Creating an Optimal Future
Creating an Optimal Future. It sounds very arrogant when I type it out. A more reasonable claim would be that it is possible to create a Less Wrong Future, but for reasons that will shortly become apparent that felt like stepping too hard on other people’s shoes. I suppose Working Towards an Optimal Future would be the best title for what I have in mind.
Let me backtrack and start at the beginning. I am not a rationalist. Well, I am not a rationalist as the term applies in this community. Not completely anyway. I have only read some of the Sequences and, although I’ve devoured HPMOR, I do understand and agree with a number of the criticisms that have been leveled toward it.
But I am here because of that Optimal Future I have mentioned. The way I see it, we are not currently on a trajectory that will lead to an optimal future and I am fairly confident that you agree with me on that. From what I have seen and heard from various online communities over the years, quite a few people do agree with me on that.
But the problem is, a few thousand people visit Less Wrong regularly, generating and evolving a unique memescape. And a few miles down the information highway, another few thousand people post to Humanity+ mailing lists; building up a different memescape. There is some overlap, naturally, but not nearly enough. And in another corner of the internet, environmentalist factions sit in their own forums and discuss a different set of problems affecting (trans)humanity’s future. In yet another corner, socialists imagine utopias built on free access to nanofabricators (while anarchists imagine a similar utopia sans the government).
All in all, there may be near to a million people looking at future problems and solutions. But as long as they do so in small fringe groups, the solutions they can think up are limited. Worse, “junk” memes start sweeping into the community, harming recruitment and giving the underlying philosophies a bad name. To push the metaphor about as far as it can go: these communities tend to get a bit inbred over time.
And a million voices fail to affect policies in any way, because for all the hopes and fears they share they fail to coordinate and collaborate. Meanwhile, the world continues to move along a sub-optimal trajectory.
Which, finally, leads us back to Optimal Future. In discussing the problems above with friends, we hit upon an obvious solution: build a place where all futurists and people who care about the future (but do not self identify as futurist) can discuss the relevant topics and hopefully find novel solutions through combining memes that one wouldn’t normally think to combine.
Which is why I am here now. The site has been built, but then that was always going to be the easiest part. The hard part is building a diverse and active community. That’s where you come in. LessWrong is one of the most active future thinking communities on the web, and also a fairly controversial one. Having you as part of the community could make a lot of difference to us. In exchange we can offer you a wider audience and some new perspectives.
So if you are curious as to how a Friendly AGI designed by anarchist would be different to one designed by Greens, feel like scaring communists with what horrors a corporate paperclip maximizer could commit, want to see how wide the spectrum of transhumanists really is, want to learn about cryptography or sousveillance, or feel like debating the pros and cons of open sourced AIs, come on down to optimalfuture.org and take a look at the bigger picture.
No, you don’t have a wide audience. You have a politics group with four members. Writing on Lesswrong reaches a much wider audience.
The way the website looks, it seems like you failed at the building part. You have a color scheme that has grey letters on grey background next to greish blue letters on grey ground.
It also looks like you tried to build a new system of how an online forum should operate instead of just taking a readymade solution. As a result it seems you have to make a bunch of bad UI decisions.
In my experience Lesswrong is fairly diverse. I don’t think that there a problem of not enough Humanity+ type people contributing ideas to lesswrong. Lesswrong attracts a fairly diverse readership.
Five, but point taken. That’s why we’re recruiting in the first place. A site no-one knows about isn’t doing any good after all. So we recruit. From LessWrong, from Humanity+, SENS and Lifeboat but also from sites you might not have considered as futurists, like Space.com, Greenpeace, Thingiverse, and the European Pirate party. This is where the diversity bit comes in. Emails and posts are going out to these groups as fast as we can make them, but we chose to contact LessWrong as early in the process as possible, because, as you point out, it is a large and diverse community.
The website is very much a work in progress, yes. But then websites generally do look bad in the beginning, until the influx of fresh eyes help the developers see the trouble spots. Work is ongoing to make a prettier front end, but the off the shelf solution we found was deemed more cost effective than having a group of novices sit down and design a page from scratch.
No, that’s not how it normally works for a professional website. Normally websites aren’t designed by developers but are designed by a webdesigner. On top of that there are readymade solutions for forums. LessWrong for example uses the reddit framework.
The website would probably profit from starting from scratch with a proper design.
So you choose to contact Lesswrong for recruitment at a time where it’s inprobable that your recruiting is very successful because it’s large...
It looks like Drupal to me. You might not like it, but you can hardly say they failed to make use of existing components.
There no facebook sign in. There’s for example “4 comment(s)” under an article but no hotlink to the comments.
In case you don’t know, different people have a different ability to distinguish shades of blue and most people are not perfect. For me that “Create an account link”-text on the startpage is unreadable. Even beyond this the page is very uninviting.
If I read a topic I find under the topic “Promote content” but no “Post comment button or free text box”. There some unlabled blue thing that shows that(you have to log in to post but only if you hover over it.
To further deter people from registering, at the end of comments where you get information that you have to login/register, the words login/register are in lower font size than the rest of the text. After all you don’t want to draw attention to logining in or registering.
Those issues don’t seem like a decision that anybody who designs a framework that intents to encourage community participation should make. For that reason it looked to me like it doesn’t use a proper community platform.
If you have a corporate website, you might not want to encourage as much participation as possible and have some barrier to entry. You might use a website that looks that way. If your intend is to grow a community it doesn’t seem like a good decision.
On Drupal.org they use a forum plugin for their forum: https://drupal.org/forum/22 I think using Drupal and not using a forum plugin when you want to built a forum but trying to do it your own way, counts as not using existing components.
