Less Wrong has a high barrier of entry if you’re at all intimidated by math, idiosyncratic language, and the idea that ONE GUY has written most of its core content. I think the diaspora is good for mainstreaming the concepts on this site. I wish I had been an active member when it was still a catalyst for motion. The book’s existence is good, and HPMoR will still bring people here. This site is important for archival and educational reasons.
Less Wrong might be in a good place to mature in several different directions. If other community members branch out in the way that CFAR and MIRI have, integrating the education-without-academia principles should be a priority in their organizations. It’s not a stretch: Eliezer Yudkowsky does not have a degree, and he has done excellent work from a teaching point of view. He also seems to be respectable among academics for his theory work (I’m not knowledgeable enough to vet that personally).
Teaching people to use effective signaling of their competence, without resorting to Dark Arts, might be useful too.
I’m in favor of EA, but ingres is not wrong that embedding those principles could be off-putting. I don’t know their personal reasons for feeling that way, but I know many people feel that utility-maximizing about human lives is “icky.” To be more charitable, they believe that human life has inherent sacred properties. They also believe that assigning mathematical values to people signals that you’re “cold.” If someone comes to Less Wrong with those ideals, they have to a) digest a LOT of LW philosophy to be okay with EA principles, or b) stick around despite their distaste for certain core principles.
Back when LW was more active, there was much lower math density in posts here.
Maybe because many people are not sure whether their topics are “LW-worthy”, but when they do something mathematical they feel comfortable about posting it here. If I write my opinion about something, people will most likely disagree; but if I write an equation and solve it correctly, there is nothing to disagree with.
I believe that this is the main reason newcomers are reluctant to post anything here. Right now, I notice that I am reluctant to reply to you because I am uncertain if my acknowledgement and agreement with your comment is ‘LW-worthy’. While the high standard of posts maintain Lesswrong as a well-kept garden, it discourages people from starting stimulating, although not strictly Hollywood-esque ‘rational’, discussions.
To say the most obvious thing, the quality threshold for comments should be much lower than for articles. And maybe these should be also some “chat” area where comments just appear and disappear without voting, so that no one would hesitate to post there; and then after receiving some positive feedback they would feel comfortable with posting regular comments.
Maybe there could be a special posting mode for newcomers, which would provide some advantages and disadvantages, like training wheels. For example it would not display negative comment karma (karma below zero would be displayed as zero), it could encourage specific verbal feedback which would be visible only to the comment author (or perhaps require downvoters to select one of predefined explanations, such as “you were rude” or “you promoted pseudoscience”), but it would also limit the number of comments per day and per thread (to prevent spamming by people who can’t take a hint). After receiving enough total karma, the newbie mode would be turned off. -- That’s just a quick idea, maybe completely wrong.
Or maybe we could encourage people being nice to each other by giving positive feedback additionally to upvotes. Such as “this is nice” or “thank you for the research”, which would be displayed as small icons above the comment. Generally, to add some optional flavor to the numbers, whether positive or negative.
In reading the Sequences, I feel weird about replying to comments because most of them are from seven years ago. Is it frowned upon to respond to something crazy old and possibly obsolete?
Yes, I agree completely. Honestly, I thought this line of reasoning was common knowledge in the rationalsphere, since I think I’ve seen it discussed a couple times on Tumblr and in person (IIRC, both in Portland, and in the Bay Area).
Assuming this trend exists (I haven’t noticed it) I think that in addition to that we also have a fact that reaching higher hanging fruit requires better tools.
Well, no posts are deleted. If you look at Main and sort chronologically, you can go through and count articles per time and what fraction of them are math-heavy (which should be easy to check from a once-over skim).
I think this is pretty much accepted wisdom in the rationalsphere. Several people, online and in person, have said things to the effect of “Tumblr is for socializing, private blogs are for commenting on whatever the blogger writes about, and LessWrong is for math-heavy things, quotes threads, and meetup scheduling.” But if you doubt it, you can absolutely check.
I know I could check; I was more wondering whether you, or someone you knew, had checked yourself/themselves.
I think it’s quite possible that Discussion has had a higher maths density over the last two or three months, mainly because of Stuart Armstrong posting his run of ideas from his AI risk retreat. Aside from that, though, I’m doubtful that LW’s had a strong rise in maths density over the last few years. To me it feels like an idea that’s probably more truthy than true.
It’s possible the LW diaspora has concrete evidence on this and I haven’t encountered it. I look at rationalist Tumblr only intermittently and I don’t have Facebook, so I would likely have missed it.
I have heard this discussed for at least the last year, well before Stuart started his series, and would be very surprised if it was not true. I’d put down $30 to your $10 on the matter, pending an agreed-upon resolution mechanism for the bet.
