Wikipedia generally works fine, but occassionally problems happen. Sometimes obsessive editors are rewarded with power, which they sometimes abuse to win the debates on their pet topics. As long as other similarly powerful editors don’t care, they are allowed to rule their little fiefdoms.
As an example, David Gerard, the admin of RationalWiki, is currently camping at the Wikipedia article on Less Wrong; most of his effort goes towards reducing the section on effective altruism and expanding the section on “Roko’s basilisk”… which itself is known mostly because he previously popularized it on RationalWiki. (Also notice other subtle manipulation, like the fact that the page mentions the political opinion of 0.92% of 2016 survey participants, but the remaining 99.08% is not worth mentioning.) I mean, just make your own opinion on how much the content of Less Wrong as you see it here actually resembles the thing that is described at Wikipedia. -- One guy, with a strong grudge, willing to spend more time fighting wiki wars than all his opponents together. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
The principles of LW… well, originally it was a shared blog by Robin Hanson and Eliezer Yudkowsky, later (cca 10 years ago) Yudkowsky moved his part (which is commonly referred to as “the Sequences”) to a separate website, which enabled voting for articles, and allowed other people to register accounts and post their own articles. So the principles are, de facto, “what the community, which has grown around Yudkowsky’s blog, approves of”. (Note that Yudkowsky himself, other than being respected as a founder, doesn’t currently have any special rights within the website, and he is gradually less and less involved; e.g. he only postedone article in 2020.) To see what the community approves of, stay here for some time, watch what gets upvoted and what does not; on a lucky day a comment may explain why.
My newer view is that LW is almost like a form of performance art, with the contributors in the role of artists.
I like this metaphor. But aren’t most web debates like this? By which I mean that the metaphor alone doesn’t explain how LW is different from the rest of internet. Perhaps we should add that this performance is played for the same kind of audience that enjoyed the original Yudkowsky’s blog.
I agree that posting links to related articles is useful, and also lot of work, especially as the site had grown so no one can now remember everything. There are the tags below articles, which (I only noticed this now) display articles on the same topic when you move your mouse over the tag. You can look at the list of all tags, or you can use Google. I agree that this could be made more convenient, but I don’t see that as high priority.
It would be nice if the system (LW in this example) offered me some way to track my contributions.
I’m trying to figure out what sort of things I can ‘properly’ write about here on LW.
I think how is much more important than what. Of course it’s a bonus if the thing is related to artificial intelligence, machine learning, math, effective altruism, self-help, etc. But more important is not to write bullshit. Write about something you understand, or something you experienced; but generally something you care about. Don’t bluff; you never know what kind of expert will read and comment your article; there are some pretty smart people here.
(As a rule of thumb, don’t write anything about politics, unless you can reliably write articles on other topics that get like 10 karma each, otherwise you risk doing exactly the same mistake many people did before you, and invoking the anger of community. Which again, relates more to how people write rather than what. Somehow, when people start thinking about politics, their IQ automatically drops by 50 points, and they produce exactly the type of content we are trying to avoid here. Yeah, there are exceptions, but notice how e.g. this differs from 99.99% of political discourse you can find online.)
I do feel like AI is a heavy concern, even a favored topic, here on LW, and that is probably related to the preferences of the donors or maybe the personal concerns of the “team of six” (artists?) who do the “site development and support”.
Just ignore this completely. Other people already write about AI. If you have something insightful to add, go ahead, but if you are more interested in other things, don’t force yourself; it would help no one. I’d prefer to read a good article about how to train a pet lizard, rather than a mediocre essay on why artificial intelligence is this or that. (The worst case for a good off-topic article is that it will be ignored. A bad essay will be downvoted. And precisely because there are many AI experts here, a mediocre essay on AI would be perceived as bad.)
If you have an idea of a very important article, where it would hurt you to get negative reaction, maybe test waters with something smaller first. My opinion (which may not be representative for LW as a whole) about your suggestions is:
1 - great;
2 - potentially interesting; I would recommend writing it from perspective “what I use” or “these are some existing systems”, rather that “this is the One True Way to do it”;
4 - if there is a specific product you like and find useful, go ahead;
5 - don’t force yourself;
6 - depends… maybe leave this for later, and test the waters with other topics first.
