Blogroll / Side Bar Section for Links to Rationality Related Websites. I love Overcoming Bias, but it seems a bit biased that Overcoming Bias is the only other website linked from here.
I don’t like this idea. The choice of websites to put on the sidebar is likely to be contentious. What exactly qualifies a website to be endorsed by LW? How should a website be judged considering the various PR implications of endorsing it? Also, who exactly stands behind the endorsement, considering that LW is a group blog?
What’s more, LW members already have the option to put website links in their profiles, and the websites authored or endorsed by prominent LW contributors are thus already given significant promotion.
What’s more, LW members already have the option to put website links in their profiles, and the websites authored or endorsed by prominent LW contributors are thus already given significant promotion.
It’s not that significant. I watch my site traffic like a hawk and I get almost no hits from here.
I think I’ve clicked on all profile links posted by people on the top contributors list at one time or another (and many others as well), but I guess I’m an exception then. What could be done is to make people’s profile links more conspicuous and directly accessible, perhaps as a part of making profiles generally more informative for those who wish to make them so. (I think someone already mentioned the idea of merging them with wiki profiles.)
A website has a specific goal that it’s trying to uniquely achieve, and a general goal that places it within a community of like-minded websites. Less Wrong’s specific goal is to refine the art of human rationality, and its general goal is to raise the sanity waterline. If other websites are successfully raising the sanity waterline, it behooves Less Wrong to link to them.
I don’t like this idea. The choice of websites to put on the sidebar is likely to be contentious. What exactly qualifies a website to be endorsed by LW? How should a website be judged considering the various PR implications of endorsing it? Also, who exactly stands behind the endorsement, considering that LW is a group blog?
I agree that there’s genuine challenges in selecting which websites to link to, especially for a community blog. But a community blog, if it meets those challenges, actually has the greater potential to choose a good set of links. Less Wrong should strive to have a better set of links than its sister site, Overcoming Bias. These links matter. It’s a standard feature of blogs, and for good reason. I’ve discovered many great websites this way. Unfortunately, never via Less Wrong.
What’s more, LW members already have the option to put website links in their profiles, and the websites authored or endorsed by prominent LW contributors are thus already given significant promotion.
While I think high-karma Less Wrong users deserve promotion, it’s not the only criteria for which promotion is justified. If there’s a great sanity waterline raising website out there, it should be linked to, whether or not there’s a high-karma Less Wrong user running it. On my own website I link to Wikipedia’s argument fallacy list and cognitive bias list. Without digressing into a debate as to whether Less Wrong should link to these lists too, I’ll merely point out that with the criteria you’re suggesting, such links would necessarily have zero value. I think JGWeissman’s proposal would choose the appropriate value for such links.
What I dislike most about the idea is that it gives some sort of official collective endorsement to external websites. One thing I like about LW is that except for the institutions that historically gave rise to it (OB and SIAI), it has no official doctrine and official endorsements. There are issues of broad consensus, but they are never officially presented as such. Thus, even if I have some disagreements with the majority on these issues, I can always voice my arguments without the unpleasant feeling that I’m invading the forum as an outsider trying to pick arguments over matters of consensus. (Which would constitute borderline trolling even if I’m right.)
Now, if there is a list of officially LW-endorsed websites, and I think some of them are bad and I don’t want to endorse them by any means, raising such concerns would mean picking fruitless and frustrating arguments with the majority. And frankly, I think it is quite plausible that some websites hit enough “applause lights” that they might find themselves on the LW endorsement list, even though their intellectual standards leave much to be desired.
If individual LW members wish to promote external websites, I’m all for it. They can post links in discussions, and by all means allow them to post links in their profiles more conspicuously and prominently than now, not just to their own websites but also to a list of favorite websites. But please don’t insist on an official list of collectively endorsed links.
You’ve articulated some of the problems of a blogroll well. Perhaps the blogroll idea could be evolved into a concept that better fits the needs of this community, while retaining its core value and simplicity:
1) Along side a link could be its controversy level, based on the votes for and against the link. By making the controversy explicit, the link can no longer be seen as a straight-up endorsement.
2) Along side a link could be its ranking based on say only the top 50 users. This would let people explicitly see what the majority vs. the “elite rationalists” thought—an interesting barometer of community rationality.
3) Split the “blogroll” in two—all-time most votes vs. most votes in the last week/month. This would alleviate the problem of staleness that Nancy pointed out. This is also nice because the links could be for not just websites, but any interesting new article.
