is even the type of noun phrase that *can* have semantic content, but cultivating general quality seems like a fairly broad goal. A movement that wants to gain appeal in the ways I’ve outlined will want its members to be visibly successful at instrumental rationality, and be fine upstanding citizens and so on.
2. I don’t think I’m smarter than Ben Franklin, so my advice for now would be to just do what he did. At a higher level: study successful people with well-known biographies and see if there’s anything that can be abstracted out. I notice (because Athrelon pointed it out a while ago) that Ben Franklin, C.S. Lewis, Tolkien, Thiel, and Musk have one thing in common: the benefit of a secret society or something like it—the Junto, the Inklings, or the Paypal Mafia.