Of the 12 most recent posts in ‘Discussion’, nine are ‘Meetup’ related and one is a meta-level discussion about producing LW courses.
Is LW imploding into some sort of self-impressed death spiral? Where is the new non-LW meta content? Am I way off, or has the quality of posts significantly diminished over time here?
I have noticed waves of insightful posts inspired by other insightful posts, followed by periods where nobody thinks of anything important to say, so we are dominated by meetup posts. I think for me, there has been a greater density of interesting in the previous 2 months, than there was in the 6 months before that.
There are two possible mechanisms that could produce a predominance of meetup posts over interesting new content: an explosion of meetup posts, or a dearth of interesting new content.
There are frequent complaints about how the meetup posts swamp everything else. I’m not sure whether anyone’s come up with a convincing way to solve the problem and offered to implement it.
My impression is that there is less interesting stuff on LW than there used to be, partly because a small number of particularly high-quality contributors have moved elsewhere or run out of new things they want to say. Two obvious examples: Eliezer (more or less completely stopped; presumably he’s working on some combination of saving the world and writing Harry Potter fanfiction) and Yvain (has no more time for blogging on account of being an overworked junior doctor; also blogging, more than ever but at slatestarcodex.com rather than LW).
Another explanation for the shortage of interesting new things: saying interesting new things is hard and more and more of the things people might want to say have already been said.
I’d agree that EY’s stuff makes up a big chunk of the best of LW and Slatesarcodex is cool.
I’m speculating if LW has run it’s course, at least quality content wise?
At some critical mass, it seems to me the content won’t matter all that much in most groups. LW can function as it’s own meetup.com where rationalists and/or Harry Potter fans can come to meet like minds.
It kind of reminds me of my time in church—it becomes not-that-important if all the doctrinal stuff is true because everybody benefits from the social construct in place as a distant result of once caring deeply about the doctrinal stuff.
Well, (moridinamael hemmed and hawed, debated whether to open his big dumb mouth) there have also been a few huge disaster-threads recently that really damaged my personal affect regarding this community. When everybody in The Rationality Club (tm) starts acting like children, defect-defecting on each other and statusmongering and basically looking indistinguishable from my Facebook feed, one begins to feel that a Rubicon has been unknowingly crossed somewhere. It reduces my unconscious impulse to contribute; it reduces my expectation that my contributions will be received in the generous spirit that I feel they would have been received in, oh, two or three years ago.
I hate writing posts like this, mainly because I hate complaining without suggesting solutions, so I will end with a solution: let’s be more generous to each other. To each others’ arguments and possible meanings. To the moods we might have been in when we wrote the posts we wrote; users aren’t bad people, they just have bad days. (Fundamental Attribution Error should be in bold at the bottom of the Reply button.)
Maybe we wouldn’t all feel the need to hide in the Open Thread if we were nicer to each other.
Let’s be more generous to each other. To each others’ arguments and possible meanings.
I don’t know that I’m for this. I like the sentiment. But I’ve recently noticed the aspect that I enjoy about LW (when it is at is best) is it’s relatively cold, irrational indifference.
In my regular world, which is not filled with scholars or even particular rational people, everyone seems phony, flattering and patronizing. It’s very Facebook-y.
I love having a place to go to find a rational take on things. I often search LW for discussion on things I’m interested in.
Maybe you are right that the style of engagement has devolved and that has caused—or at least contributed to—lower quality content.
Didn’t the latest poll indicate numbers are up year-over-year? Perhaps quantity of users is diluting the quality of the content?
You extend to me quite a bit of courtesy here, and your tone is very generous although you disagree with me. I seem to see a lot of posts these days that skip the courtesy (which is necessary for productive discourse, rationality is about winning, etc.) and start with “You’re wrong” and then proceed from there with middle fingers raised. I do think most of these are relative newcomers, as you say.
Any post trying to say something complex is bound to have multiple valid interpretations. This is just a fact of communication and the difficulty of expressing ideas using language. The truth of this is borne out by the fact that multiple commenters responding to the same post will interpret the original post differently. So, it is not so radical, I think, for me to suggest that we wait to say “I disagree!” or “You’re wrong!” until after we’ve first said “Let me make sure I understand what it is you’re saying.”
I’d agree there can be a great deal of courtesy-skipping here. It slapped me in the face at first.
Then I got used it. And it forced me to get smarter, and to be more careful about what I said and how I chose to say it. I’m grateful for LW in that it forced me out of some lazy communication habits. I’m still lazy in my communication, but LW helps to the extent I engage with intention.