By the way, links are supported in replies. Select the words, a context menu will appear, click on the “Link” button, and paste the URL. To get the URL for an article or a comment, right-click on the publishing date and copy the link.
I mean, just make your own opinion on how much the content of Less Wrong as you see it here actually resembles the thing that is described at Wikipedia.
The problem here is that the goal of Wikipedia isn’t to describe LessWrong as it’s seen by someone who goes to LessWrong but how LessWrong is seen by reliably secondary sources.
Thank you for another deep and thoughtful response. But what response should I make? [Note that second person “you” here refers to Viliam, but there is risk of confusion if I say something to the broader (but unknown) audience. I’ll try to be careful… But in this discussion I am sure that I have already used “you” with reference to someone else. [I find myself wishing that English had a mechanism to avoid confusing “you” references without ponderous third person descriptions such as “Viliam in his comment of <timestamp> said...”]]
The easy part is to pick a couple of nits, but I’m trying to get deeper than that… But when I back up (and look at the context) then the volume becomes overwhelming and I’m having trouble unraveling the topics. I do feel that part of the problem is my poor and unclear writing, but it is also true that I don’t understand how to use the system well.
So I’m going to focus on two nits here, one that reflects my lack of understanding of the system and one that reflects the lack of clarity in my writing. Then I’ll try to get back up to a higher perspective, which seems to be the karma thing… (But that topic is more related to my earlier reply on the karma “research” from the end of 2019.)
At the end of your comment, what you described is an interesting example of my lack of understanding of the LW system. Or maybe an example of my failing eyesight? I definitely knew that it worked exactly the way you described it for “top-level” content, but for several days I was apparently unable to see the fifth icon on the context menu when I was working on a reply (such as this one). But this is just part of a more general lack of familiarity with the system. Another example: A few minutes ago I spent several minutes figuring out that a “5m” notation meant 5 minutes ago, not 5 months ago, even though the article had an “11y” notation for the 11 years from 2010. The section heading of “Recent Discussion” should have made it more obvious to me, but now I wonder what the notation for 5 months ago would have been… (Relative times are good, but sometimes confusing.)
The other nit involves my poor clarity. I was already quite aware of the “this” link you posted to my user page and it does list my contributions, but not in the sense of “track” that I was trying to describe. There are also the pull-down notices invoked by the bell icon at the upper right. What I am currently unable to do is combine these views to get a mental image of what is happening. Where do my own comments fit into the discussion? What is the structure of the replies?
Is there a tree graphic representation of the discussions hidden somewhere around here? I’m imagining a node diagram with one color for my own contributions, separate colors for each of the primary contributors, and then a fallback color for grouping all of the minor contributors. Now I’m imagining solid lines for direct replies and dotted lines for links that go elsewhere. (If the 80-20 rule applies to discussions here, then at least the part with colors for contributors might work well enough with a reasonably small number of colors.)
For whatever it is worth, I feel like this discussion itself is already beyond my ken. I feel like the lesson that I am learning is that I need to learn to limit my questions MUCH more narrowly. (I have only looked at a few relies, and my available time is already becoming exhausted by this one reply. But was this the best place to begin today? (And now I lack time (and musal energy) to return to the karma topic.))
Also I greatly appreciate the politeness of the replies and I feel like I am being indulged in my ignorance. In solution terms, how could I learn about the system without bothering other people? (Or is that intrinsically impossible in the context of a discussion system such as this?)
Hey, if you’re new here, it’s perfectly natural that there are some website functions you are not familiar with. I am here for years, and there are still things I don’t know. Keep reading, you will gradually get more familiar with how this all works.
A few minutes ago I spent several minutes figuring out that a “5m” notation meant 5 minutes ago, not 5 months ago, even though the article had an “11y” notation for the 11 years from 2010.
Good catch! I never noticed this one. (If you move the mouse above the abbreviation, the full date and time will be displayed.)
