Lots of us are interested in the topic and write on it even when it doesn’t strictly relate to rationality. Segregating transhumanist posts would help us retain readers who are interested in increasing their rationality but would be turned off by posts such as the above one on CEV.
For selfish reasons I would benefit because I’m writing a book on singularity issues.
I agree for the reasons you’ve mentioned. Recently there has been a lot of discussion about what LessWrong should be about, and I think this is a good way to resolve that question.
Here’s a suggestion: What if we divided the forum into sub-pages by topic?
Agreed with Jack about the nuisance value of splitting up not being worth it for the current level of throughput.
If things do get significantly overloaded, a better (though harder to code) answer would be to allow individual users to define filters, and modify the site code to only display posts whose tags match the user’s filters.
I think the current level of throughput is low largely because there is no subsection of the kind James is arguing for; maybe there are arguments to be made that these topics are already appropriate in theory, but in practice I think the fear of being off-topic, the fear of being incorrectly perceived as off-topic, and the lack of active priming to post on these topics are inhibiting a lot of potential useful contributions, especially from more cautious members.
Here’s a suggestion: What if we divided the forum into sub-pages by topic?
This kind of thing is a good long-term solution but is there enough discussion at this point to justify this kind of division? It would be inconvenient to have to click through every subforum I was interested in just to see if there was anything new.
You can use http://lesswrong.com/r/all/recentposts/ if you don’t mind manually skipping over threads from subforums you’re not interested in. (On Reddit you can put together more specific combinations like this, or just configure your front page to show particular reddits, but neither of those seems to work here.)
Lots of us are interested in the topic and write on it even when it doesn’t strictly relate to rationality. Segregating transhumanist posts would help us retain readers who are interested in increasing their rationality but would be turned off by posts such as the above one on CEV.
For selfish reasons I would benefit because I’m writing a book on singularity issues.
I agree for the reasons you’ve mentioned. Recently there has been a lot of discussion about what LessWrong should be about, and I think this is a good way to resolve that question.
Here’s a suggestion: What if we divided the forum into sub-pages by topic?
Agreed with Jack about the nuisance value of splitting up not being worth it for the current level of throughput.
If things do get significantly overloaded, a better (though harder to code) answer would be to allow individual users to define filters, and modify the site code to only display posts whose tags match the user’s filters.
I think the current level of throughput is low largely because there is no subsection of the kind James is arguing for; maybe there are arguments to be made that these topics are already appropriate in theory, but in practice I think the fear of being off-topic, the fear of being incorrectly perceived as off-topic, and the lack of active priming to post on these topics are inhibiting a lot of potential useful contributions, especially from more cautious members.
This kind of thing is a good long-term solution but is there enough discussion at this point to justify this kind of division? It would be inconvenient to have to click through every subforum I was interested in just to see if there was anything new.
You can use http://lesswrong.com/r/all/recentposts/ if you don’t mind manually skipping over threads from subforums you’re not interested in. (On Reddit you can put together more specific combinations like this, or just configure your front page to show particular reddits, but neither of those seems to work here.)
That’s true—I think TheOtherDave’s suggestion above might be something of a compromise.
In general, we could use a better search/tagging system. Open tagging would help.
A section even lesser than “Discussion” for off-topic chat?
They are not “lesser” but different.