Curated. This was one of the more inspiring things I read this year (in a year that had a moderate number of inspiring things!)
I really like how Sarah lays out the problem and desiderata for neutrality in our public/civic institutional spaces.
LessWrong’s strength is being a fairly opinionated ”university[1]” about how to do epistemics, which the rest of the world isn’t necessarily bought into. Trying to make LW a civic institution would fail. But, this post has me more excited to revisit “what would be necessary to build good, civic infrastructure” (where “good” requires both “be ‘good’ in some kind of deep sense,” but also “be memetically fit enough to compete with Twitter et all.” One solution might be convincing Musk of specific policies rather than building a competitor)
Durable institutions find ways to survive. I don’t mean survival merely in terms of legal continuity; I mean fidelity to their founding charter. Institutions not only have to survive past their first leader; they have to survive their first leader themself! The institution’s structure and policies must protect against the leader’s meandering attention, whims, and potential corruptions. In the case of Elon, based on his mercurial history, I would not bet that Musk would agree to the requisite policies.
Curated. This was one of the more inspiring things I read this year (in a year that had a moderate number of inspiring things!)
I really like how Sarah lays out the problem and desiderata for neutrality in our public/civic institutional spaces.
LessWrong’s strength is being a fairly opinionated ”university[1]” about how to do epistemics, which the rest of the world isn’t necessarily bought into. Trying to make LW a civic institution would fail. But, this post has me more excited to revisit “what would be necessary to build good, civic infrastructure” (where “good” requires both “be ‘good’ in some kind of deep sense,” but also “be memetically fit enough to compete with Twitter et all.” One solution might be convincing Musk of specific policies rather than building a competitor)
I.e. A gated community with epistemic standards, a process for teaching people, and a process for some of those people going on to do more research.
Durable institutions find ways to survive. I don’t mean survival merely in terms of legal continuity; I mean fidelity to their founding charter. Institutions not only have to survive past their first leader; they have to survive their first leader themself! The institution’s structure and policies must protect against the leader’s meandering attention, whims, and potential corruptions. In the case of Elon, based on his mercurial history, I would not bet that Musk would agree to the requisite policies.