The UI you imagine probably does not exist. What you can get is (a) the list of all articles you posted, in chronological order; and (b) the list of all comments you made, in chronological order, with links to context. Both of them are on the same page, when you click on your name.
For me, this is quite enough, because the number of my posts will most likely never exceed three digits, probably not even two (though I wish the meetup announcements were displayed separately from the actual articles), and given the huge number of comments I wrote during the years, I don’t believe I would ever want to see them all.
In solution terms, how could I learn about the system without bothering other people?
Maybe read articles with the Site Meta tag? Not all of them are related to what you want, but probably most of what you want is covered somewhere there.
Thanks for the lead to the “Site Meta” tag. I have that one open in another tab and will explore it next. However my general response to your reply is that part of the problem is that I would like to see different kinds of “tracking summaries” depending on what kinds of things I am trying to understand at a particular time.
You introduced a new example with your mention of “meetup announcements”. If you are trying to track your activity on LW in terms of such meetings, then you want to see things from that perspective.
What I have done in today’s experiment is to open all the “recent” notifications in tabs because it is not clear which ones are actually new… It would be helpful if the notifications pulldown list also showed the notification times (though the mouseover trick for date expansion also works for the relative dates on the floating summary that appears to the left of the notification when you hover over it). Overall I’m still having a difficult time grasping the status of this question.
Just rereading the entire “question” to try to assess it, and almost overlooked your [Viliam’s] helpful numbered list. I think I have replied as appropriate (if replying was appropriate?) and hope that the notification system will let me know if I should come back.
On the basis of your encouragement, I’m going to try to write something for the literacy software topic. Not sure upon what basis you think it might be “great”, but I could not find much that seemed to be related in my search efforts on LW. The obvious searches did produce some results, but how they are ranked is still unclear. For example, I remember a “literacy” search with four primary results, but two of them were for narrow senses of literacy such as “financial literacy”. Before starting to write, I’m going to try searching from the list of tags. (It would be helpful if there were an option to sort by the numbers there… That way I could spot the more relevant tags more easily. (I’m guessing that the numbers are the authors’ usage counts for the tags, but there should be a way to link to the readers’ counts to capture the other side of interest? (What people want to read about in contrast to what people want to write about. (Yet another symmetry thing?))))
Backing up to the top level, I haven’t obtained much insight into the original question. I guess my summary of my understanding now would be “We’re sort of above worrying about money, so go have fun with the LW tools we are creating.” I think that summary reflects input from at least two of the creators of the tools. The users’ side seems to be “We’re having fun and that’s why we do it.”
Here is a part of LW history that may be relevant to the question of money and sponsors: the Less Wrong website you see is, from a technical perspective, already a third version.
The first version was Overcoming Bias, a shared blog of Robin Hanson and Eliezer Yudkowsky, which started in 2006. Being just two guys’ personal WordPress blog, I assume the costs were negligible.
The second version was Less Wrong implemented with a clone of Reddit code in 2009, which started with importing the existing Eliezer’s articles. The initial software was free, but required some maintenance and extra functionality, which was provided by TrikeApps. TrikeApps is a company owned by Less Wrong user matt.
The third version that you see now, with a complete rewrite of code, was actually made only a few years ago. I couldn’t quickly find the exact year, but not sooner than 2017. This was the first version that was actually quite expensive to develop.
In other words, before Less Wrong started needing serious money to exist as a website, it already had more than 10 years of history. So there is a strong momentum. The people who donated money are presumably the people who liked the existing LW, and therefore their wish is probably to keep it roughly like it was, only more awesome. (The people who didn’t like the historical Less Wrong would probably not donate money to keep it alive.) The fans of Less Wrong, as a whole, are sufficiently rich to keep the website alive.
PS: You are taking this too seriously; probably more seriously than most users here. There is no need to overthink it. If you have an idea for a nice article, write it. If you don’t, just reading and commenting is perfectly okay.
The people who donated money are presumably the people who liked the existing LW, and therefore their wish is probably to keep it roughly like it was, only more awesome.
I think a better historical perspective would be that they liked was LessWrong was in it’s first years of existing and felt that LessWrong declined and that there was a potential to bring it back to it’s old glory and make it even beter.
