I am new here—and so do not have enough experience to make a judgement call, but I do have a question:
Why do you want to “improve” it? What are the aspects of it’s current operation that you think are sub-optimal, and why?
I see a lot of interesting suggestions for changes, and a wishlist for features—but I have no inkling if they might “improve” anything at all. I tend to be of the “simpler is better” school, and from the sound of things, it seems things are already pretty good, or at least pretty non-bad?
STORYTIME!
I used to play a lot of World of Warcraft. I mean—a lot. I had always been a big fan of Blizzard, and when WoW came out, I participated eagerly in the beta, and played it heavily for many years. I eventually left, for a number of reasons—but the relevant one, here, is that Blizzard had been steadily “improving” WoW to the point where it was not what I wanted. In the early days, a lot of WoW was hard, and thus rewarding. You had giant questlines, 40 man raids, and it would take months, maybe a year, to complete goals. Doing so was rewarding, as it was challenging to the intellect, and demonstrated mastery to my peer group—It’s fun to brag and show off, even in a video game. But—my goals were not Blizzards, and they steadily “improved” things by making it simpler—rather than a 40 man raid where everyone must be in top form, you could do 25 man, 10 man, 5 man “raids”, and you could earn some things by virtue of just grinding (quantity) rather than excellence (quality). Eventually, they started simply selling the types of things that I had spent a great deal of time earning, further invalidating it in my eyes. They improved themselves out of a paying customer, and while they maybe picked up 5 in my place—for me, at least, it ruined the game.
The moral is—beware of “improving” things so much that you alter them fundamentally. I’ll be blunt—very little of what you propose above can’t be done in discussion threads, and the world has enough social networks. Part of the reason I joined here is the fact that I cannot ask or discuss these things on twitter or shudder facebook—well, I can, but I would get very little but the blank stares of bumpkins. I love humanity, but on a whole we are a bunch of bumpkins, sorry to say.
My thinking stems from the belief that improving this community would be a high level action that would do a lot of good. Improving the quantity and quality of conversation could 1) help spread rationality and 2) improve the experience for current members. And I think that it could lead to 3) intellectual progress and 4) progress stemming from people working together on projects.
The explanation above is incomplete, but hopefully it communicates the big picture—I see a lot of untapped potential for this community to make important progress in discovering things and achieving things.
Why do I think this? It’ll take me a good amount of time to answer that properly and now isn’t the time for me to do so, sorry. I plan on posting again with that answer at some point though.
Fair enough. I should mention my “Why” was more nutsy-and-boltsy than asking about motive; it would perhaps more accurately have been asked as “What do you observe about lesswrong, as it stands, that make you believe it can or should be improved”. I am willing to take the desire for it as a given.
The goal of the why, fwiw, was to encourage self-examination, to help perhaps ensure that the “improvement” is just that. Fairly often, attempts to improve things are not as successful as hoped (see most of world history), and as I get older I begin to think more and more that most human attempts to “fix” complex things just tend to screw em up more.
Imagine an “improvement” where your picture was added as part of your post. There are perhaps some who would consider that an improvement—I, emphatically, would not. Not that you are suggesting that—just that the actual improvements should ideally be agreed upon (or at least tolerable to) most or all of the community, and sometimes that sort of consensus is just impossible.
I am new here—and so do not have enough experience to make a judgement call, but I do have a question:
Why do you want to “improve” it? What are the aspects of it’s current operation that you think are sub-optimal, and why?
I see a lot of interesting suggestions for changes, and a wishlist for features—but I have no inkling if they might “improve” anything at all. I tend to be of the “simpler is better” school, and from the sound of things, it seems things are already pretty good, or at least pretty non-bad?
STORYTIME!
I used to play a lot of World of Warcraft. I mean—a lot. I had always been a big fan of Blizzard, and when WoW came out, I participated eagerly in the beta, and played it heavily for many years. I eventually left, for a number of reasons—but the relevant one, here, is that Blizzard had been steadily “improving” WoW to the point where it was not what I wanted. In the early days, a lot of WoW was hard, and thus rewarding. You had giant questlines, 40 man raids, and it would take months, maybe a year, to complete goals. Doing so was rewarding, as it was challenging to the intellect, and demonstrated mastery to my peer group—It’s fun to brag and show off, even in a video game. But—my goals were not Blizzards, and they steadily “improved” things by making it simpler—rather than a 40 man raid where everyone must be in top form, you could do 25 man, 10 man, 5 man “raids”, and you could earn some things by virtue of just grinding (quantity) rather than excellence (quality). Eventually, they started simply selling the types of things that I had spent a great deal of time earning, further invalidating it in my eyes. They improved themselves out of a paying customer, and while they maybe picked up 5 in my place—for me, at least, it ruined the game.
The moral is—beware of “improving” things so much that you alter them fundamentally. I’ll be blunt—very little of what you propose above can’t be done in discussion threads, and the world has enough social networks. Part of the reason I joined here is the fact that I cannot ask or discuss these things on twitter or shudder facebook—well, I can, but I would get very little but the blank stares of bumpkins. I love humanity, but on a whole we are a bunch of bumpkins, sorry to say.
My thinking stems from the belief that improving this community would be a high level action that would do a lot of good. Improving the quantity and quality of conversation could 1) help spread rationality and 2) improve the experience for current members. And I think that it could lead to 3) intellectual progress and 4) progress stemming from people working together on projects.
The explanation above is incomplete, but hopefully it communicates the big picture—I see a lot of untapped potential for this community to make important progress in discovering things and achieving things.
Why do I think this? It’ll take me a good amount of time to answer that properly and now isn’t the time for me to do so, sorry. I plan on posting again with that answer at some point though.
Fair enough. I should mention my “Why” was more nutsy-and-boltsy than asking about motive; it would perhaps more accurately have been asked as “What do you observe about lesswrong, as it stands, that make you believe it can or should be improved”. I am willing to take the desire for it as a given.
The goal of the why, fwiw, was to encourage self-examination, to help perhaps ensure that the “improvement” is just that. Fairly often, attempts to improve things are not as successful as hoped (see most of world history), and as I get older I begin to think more and more that most human attempts to “fix” complex things just tend to screw em up more.
Imagine an “improvement” where your picture was added as part of your post. There are perhaps some who would consider that an improvement—I, emphatically, would not. Not that you are suggesting that—just that the actual improvements should ideally be agreed upon (or at least tolerable to) most or all of the community, and sometimes that sort of consensus is just impossible.