Perhaps some of it is just a style issue? Or that social awareness of courtesy tends not to go hand-in-hand with brute IQ and technical genius?
Anyway, you make good points (and, to evidence those good points, it basically true that I quite telling people they made good points on LW some time ago as it seemed to violate the often kurt decorum. :)
You extend to me quite a bit of courtesy here, and your tone is very generous although you disagree with me. I seem to see a lot of posts these days that skip the courtesy (which is necessary for productive discourse, rationality is about winning, etc.) and start with “You’re wrong” and then proceed from there with middle fingers raised. I do think most of these are relative newcomers, as you say.
Which in turn means that rationalists, and especially apprentice rationalists watching other rationalists at work, are especially at-risk for absorbing cynicism as though it were a virtue in its own right—assuming that whosoever speaks of ulterior motives is probably a wise rationalist with uncommon insight; or believing that it is an entitled benefit of realism to feel superior to the naive herd that still has a shred of hope.
People here can be blunt for the sake of getting to the point, or can at least appear blunt. This could make it look like “rationalists are blunt,” which makes people blunt for the sake of signaling rationality.
This is obviously my own opinion, but I see being blunt regardless of context as a social habit that one grows out of, not something that one grows into. I certainly haven’t personally found it useful to become more rude over time, quite the opposite.
From a tribal affiliation standpoint, we are often reflexively portrayed as “the ones who value truth and honesty above feelings,” as if this necessitates that feelings not matter at all, or that they not exist, which is totally contrary to the truth of human psychology and how our interactions work.
there have also been a few huge disaster-threads recently that really damaged my personal affect regarding this community. When everybody in The Rationality Club (tm) starts acting like children, defect-defecting on each other and statusmongering and basically looking indistinguishable from my Facebook feed
I found a lot of behavior in the White Lies thread to be disappointing, not in content but in tone and how people were treating each other. I think it affected me so much that I’ve been reading other threads recently with a bad taste in my mouth, because I frankly can’t point to any other threads and say “this one was also a nightmare” but it just feels like the level of civility across the community took a big hit, or maybe my faith took the hit and it’s coloring my reading.
Personally I find usually more interesting material in the open threads than the discussion area or the main. I take this to mean I am at least somewhat outside of the core target audience of the site.
More meetup posts clutter Discussion (which is kinda bad) but mean that people are actually going to meetup groups (which is kinda awesome). Maybe frame a meetup post not as a trivial inconvenience, but evidence that rationalists are meeting in person and having cool discussions and working on their lives instead of hanging around in Less Wrong.
When there’s a lot of interesting content here, sometimes people ask why we’re all sticking around talking about talking about rationality instead of doing stuff out in the world.
Of the 12 most recent posts in ‘Discussion’, nine are ‘Meetup’ related and one is a meta-level discussion about producing LW courses.
Is LW imploding into some sort of self-impressed death spiral? Where is the new non-LW meta content? Am I way off, or has the quality of posts significantly diminished over time here?
I’m curious to know what others think.
I have noticed waves of insightful posts inspired by other insightful posts, followed by periods where nobody thinks of anything important to say, so we are dominated by meetup posts. I think for me, there has been a greater density of interesting in the previous 2 months, than there was in the 6 months before that.
There are two possible mechanisms that could produce a predominance of meetup posts over interesting new content: an explosion of meetup posts, or a dearth of interesting new content.
There are frequent complaints about how the meetup posts swamp everything else. I’m not sure whether anyone’s come up with a convincing way to solve the problem and offered to implement it.
My impression is that there is less interesting stuff on LW than there used to be, partly because a small number of particularly high-quality contributors have moved elsewhere or run out of new things they want to say. Two obvious examples: Eliezer (more or less completely stopped; presumably he’s working on some combination of saving the world and writing Harry Potter fanfiction) and Yvain (has no more time for blogging on account of being an overworked junior doctor; also blogging, more than ever but at slatestarcodex.com rather than LW).
Another explanation for the shortage of interesting new things: saying interesting new things is hard and more and more of the things people might want to say have already been said.
I’d agree that EY’s stuff makes up a big chunk of the best of LW and Slatesarcodex is cool.
I’m speculating if LW has run it’s course, at least quality content wise?
At some critical mass, it seems to me the content won’t matter all that much in most groups. LW can function as it’s own meetup.com where rationalists and/or Harry Potter fans can come to meet like minds.
It kind of reminds me of my time in church—it becomes not-that-important if all the doctrinal stuff is true because everybody benefits from the social construct in place as a distant result of once caring deeply about the doctrinal stuff.
