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.
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.