Online interaction can be costly. You start by providing an interactive forum, and before you notice, you are spending your time nitpicking the latest proposal for comment deletion policy, instead of doing what you wanted to do in the first place.
Internet debates with low cost of entry attract people with too much free time. Those are usually neither effective nor altruists.
Both. Christian posted 2 FB groups, 1 subreddit, and one separate page; that seems quite enough to me, for general discussion. How much would you consider optimal?
If the user base grows, that is a good thing, but if the communication costs grow, that is a bad thing. So the communication needs to be organized effectively. I will assume there is a usual distribution that a few core people are doing most of the work, and the majority of people is mostly or exclusively there to chat. Two ways how things could go wrong:
1) The more channels and the more debate there is, the more time will the important people spend participating in the discussion, and the less time will be left for their work.
2) The important people will not participate in some of the discussions, which means someone else (perhaps the person with most free time, or most loud voice) will take over, not necessarily in a good way.
As an example of the latter, there was a FB group called “Less Wrong” where Eliezer didn’t have time to participate, and it evolved into something… uhm, not representative of LW… so at the end Eliezer asked them to change their name, because the association seemed harmful for LW.
I am not asking for a general discussion place, but for an idea repository with dedicated discussion places.
From the post :
The current forum doesn’t cut it : it isn’t meant to that end. It’s easier to build a forum dedicated to that than try to artificially support a balance between “New Ideas” posts and “Information Sharing” posts so that none of these get overshadowed. The same problem applies to existing reddit boards and facebook groups.
Also, regular discussion places (reddit, fb), aren’t really meant as thread repository : pinning more and more threads is a nuisance to the discussion part.
Online interaction can be costly. You start by providing an interactive forum, and before you notice, you are spending your time nitpicking the latest proposal for comment deletion policy, instead of doing what you wanted to do in the first place.
Internet debates with low cost of entry attract people with too much free time. Those are usually neither effective nor altruists.
I think I don’t understand your point :
There are already many functioning places for EA online interactions, and these work quite well.
Do you mean that, in the case the user base grows unexpectedly, high costs of entry should be put in order to deal with that problem ?
Both. Christian posted 2 FB groups, 1 subreddit, and one separate page; that seems quite enough to me, for general discussion. How much would you consider optimal?
If the user base grows, that is a good thing, but if the communication costs grow, that is a bad thing. So the communication needs to be organized effectively. I will assume there is a usual distribution that a few core people are doing most of the work, and the majority of people is mostly or exclusively there to chat. Two ways how things could go wrong:
1) The more channels and the more debate there is, the more time will the important people spend participating in the discussion, and the less time will be left for their work.
2) The important people will not participate in some of the discussions, which means someone else (perhaps the person with most free time, or most loud voice) will take over, not necessarily in a good way.
As an example of the latter, there was a FB group called “Less Wrong” where Eliezer didn’t have time to participate, and it evolved into something… uhm, not representative of LW… so at the end Eliezer asked them to change their name, because the association seemed harmful for LW.
I am not asking for a general discussion place, but for an idea repository with dedicated discussion places.
From the post :
Also, regular discussion places (reddit, fb), aren’t really meant as thread repository : pinning more and more threads is a nuisance to the discussion part.