4) Allow discussion of any link. Comments could warn users of applause lights etc. This is perhaps why the current voting system works well for choosing top posts, despite the problems you point out with majority opinion. A poor post/link can never get past the gauntlet of critical comments.
You could generalize this to the point that ordinary posts essentially become a special case of an “internal link”. Anyway, enough about a technical proposal—at this point I’m reluctant to push any harder on this. An impression I have of Less Wrong is that it’s somewhat of a walled garden (albeit a beautiful one!) and that such changes would open it up a little, while maintaining its integrity. The resistance people have seems to be rooted in this—a fear of in any way endorsing “inferior intellectual standards”. What we should instead be fearful of is not doing everything we can to raise the sanity waterline.
2) Along side a link could be its ranking based on say only the top 50 users. This would let people explicitly see what the majority vs. the “elite rationalists” thought—an interesting barometer of community rationality.
I wouldn’t do this. The top 50 users by karma score are more likely to be members who make a lot of comments than “elite rationalists”.
The controversy meter and using recent votes are good ideas (I wouldn’t split it, use only the recent votes).
You feel a good bit more strongly about this than I do. I would be inclined to look for a mild recommendation to head the blogroll—“possibly of interest” or “frequently rationalist” or somesuch.
However, your arguments remind me of another reason not to have a blogroll—they generally don’t get maintained, which means that they’re likely to include discontinued and inactive blogs.
This strikes me as the most cultish-sounding thing I’ve seen here—more so, say, than the boot camp.
This may be unreasonable on my part since I don’t have specific blogs in mind, but really—in the huge universe of blogs, no others are rationalist enough?
We couldn’t even settle on science and math blogs which would be of interest?
I dunno Nancy. I mean you start off innocently clicking on a link to a math blog. Next minute you’re following these hyperlinks and soon you find yourself getting sucked into a quantum healing website. I’m still trying to get a refund on these crystals I ended up buying. Let’s face it. These seemingly harmless websites with unrigorous intellectual standards are really gateway drugs to hard-core irrationality. So I have a new feature request: every time someone clicks on an external link from Less Wrong, a piece of Javascript pops up with the message: “You are very probably about to enter an irrational area of the internet. Are you sure you want to continue?” If you have less than 100000 karma points, clicking yes simply redirects you the sequences.
Have a section of the site where people can submit suggestions for the blogroll. This should be structured, with fields for a title, a URL, and a free form comment explaining the submission. The submissions can be voted on like comments, and the top 5 by voting score appear in the blog roll widget. The blog roll header can link back the submission section.
I don’t like this idea. The choice of websites to put on the sidebar is likely to be contentious. What exactly qualifies a website to be endorsed by LW? How should a website be judged considering the various PR implications of endorsing it? Also, who exactly stands behind the endorsement, considering that LW is a group blog?
What’s more, LW members already have the option to put website links in their profiles, and the websites authored or endorsed by prominent LW contributors are thus already given significant promotion.
It’s not that significant. I watch my site traffic like a hawk and I get almost no hits from here.
FYI, I just tried to click through to your food blog from the link on your wiki userpage, and it is broken, I think.
Fixed, thanks.
I think I’ve clicked on all profile links posted by people on the top contributors list at one time or another (and many others as well), but I guess I’m an exception then. What could be done is to make people’s profile links more conspicuous and directly accessible, perhaps as a part of making profiles generally more informative for those who wish to make them so. (I think someone already mentioned the idea of merging them with wiki profiles.)
A website has a specific goal that it’s trying to uniquely achieve, and a general goal that places it within a community of like-minded websites. Less Wrong’s specific goal is to refine the art of human rationality, and its general goal is to raise the sanity waterline. If other websites are successfully raising the sanity waterline, it behooves Less Wrong to link to them.
I agree that there’s genuine challenges in selecting which websites to link to, especially for a community blog. But a community blog, if it meets those challenges, actually has the greater potential to choose a good set of links. Less Wrong should strive to have a better set of links than its sister site, Overcoming Bias. These links matter. It’s a standard feature of blogs, and for good reason. I’ve discovered many great websites this way. Unfortunately, never via Less Wrong.
While I think high-karma Less Wrong users deserve promotion, it’s not the only criteria for which promotion is justified. If there’s a great sanity waterline raising website out there, it should be linked to, whether or not there’s a high-karma Less Wrong user running it. On my own website I link to Wikipedia’s argument fallacy list and cognitive bias list. Without digressing into a debate as to whether Less Wrong should link to these lists too, I’ll merely point out that with the criteria you’re suggesting, such links would necessarily have zero value. I think JGWeissman’s proposal would choose the appropriate value for such links.