You seem to have very weak evidence that they actually did this. It seems tremendously unlikely to me. Drupal comes with a forum module and it has many third party forums available. I see no good reason to think that they failed to make use of these resources.
The forum on Drupal.org looks I expect a forum to look. I would disagree with a few design choices but there’s nothing that looks obviously wrong.
It might be that it’s just a wrongly configured plugin but the UX decisions like the one about the fontsize of the register/login of the existing website just doesn’t make sense for the purposes of running a forum.
The rationalist part is important. I agree that it would help to have collaborating memescapes but if these memescapes are not updating with new evidence then it is worthless. Lesswrong is already a community of rationalist that wants to identify and rid themselves of junk memes. Lesswrong is already concerned with non bleak futures and has active discussion with wide ranging implications for the far future, such as problems of philosophy, machine ethics, and decision theory. The rationalist part is important because it already implies we care about FAI, and optimal futures. It’s not worth anything to know what a Friendly AGI would look like if designed by an anarchist, if that anarchist isn’t also an aspiring rationalist, but rather seeking an anarchist future for the sake of an anarchist future. If you look at the topics of discussion you will already find the gamut of different memescapes that you referred to. Assume optimalfuture.org takes off, if you start to prune the junk from all competing futurist ideas you would start to converge to the most “less wrong” ideas, basically you just end up with LW.
I may be wrong and may update on it later, so I’m not completely dismissive of the idea. I book marked the site and will check it from time to time because there could interesting discussions.
You seem to believe there’s the optimal future, one and only. I see no reason to assume that various groups prefer the same future and agree on which trajectory is “optimal”.
In basic terms, different people have different goals.
If you are making a place just to *talk*, well, that’s not really a problem. Flamefests can be fun :-D On the other hand, if you actually want to “coordinate and collaborate” you’ll need people to agree on the what the end goal will look like and kick out the dissidents.
I agree with this. Actually, I’m barely ambitious enough to try to figure out an optimal future for myself.
The risk of community meme inbreeding is interesting and I think real. Even for LW there are memes where the community appears to be overconfident.
I hoped to find something which moderates this effect but found optimalfuture to be ‘just another forum’.
I’d like to see something where ideas are exchanged and rated or even ‘traded’ like it is done in the Foresight Exchange http://www.ideosphere.com/ where you put yours stakes into clearly defined ‘memes’.
In a way the voting on posts does express the confidence of the community in a meme in a loose way. But I’d like to see a more clear way that doesn’t hinge on popularity or makeup.
Couldn’t we build a site where you actually ‘trade’ ideas/memes? This could be done my attaching claims to a post that can be bought and sold like in the Fuuture Exchange but without the strict judgement process there.
Or better to provide such an Idea Exchange at an independent site which provides this service without overly dominating the traded ideas by its topics.
But how do you judge whether the Exchange pays out? Number of karma votes?
You don’t need to pay out once or at a fixed time. Normal stocks aren’t either.
My first idea was that you could ‘buy’ a meme and advertize so e.g. on your blog. This creates a ‘demand’ for certain memes. The problem is that you’d be incentiviced to sell your own opinion to cash in.
Then I came up with the idea of ‘endorsing’ versus ‘trading’ memes. Endorsing a meme could be taken to be a dividend of the meme. This allows to ‘buy’ early and cash in on the later endorsing by others. And you could still sell when you have convinced the majority without dropping your endoring. If everybody is only entitled to a limited number of ‘endorsed’ memes this avoids meme inflation.
The idea is that endorsing is a slow proces you may change your opinion only once a week, e.g. by linkingto it (or its reverse on your blog. But trading can be as fast as you want.
You don’t seem to provide a USP (unique selling point) that would give a random interested individual much reason to join it over the 100s of other larger blogs, forums, etc., discussing such topics.
Creating some sort of portal that allowed access to a wide range of topics related to futorology, rationality, solutions toward a better future, strong AI, philosophy, etc., would be a huge boon and if you could put that together, I believe it would be a massive step forward.
Incidentally, I am a web developer and if anyone is interested in helping out with the project (it’s just a concept at this stage, although very practical), I’d love to hear from you :)
(puts on morpheus glasses) what if I told you… many of this site’s members are also members of those sites?
Added to the list.
I’ll participate, but I can’t guarantee it’ll have been useful for me to do.
Obligatory XKCD reference:
I don’t mean to be overly dismissive—just reemphasizing the difficulty you expressed in your article.
The critical difference, and the reason we are bothering to try, is that it’s easier to frequent multiple websites than it is to adhere to multiple standards.
Yeah, but it’s still difficult. I post at the same name on the xkcd forums (that’s me at number 7), except basically every post I’ve made there in the last few years (after discovering Less Wrong) has been to discuss My Little Pony or video games, and both of those are only because those are mostly off-topic here.
Valuable participation on a website takes effort- and so if you’re just looking for people to read your blog, then you can expect that to about the degree that you write interesting posts. But if you’re looking for people to build a community with you, then any effort those people direct towards you comes at the cost of effort they could have directed elsewhere. For example, a new organization with a different focus was spun off the organization behind LessWrong- and posts by the people in the daughter organization, several of whom used to be core LW members, are few and far between, and mostly advertising for their organization. (While I miss their posts, I think that they’re doing more important work over at CFAR, so I’m not complaining.)
I don’t follow. I agree it’s not difficult for readers to frequent multiple websites, but that just leads me to question the utility of an aggregate site.
Do you imagine Optimal Future to be a United Nations, where representatives from other communities come together to discuss ideas? If so, why would a new central meeting place be better than people posting across forums directly (LessWrongers posting to Humanity+ and vice versa)?
Do you imaging Optimal Future to become a reddit-like super-community that encompasses futurist communities? If so, wouldn’t it be better to join another super-community (e.g. reddit)?