Well, (moridinamael hemmed and hawed, debated whether to open his big dumb mouth) there have also been a few huge disaster-threads recently that really damaged my personal affect regarding this community. When everybody in The Rationality Club (tm) starts acting like children, defect-defecting on each other and statusmongering and basically looking indistinguishable from my Facebook feed, one begins to feel that a Rubicon has been unknowingly crossed somewhere. It reduces my unconscious impulse to contribute; it reduces my expectation that my contributions will be received in the generous spirit that I feel they would have been received in, oh, two or three years ago.
I hate writing posts like this, mainly because I hate complaining without suggesting solutions, so I will end with a solution: let’s be more generous to each other. To each others’ arguments and possible meanings. To the moods we might have been in when we wrote the posts we wrote; users aren’t bad people, they just have bad days. (Fundamental Attribution Error should be in bold at the bottom of the Reply button.)
Maybe we wouldn’t all feel the need to hide in the Open Thread if we were nicer to each other.
Interesting.
I don’t know that I’m for this. I like the sentiment. But I’ve recently noticed the aspect that I enjoy about LW (when it is at is best) is it’s relatively cold, irrational indifference.
In my regular world, which is not filled with scholars or even particular rational people, everyone seems phony, flattering and patronizing. It’s very Facebook-y.
I love having a place to go to find a rational take on things. I often search LW for discussion on things I’m interested in.
Maybe you are right that the style of engagement has devolved and that has caused—or at least contributed to—lower quality content.
Didn’t the latest poll indicate numbers are up year-over-year? Perhaps quantity of users is diluting the quality of the content?
You extend to me quite a bit of courtesy here, and your tone is very generous although you disagree with me. I seem to see a lot of posts these days that skip the courtesy (which is necessary for productive discourse, rationality is about winning, etc.) and start with “You’re wrong” and then proceed from there with middle fingers raised. I do think most of these are relative newcomers, as you say.
Any post trying to say something complex is bound to have multiple valid interpretations. This is just a fact of communication and the difficulty of expressing ideas using language. The truth of this is borne out by the fact that multiple commenters responding to the same post will interpret the original post differently. So, it is not so radical, I think, for me to suggest that we wait to say “I disagree!” or “You’re wrong!” until after we’ve first said “Let me make sure I understand what it is you’re saying.”
I’d agree there can be a great deal of courtesy-skipping here. It slapped me in the face at first.
Then I got used it. And it forced me to get smarter, and to be more careful about what I said and how I chose to say it. I’m grateful for LW in that it forced me out of some lazy communication habits. I’m still lazy in my communication, but LW helps to the extent I engage with intention.
Perhaps some of it is just a style issue? Or that social awareness of courtesy tends not to go hand-in-hand with brute IQ and technical genius?
Anyway, you make good points (and, to evidence those good points, it basically true that I quite telling people they made good points on LW some time ago as it seemed to violate the often kurt decorum. :)
This reminds me of Cynical about Cynicism where Yudkowsky writes:
People here can be blunt for the sake of getting to the point, or can at least appear blunt. This could make it look like “rationalists are blunt,” which makes people blunt for the sake of signaling rationality.
This is obviously my own opinion, but I see being blunt regardless of context as a social habit that one grows out of, not something that one grows into. I certainly haven’t personally found it useful to become more rude over time, quite the opposite.
From a tribal affiliation standpoint, we are often reflexively portrayed as “the ones who value truth and honesty above feelings,” as if this necessitates that feelings not matter at all, or that they not exist, which is totally contrary to the truth of human psychology and how our interactions work.
I’m curious, which threads are you referring to?
I found a lot of behavior in the White Lies thread to be disappointing, not in content but in tone and how people were treating each other. I think it affected me so much that I’ve been reading other threads recently with a bad taste in my mouth, because I frankly can’t point to any other threads and say “this one was also a nightmare” but it just feels like the level of civility across the community took a big hit, or maybe my faith took the hit and it’s coloring my reading.
Personally I find usually more interesting material in the open threads than the discussion area or the main. I take this to mean I am at least somewhat outside of the core target audience of the site.
More meetup posts clutter Discussion (which is kinda bad) but mean that people are actually going to meetup groups (which is kinda awesome). Maybe frame a meetup post not as a trivial inconvenience, but evidence that rationalists are meeting in person and having cool discussions and working on their lives instead of hanging around in Less Wrong.
When there’s a lot of interesting content here, sometimes people ask why we’re all sticking around talking about talking about rationality instead of doing stuff out in the world.