I feel like this branch of the discussion might be related to Dunbar’s Number? Either for total members or for active participants. Is there any data for number of participants over time and system versions?
However I also feel like Dunbar’s Number is probably different for different people. Social hubs have large numbers of personal friends, whereas I feel overwhelmed by any group of 150. My personal Dunbar’s Number might be around 15?
Wikipedia generally works fine, but occassionally problems happen. Sometimes obsessive editors are rewarded with power, which they sometimes abuse to win the debates on their pet topics. As long as other similarly powerful editors don’t care, they are allowed to rule their little fiefdoms.
As an example, David Gerard, the admin of RationalWiki, is currently camping at the Wikipedia article on Less Wrong; most of his effort goes towards reducing the section on effective altruism and expanding the section on “Roko’s basilisk”… which itself is known mostly because he previously popularized it on RationalWiki. (Also notice other subtle manipulation, like the fact that the page mentions the political opinion of 0.92% of 2016 survey participants, but the remaining 99.08% is not worth mentioning.) I mean, just make your own opinion on how much the content of Less Wrong as you see it here actually resembles the thing that is described at Wikipedia. -- One guy, with a strong grudge, willing to spend more time fighting wiki wars than all his opponents together. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
The principles of LW… well, originally it was a shared blog by Robin Hanson and Eliezer Yudkowsky, later (cca 10 years ago) Yudkowsky moved his part (which is commonly referred to as “the Sequences”) to a separate website, which enabled voting for articles, and allowed other people to register accounts and post their own articles. So the principles are, de facto, “what the community, which has grown around Yudkowsky’s blog, approves of”. (Note that Yudkowsky himself, other than being respected as a founder, doesn’t currently have any special rights within the website, and he is gradually less and less involved; e.g. he only posted one article in 2020.) To see what the community approves of, stay here for some time, watch what gets upvoted and what does not; on a lucky day a comment may explain why.
I like this metaphor. But aren’t most web debates like this? By which I mean that the metaphor alone doesn’t explain how LW is different from the rest of internet. Perhaps we should add that this performance is played for the same kind of audience that enjoyed the original Yudkowsky’s blog.
I agree that posting links to related articles is useful, and also lot of work, especially as the site had grown so no one can now remember everything. There are the tags below articles, which (I only noticed this now) display articles on the same topic when you move your mouse over the tag. You can look at the list of all tags, or you can use Google. I agree that this could be made more convenient, but I don’t see that as high priority.
Like this?
I think how is much more important than what. Of course it’s a bonus if the thing is related to artificial intelligence, machine learning, math, effective altruism, self-help, etc. But more important is not to write bullshit. Write about something you understand, or something you experienced; but generally something you care about. Don’t bluff; you never know what kind of expert will read and comment your article; there are some pretty smart people here.
(As a rule of thumb, don’t write anything about politics, unless you can reliably write articles on other topics that get like 10 karma each, otherwise you risk doing exactly the same mistake many people did before you, and invoking the anger of community. Which again, relates more to how people write rather than what. Somehow, when people start thinking about politics, their IQ automatically drops by 50 points, and they produce exactly the type of content we are trying to avoid here. Yeah, there are exceptions, but notice how e.g. this differs from 99.99% of political discourse you can find online.)
Just ignore this completely. Other people already write about AI. If you have something insightful to add, go ahead, but if you are more interested in other things, don’t force yourself; it would help no one. I’d prefer to read a good article about how to train a pet lizard, rather than a mediocre essay on why artificial intelligence is this or that. (The worst case for a good off-topic article is that it will be ignored. A bad essay will be downvoted. And precisely because there are many AI experts here, a mediocre essay on AI would be perceived as bad.)
If you have an idea of a very important article, where it would hurt you to get negative reaction, maybe test waters with something smaller first. My opinion (which may not be representative for LW as a whole) about your suggestions is:
1 - great;
2 - potentially interesting; I would recommend writing it from perspective “what I use” or “these are some existing systems”, rather that “this is the One True Way to do it”;
3 - potentially interesting, potentially bullshit;
4 - if there is a specific product you like and find useful, go ahead;
5 - don’t force yourself;
6 - depends… maybe leave this for later, and test the waters with other topics first.
