At the risk of sounding ridiculous, I will self-identify as a member of the intellectual elite since no one else seems to want to.
I’m occasionally engaged in LW and I’m interested in rationality and applied psychology and the idea of FAI.
I don’t think LW is necessarily the best venue for discussing big important ideas. Making a post on the internet is something I might spend 4-5 working hours on. It might even be something I’ll spend a couple days on, but that’s an inconsequential amount of my time. And the vast majority of the people who read whatever post I generate will spend generously 15-20 minutes thinking about it. I’m actively working on reading and checking the math in a 300 page textbook in order to make a post on LW six months from now that maybe 100 people will read and almost no one will take seriously. If my day job weren’t writing academic papers with similarly dim readership prospects this would surely be overwhelmingly demoralizing. There’s a commitment issue here where it doesn’t make sense to invest a lot of time in impressing/convincing LW readers. I have no guarantee that anyone is seriously engaged with whatever idea I present here as opposed to just being entertained, and most of the people reading this forum are not looking for things to seriously engage with. There’s a limit to how many, how big, and how strange the ideas you encounter once a week in a blog can be. They might be entertaining, they might be interesting, but they can’t all change the way you see the world. It takes a lot of time (for my mind at least) to process new ideas and work through all the implications.
LW is set up in such a way that it’s a constant stream of updates, and any given post can expect a week or two of attention, at which point it fades into the background with all the other detritus. But big ideas are hard to grapple with in a week, and so most LW responses are the sort of off the cuff suggestions that you get when you expose people to a new idea they don’t fully understand. I’ve been reading LW for 9 months now and I’m still on the fence about FAI. The internet makes publishing much easier, but it doesn’t make thinking any easier. This is I think one of the reasons that science hasn’t abandoned publishing in journals and why there aren’t many elites on the web. Accessing content is already much much easier than digesting that content. I have whole binders full of papers I need to read and digest that I don’t have time for. And so does everyone else probably. LW posts are primarily entertainment and most of the people who post here are doing it for a brief applause or to float an idea they haven’t seriously worked on yet.
I’m also less clear as to what sort of content you want that you don’t have. What’s your end goal?
If I had to make code suggestions, I would say that discussions on a single post get too long before anything is resolved. There seems to be no point in commenting once there’s a certain number of comments, and so discussion tends to sort of stall out. I’d be interested to see what the distribution of # of comments on high karma posts looks like and whether there’s a specific number of comments which seems to function as a sort of glass ceiling. I also think that as time goes on things get pushed down the queue and become invisible. The fact that no matter how brilliant your idea is it’s basically got a week in the limelight and then will be forgotten forever isn’t super conducive to using LW to seriously discuss difficult problems.
And this is all off the top of my head, because of course I haven’t seriously thought about this.
I’m actively working on reading and checking the math in a 300 page textbook in order to make a post on LW six months from now that maybe 100 people will read and almost no one will take seriously.
Thanks! But 100 people is a serious underestimate: far more people read your previous posts on the subject (only a fraction of readers vote, and you got 43 upvotes on your post about nanotechnology). If you wind up with some substantive technical criticisms, I expect Eric Drexler will take time to reply, I for one will be seriously interested, and it will be frequently linked to in discussions about Drexlerian nanotechnology.
The most-viewed LW post has hundreds of thousands of hits, and there are many at 10,000+ (search the link for “pageviews”).
The fact that no matter how brilliant your idea is it’s basically got a week in the limelight and then will be forgotten forever isn’t super conducive to using LW to seriously discuss difficult problems.
I think that’s fine. Public forums in general aren’t proper places to seriously discuss difficult problems. What they offer is width, not depth.
Your complaint is really that there are not enough smart people who are willing to spend a lot of time and effort grappling with the problems which you are interested in. That’s a very common complaint :-) and I don’t think this problem can be fixed by fiddling with the structure of a web site.
If I had to make code suggestions, I would say that discussions on a single post get too long before anything is resolved. There seems to be no point in commenting once there’s a certain number of comments, and so discussion tends to sort of stall out. I’d be interested to see what the distribution of # of comments on high karma posts looks like and whether there’s a specific number of comments which seems to function as a sort of glass ceiling. I also think that as time goes on things get pushed down the queue and become invisible. The fact that no matter how brilliant your idea is it’s basically got a week in the limelight and then will be forgotten forever isn’t super conducive to using LW to seriously discuss difficult problems.
Is this an example of a proposed code change that you feel would solve this issue?
A possible re-ordering of the site could allow for easy routes to posts on a particular topic, be they old or new. Something like tagging system, but more clear-cut, so whenever someone adds a new post, it goes straight into a particular section. Also, the post could be regenerated every time the discussion extended to more than 300 comments, to keep things fresh (keeping the old comments in an easily accessible archive).
Since my views are intended to be part of the discussion here, there are not well thought-through by your standards. My apologies- if you want to stop reading leplen, you have every right to.
I’m a Melbourne University first-year student, which qualifies me as “intellectual elite” by some descriptions and not by others. My thoughts:
1- Use censored forums, where you have to show some degree of credentials to be allowed to make a response. Either make there rules to prevent somebody getting in at all to avoid jealousy, or make criterion of intellectual content merely to post. These standards would be much higher than the current Lesswrong Karma standards.