Less Wrong has a high barrier of entry if you’re at all intimidated by math, idiosyncratic language, and the idea that ONE GUY has written most of its core content. I think the diaspora is good for mainstreaming the concepts on this site. I wish I had been an active member when it was still a catalyst for motion. The book’s existence is good, and HPMoR will still bring people here. This site is important for archival and educational reasons.
Less Wrong might be in a good place to mature in several different directions. If other community members branch out in the way that CFAR and MIRI have, integrating the education-without-academia principles should be a priority in their organizations. It’s not a stretch: Eliezer Yudkowsky does not have a degree, and he has done excellent work from a teaching point of view. He also seems to be respectable among academics for his theory work (I’m not knowledgeable enough to vet that personally).
Teaching people to use effective signaling of their competence, without resorting to Dark Arts, might be useful too.
I’m in favor of EA, but ingres is not wrong that embedding those principles could be off-putting. I don’t know their personal reasons for feeling that way, but I know many people feel that utility-maximizing about human lives is “icky.” To be more charitable, they believe that human life has inherent sacred properties. They also believe that assigning mathematical values to people signals that you’re “cold.” If someone comes to Less Wrong with those ideals, they have to a) digest a LOT of LW philosophy to be okay with EA principles, or b) stick around despite their distaste for certain core principles.
Back when LW was more active, there was much lower math density in posts here.
Maybe because many people are not sure whether their topics are “LW-worthy”, but when they do something mathematical they feel comfortable about posting it here. If I write my opinion about something, people will most likely disagree; but if I write an equation and solve it correctly, there is nothing to disagree with.
I believe that this is the main reason newcomers are reluctant to post anything here. Right now, I notice that I am reluctant to reply to you because I am uncertain if my acknowledgement and agreement with your comment is ‘LW-worthy’. While the high standard of posts maintain Lesswrong as a well-kept garden, it discourages people from starting stimulating, although not strictly Hollywood-esque ‘rational’, discussions.
To say the most obvious thing, the quality threshold for comments should be much lower than for articles. And maybe these should be also some “chat” area where comments just appear and disappear without voting, so that no one would hesitate to post there; and then after receiving some positive feedback they would feel comfortable with posting regular comments.
Maybe there could be a special posting mode for newcomers, which would provide some advantages and disadvantages, like training wheels. For example it would not display negative comment karma (karma below zero would be displayed as zero), it could encourage specific verbal feedback which would be visible only to the comment author (or perhaps require downvoters to select one of predefined explanations, such as “you were rude” or “you promoted pseudoscience”), but it would also limit the number of comments per day and per thread (to prevent spamming by people who can’t take a hint). After receiving enough total karma, the newbie mode would be turned off. -- That’s just a quick idea, maybe completely wrong.
Or maybe we could encourage people being nice to each other by giving positive feedback additionally to upvotes. Such as “this is nice” or “thank you for the research”, which would be displayed as small icons above the comment. Generally, to add some optional flavor to the numbers, whether positive or negative.
In reading the Sequences, I feel weird about replying to comments because most of them are from seven years ago. Is it frowned upon to respond to something crazy old and possibly obsolete?
No, necroing is perfectly fine.
It seems like that’s actually an acceptable practice; it’s not unusual for “Recent Comments” to be on posts that are several years old.
Yes, I agree completely. Honestly, I thought this line of reasoning was common knowledge in the rationalsphere, since I think I’ve seen it discussed a couple times on Tumblr and in person (IIRC, both in Portland, and in the Bay Area).
Assuming this trend exists (I haven’t noticed it) I think that in addition to that we also have a fact that reaching higher hanging fruit requires better tools.
That’s interesting.
There’s also less math density on the rationalist blogs and the rationalist Tumblr-space, which at this point have much more current activity than LW.
Is that true? How do we know?
Well, no posts are deleted. If you look at Main and sort chronologically, you can go through and count articles per time and what fraction of them are math-heavy (which should be easy to check from a once-over skim).
I think this is pretty much accepted wisdom in the rationalsphere. Several people, online and in person, have said things to the effect of “Tumblr is for socializing, private blogs are for commenting on whatever the blogger writes about, and LessWrong is for math-heavy things, quotes threads, and meetup scheduling.” But if you doubt it, you can absolutely check.
I know I could check; I was more wondering whether you, or someone you knew, had checked yourself/themselves.
I think it’s quite possible that Discussion has had a higher maths density over the last two or three months, mainly because of Stuart Armstrong posting his run of ideas from his AI risk retreat. Aside from that, though, I’m doubtful that LW’s had a strong rise in maths density over the last few years. To me it feels like an idea that’s probably more truthy than true.
It’s possible the LW diaspora has concrete evidence on this and I haven’t encountered it. I look at rationalist Tumblr only intermittently and I don’t have Facebook, so I would likely have missed it.
I have heard this discussed for at least the last year, well before Stuart started his series, and would be very surprised if it was not true. I’d put down $30 to your $10 on the matter, pending an agreed-upon resolution mechanism for the bet.