By the way, links are supported in replies. Select the words, a context menu will appear, click on the “Link” button, and paste the URL. To get the URL for an article or a comment, right-click on the publishing date and copy the link.
The problem here is that the goal of Wikipedia isn’t to describe LessWrong as it’s seen by someone who goes to LessWrong but how LessWrong is seen by reliably secondary sources.
Thank you for another deep and thoughtful response. But what response should I make? [Note that second person “you” here refers to Viliam, but there is risk of confusion if I say something to the broader (but unknown) audience. I’ll try to be careful… But in this discussion I am sure that I have already used “you” with reference to someone else. [I find myself wishing that English had a mechanism to avoid confusing “you” references without ponderous third person descriptions such as “Viliam in his comment of <timestamp> said...”]]
The easy part is to pick a couple of nits, but I’m trying to get deeper than that… But when I back up (and look at the context) then the volume becomes overwhelming and I’m having trouble unraveling the topics. I do feel that part of the problem is my poor and unclear writing, but it is also true that I don’t understand how to use the system well.
So I’m going to focus on two nits here, one that reflects my lack of understanding of the system and one that reflects the lack of clarity in my writing. Then I’ll try to get back up to a higher perspective, which seems to be the karma thing… (But that topic is more related to my earlier reply on the karma “research” from the end of 2019.)
At the end of your comment, what you described is an interesting example of my lack of understanding of the LW system. Or maybe an example of my failing eyesight? I definitely knew that it worked exactly the way you described it for “top-level” content, but for several days I was apparently unable to see the fifth icon on the context menu when I was working on a reply (such as this one). But this is just part of a more general lack of familiarity with the system. Another example: A few minutes ago I spent several minutes figuring out that a “5m” notation meant 5 minutes ago, not 5 months ago, even though the article had an “11y” notation for the 11 years from 2010. The section heading of “Recent Discussion” should have made it more obvious to me, but now I wonder what the notation for 5 months ago would have been… (Relative times are good, but sometimes confusing.)
The other nit involves my poor clarity. I was already quite aware of the “this” link you posted to my user page and it does list my contributions, but not in the sense of “track” that I was trying to describe. There are also the pull-down notices invoked by the bell icon at the upper right. What I am currently unable to do is combine these views to get a mental image of what is happening. Where do my own comments fit into the discussion? What is the structure of the replies?
Is there a tree graphic representation of the discussions hidden somewhere around here? I’m imagining a node diagram with one color for my own contributions, separate colors for each of the primary contributors, and then a fallback color for grouping all of the minor contributors. Now I’m imagining solid lines for direct replies and dotted lines for links that go elsewhere. (If the 80-20 rule applies to discussions here, then at least the part with colors for contributors might work well enough with a reasonably small number of colors.)
For whatever it is worth, I feel like this discussion itself is already beyond my ken. I feel like the lesson that I am learning is that I need to learn to limit my questions MUCH more narrowly. (I have only looked at a few relies, and my available time is already becoming exhausted by this one reply. But was this the best place to begin today? (And now I lack time (and musal energy) to return to the karma topic.))
Also I greatly appreciate the politeness of the replies and I feel like I am being indulged in my ignorance. In solution terms, how could I learn about the system without bothering other people? (Or is that intrinsically impossible in the context of a discussion system such as this?)
Hey, if you’re new here, it’s perfectly natural that there are some website functions you are not familiar with. I am here for years, and there are still things I don’t know. Keep reading, you will gradually get more familiar with how this all works.
Good catch! I never noticed this one. (If you move the mouse above the abbreviation, the full date and time will be displayed.)
The UI you imagine probably does not exist. What you can get is (a) the list of all articles you posted, in chronological order; and (b) the list of all comments you made, in chronological order, with links to context. Both of them are on the same page, when you click on your name.
For me, this is quite enough, because the number of my posts will most likely never exceed three digits, probably not even two (though I wish the meetup announcements were displayed separately from the actual articles), and given the huge number of comments I wrote during the years, I don’t believe I would ever want to see them all.