2- Have permanent “spotlight” posts.
3- Have significant numbers of “reinforcement” posts for the masses, designed to encourage them to read said posts and gradually change themselves bit by bit. These posts won’t be mere padding, as they will focus on delving into how to change one’s life to adapt to the things learned in the “top-level” posts.
These require a lot of institutional change, which requires Elizier to get behind the idea and it’s advantages. If he does, however, making changes to the site to solve these problems is trivial.
At the risk of sounding ridiculous, I will self-identify as a member of the intellectual elite since no one else seems to want to.
I’m occasionally engaged in LW and I’m interested in rationality and applied psychology and the idea of FAI.
I don’t think LW is necessarily the best venue for discussing big important ideas. Making a post on the internet is something I might spend 4-5 working hours on. It might even be something I’ll spend a couple days on, but that’s an inconsequential amount of my time. And the vast majority of the people who read whatever post I generate will spend generously 15-20 minutes thinking about it. I’m actively working on reading and checking the math in a 300 page textbook in order to make a post on LW six months from now that maybe 100 people will read and almost no one will take seriously. If my day job weren’t writing academic papers with similarly dim readership prospects this would surely be overwhelmingly demoralizing. There’s a commitment issue here where it doesn’t make sense to invest a lot of time in impressing/convincing LW readers. I have no guarantee that anyone is seriously engaged with whatever idea I present here as opposed to just being entertained, and most of the people reading this forum are not looking for things to seriously engage with. There’s a limit to how many, how big, and how strange the ideas you encounter once a week in a blog can be. They might be entertaining, they might be interesting, but they can’t all change the way you see the world. It takes a lot of time (for my mind at least) to process new ideas and work through all the implications.
LW is set up in such a way that it’s a constant stream of updates, and any given post can expect a week or two of attention, at which point it fades into the background with all the other detritus. But big ideas are hard to grapple with in a week, and so most LW responses are the sort of off the cuff suggestions that you get when you expose people to a new idea they don’t fully understand. I’ve been reading LW for 9 months now and I’m still on the fence about FAI. The internet makes publishing much easier, but it doesn’t make thinking any easier. This is I think one of the reasons that science hasn’t abandoned publishing in journals and why there aren’t many elites on the web. Accessing content is already much much easier than digesting that content. I have whole binders full of papers I need to read and digest that I don’t have time for. And so does everyone else probably. LW posts are primarily entertainment and most of the people who post here are doing it for a brief applause or to float an idea they haven’t seriously worked on yet.
I’m also less clear as to what sort of content you want that you don’t have. What’s your end goal?
If I had to make code suggestions, I would say that discussions on a single post get too long before anything is resolved. There seems to be no point in commenting once there’s a certain number of comments, and so discussion tends to sort of stall out. I’d be interested to see what the distribution of # of comments on high karma posts looks like and whether there’s a specific number of comments which seems to function as a sort of glass ceiling. I also think that as time goes on things get pushed down the queue and become invisible. The fact that no matter how brilliant your idea is it’s basically got a week in the limelight and then will be forgotten forever isn’t super conducive to using LW to seriously discuss difficult problems.
And this is all off the top of my head, because of course I haven’t seriously thought about this.
Thanks! But 100 people is a serious underestimate: far more people read your previous posts on the subject (only a fraction of readers vote, and you got 43 upvotes on your post about nanotechnology). If you wind up with some substantive technical criticisms, I expect Eric Drexler will take time to reply, I for one will be seriously interested, and it will be frequently linked to in discussions about Drexlerian nanotechnology.
The most-viewed LW post has hundreds of thousands of hits, and there are many at 10,000+ (search the link for “pageviews”).
I think that’s fine. Public forums in general aren’t proper places to seriously discuss difficult problems. What they offer is width, not depth.
Your complaint is really that there are not enough smart people who are willing to spend a lot of time and effort grappling with the problems which you are interested in. That’s a very common complaint :-) and I don’t think this problem can be fixed by fiddling with the structure of a web site.
Is this an example of a proposed code change that you feel would solve this issue?
A possible re-ordering of the site could allow for easy routes to posts on a particular topic, be they old or new. Something like tagging system, but more clear-cut, so whenever someone adds a new post, it goes straight into a particular section. Also, the post could be regenerated every time the discussion extended to more than 300 comments, to keep things fresh (keeping the old comments in an easily accessible archive).
Since my views are intended to be part of the discussion here, there are not well thought-through by your standards. My apologies- if you want to stop reading leplen, you have every right to.
I’m a Melbourne University first-year student, which qualifies me as “intellectual elite” by some descriptions and not by others. My thoughts:
1- Use censored forums, where you have to show some degree of credentials to be allowed to make a response. Either make there rules to prevent somebody getting in at all to avoid jealousy, or make criterion of intellectual content merely to post. These standards would be much higher than the current Lesswrong Karma standards. 2- Have permanent “spotlight” posts. 3- Have significant numbers of “reinforcement” posts for the masses, designed to encourage them to read said posts and gradually change themselves bit by bit. These posts won’t be mere padding, as they will focus on delving into how to change one’s life to adapt to the things learned in the “top-level” posts.
These require a lot of institutional change, which requires Elizier to get behind the idea and it’s advantages. If he does, however, making changes to the site to solve these problems is trivial.