What I dislike most about the idea is that it gives some sort of official collective endorsement to external websites. One thing I like about LW is that except for the institutions that historically gave rise to it (OB and SIAI), it has no official doctrine and official endorsements. There are issues of broad consensus, but they are never officially presented as such. Thus, even if I have some disagreements with the majority on these issues, I can always voice my arguments without the unpleasant feeling that I’m invading the forum as an outsider trying to pick arguments over matters of consensus. (Which would constitute borderline trolling even if I’m right.)
Now, if there is a list of officially LW-endorsed websites, and I think some of them are bad and I don’t want to endorse them by any means, raising such concerns would mean picking fruitless and frustrating arguments with the majority. And frankly, I think it is quite plausible that some websites hit enough “applause lights” that they might find themselves on the LW endorsement list, even though their intellectual standards leave much to be desired.
If individual LW members wish to promote external websites, I’m all for it. They can post links in discussions, and by all means allow them to post links in their profiles more conspicuously and prominently than now, not just to their own websites but also to a list of favorite websites. But please don’t insist on an official list of collectively endorsed links.
You’ve articulated some of the problems of a blogroll well. Perhaps the blogroll idea could be evolved into a concept that better fits the needs of this community, while retaining its core value and simplicity:
1) Along side a link could be its controversy level, based on the votes for and against the link. By making the controversy explicit, the link can no longer be seen as a straight-up endorsement.
2) Along side a link could be its ranking based on say only the top 50 users. This would let people explicitly see what the majority vs. the “elite rationalists” thought—an interesting barometer of community rationality.
3) Split the “blogroll” in two—all-time most votes vs. most votes in the last week/month. This would alleviate the problem of staleness that Nancy pointed out. This is also nice because the links could be for not just websites, but any interesting new article.
4) Allow discussion of any link. Comments could warn users of applause lights etc. This is perhaps why the current voting system works well for choosing top posts, despite the problems you point out with majority opinion. A poor post/link can never get past the gauntlet of critical comments.
You could generalize this to the point that ordinary posts essentially become a special case of an “internal link”. Anyway, enough about a technical proposal—at this point I’m reluctant to push any harder on this. An impression I have of Less Wrong is that it’s somewhat of a walled garden (albeit a beautiful one!) and that such changes would open it up a little, while maintaining its integrity. The resistance people have seems to be rooted in this—a fear of in any way endorsing “inferior intellectual standards”. What we should instead be fearful of is not doing everything we can to raise the sanity waterline.
I wouldn’t do this. The top 50 users by karma score are more likely to be members who make a lot of comments than “elite rationalists”.
The controversy meter and using recent votes are good ideas (I wouldn’t split it, use only the recent votes).
You feel a good bit more strongly about this than I do. I would be inclined to look for a mild recommendation to head the blogroll—“possibly of interest” or “frequently rationalist” or somesuch.
However, your arguments remind me of another reason not to have a blogroll—they generally don’t get maintained, which means that they’re likely to include discontinued and inactive blogs.
This strikes me as the most cultish-sounding thing I’ve seen here—more so, say, than the boot camp.
This may be unreasonable on my part since I don’t have specific blogs in mind, but really—in the huge universe of blogs, no others are rationalist enough?
We couldn’t even settle on science and math blogs which would be of interest?
It’s cultish to say we don’t have a consensus on this?
I dunno Nancy. I mean you start off innocently clicking on a link to a math blog. Next minute you’re following these hyperlinks and soon you find yourself getting sucked into a quantum healing website. I’m still trying to get a refund on these crystals I ended up buying. Let’s face it. These seemingly harmless websites with unrigorous intellectual standards are really gateway drugs to hard-core irrationality. So I have a new feature request: every time someone clicks on an external link from Less Wrong, a piece of Javascript pops up with the message: “You are very probably about to enter an irrational area of the internet. Are you sure you want to continue?” If you have less than 100000 karma points, clicking yes simply redirects you the sequences.
What about ‘links to blogs which discuss similar things and/or use a similar approach to LW’?
I agree. The link to Overcoming Bias is a special case, because LW used to be OB, before the site split into two.
A way it could work:
Have a section of the site where people can submit suggestions for the blogroll. This should be structured, with fields for a title, a URL, and a free form comment explaining the submission. The submissions can be voted on like comments, and the top 5 by voting score appear in the blog roll widget. The blog roll header can link back the submission section.