Maybe read articles with the Site Meta tag? Not all of them are related to what you want, but probably most of what you want is covered somewhere there.
Thanks for the lead to the “Site Meta” tag. I have that one open in another tab and will explore it next. However my general response to your reply is that part of the problem is that I would like to see different kinds of “tracking summaries” depending on what kinds of things I am trying to understand at a particular time.
You introduced a new example with your mention of “meetup announcements”. If you are trying to track your activity on LW in terms of such meetings, then you want to see things from that perspective.
What I have done in today’s experiment is to open all the “recent” notifications in tabs because it is not clear which ones are actually new… It would be helpful if the notifications pulldown list also showed the notification times (though the mouseover trick for date expansion also works for the relative dates on the floating summary that appears to the left of the notification when you hover over it). Overall I’m still having a difficult time grasping the status of this question.
Just rereading the entire “question” to try to assess it, and almost overlooked your [Viliam’s] helpful numbered list. I think I have replied as appropriate (if replying was appropriate?) and hope that the notification system will let me know if I should come back.
On the basis of your encouragement, I’m going to try to write something for the literacy software topic. Not sure upon what basis you think it might be “great”, but I could not find much that seemed to be related in my search efforts on LW. The obvious searches did produce some results, but how they are ranked is still unclear. For example, I remember a “literacy” search with four primary results, but two of them were for narrow senses of literacy such as “financial literacy”. Before starting to write, I’m going to try searching from the list of tags. (It would be helpful if there were an option to sort by the numbers there… That way I could spot the more relevant tags more easily. (I’m guessing that the numbers are the authors’ usage counts for the tags, but there should be a way to link to the readers’ counts to capture the other side of interest? (What people want to read about in contrast to what people want to write about. (Yet another symmetry thing?))))
Backing up to the top level, I haven’t obtained much insight into the original question. I guess my summary of my understanding now would be “We’re sort of above worrying about money, so go have fun with the LW tools we are creating.” I think that summary reflects input from at least two of the creators of the tools. The users’ side seems to be “We’re having fun and that’s why we do it.”
Your summary seems correct.
Here is a part of LW history that may be relevant to the question of money and sponsors: the Less Wrong website you see is, from a technical perspective, already a third version.
The first version was Overcoming Bias, a shared blog of Robin Hanson and Eliezer Yudkowsky, which started in 2006. Being just two guys’ personal WordPress blog, I assume the costs were negligible.
The second version was Less Wrong implemented with a clone of Reddit code in 2009, which started with importing the existing Eliezer’s articles. The initial software was free, but required some maintenance and extra functionality, which was provided by TrikeApps. TrikeApps is a company owned by Less Wrong user matt.
The third version that you see now, with a complete rewrite of code, was actually made only a few years ago. I couldn’t quickly find the exact year, but not sooner than 2017. This was the first version that was actually quite expensive to develop.
In other words, before Less Wrong started needing serious money to exist as a website, it already had more than 10 years of history. So there is a strong momentum. The people who donated money are presumably the people who liked the existing LW, and therefore their wish is probably to keep it roughly like it was, only more awesome. (The people who didn’t like the historical Less Wrong would probably not donate money to keep it alive.) The fans of Less Wrong, as a whole, are sufficiently rich to keep the website alive.
PS: You are taking this too seriously; probably more seriously than most users here. There is no need to overthink it. If you have an idea for a nice article, write it. If you don’t, just reading and commenting is perfectly okay.
I think a better historical perspective would be that they liked was LessWrong was in it’s first years of existing and felt that LessWrong declined and that there was a potential to bring it back to it’s old glory and make it even beter.
I feel like this branch of the discussion might be related to Dunbar’s Number? Either for total members or for active participants. Is there any data for number of participants over time and system versions?
However I also feel like Dunbar’s Number is probably different for different people. Social hubs have large numbers of personal friends, whereas I feel overwhelmed by any group of 150. My personal Dunbar’s Number might be around 15?
I don’t think the history here is about Dunbar’s number.