I’ve lurked here for over a year and just started posting in the fan fic threads a month ago. I have read a handful of posts from the sequences and I believe that some of those are changing my life. Sometimes when I start a sequence post I find it uninteresting and I stop. Posts early in the recommended order do this, and that gets in the way every time I try to go through in order. I just can’t be bothered because I’m here for leisure and reading uninteresting things isn’t leisurely.
I am noise and I am part of the doom of your community. You have my sympathy, and also my unsolicited commentary:
Presently your community is doomed because you don’t filter.
Noise will keep increasing until the community you value splinters, scatters, or relocates itself as a whole. A different community will replace it, resembling the community you value just enough to mock you.
If you intentionally segregate based on qualifications your community is doomed anyway.
The qualified will stop contributing to the unqualified sectors, will stop commending potential qualifiers as they approach qualification, and will stop driving out never qualifiers with disapproval. Noise will win as soon as something drives a surge of new interest and the freshest of the freshmen overwhelm the unqualified but initiated.
Within the fortress of qualification things will be okay. They might never feel as good as you think you remember, but when you look through that same lens from further ahead you might recognize a second Golden Age of Whatever. Over time less new blood will be introduced, especially after the shanty town outside the fortress burns to the ground a couple times. People will leave for the reasons people leave. The people left will become more insular and self referential. That will further drive down new blood intake.
Doomed.
What are you going to do about it?
The best steps to take to sustain the community you value in this instance may be different than the best steps to take to build a better instance of the community.
I suspect communities have a natural life cycle and most are doomed. Either they change unrecognisably or they die. This is because the community members themselves change with time and change what they want, and what they want and will put up with from newbies, and so on. (I don’t have a fully worked-out theory yet, but I can see the shape of it in my head. I’d be amazed if someone hasn’t written it up.)
What this theory suggests: if the forum has a purpose beyond just existence (as this one does), then it needs to reproduce. The Center for Modern Rationality is just the start. Lots of people starting a rationality blog might help, for example. Other ideas?
You seem to be implying here that LW’s purpose is best achieved by some forum continuing to exist in LW’s current form. Yes? If so, can you expand on your reasons for believing that?
No, that would hold only if one thinks a forum is the best vehicle. It may not even be a suitable one. My if-then does assume a further “if” that a forum is, at the least, an effective vehicle.
My working theory is that the original purpose of the OB blog posts that later became LW was to motivate Eliezer to write down a bunch of his ideas (aka “the Sequences”) and get people to read them. LW continues to have remnants of that purpose, but less and less so with every passing generation.
Meanwhile, that original purpose has been transferred to the process of writing the book I’m told EY is working on. I’m not sure creating new online discussion forums solves a problem anyone has.
As that purpose gradually becomes attenuated beyond recognition, I expect that the LW forum itself will continue to exist, becoming to a greater and greater extent a site for discussion of HP:MoR, philosophy, cognition, self-help tips, and stuff its users think is cool that they can somehow label “rational.” A small group of SI folks will continue to perform desultory maintenance, and perhaps even post on occasion. A small group of users will continue to discuss decision theory here, growing increasingly isolated from the community.
If/when EY gets HP:MoR nominated for a Hugo award, a huge wave of new users will appear, largely representative of science-fiction fandom. The proportion of LW devoted to HP:MoR discussion will double, as will the frequency of public handwringing about the state of the site. The level of discussion will rapidly plummet to standard Internet Geek. LW maintenance will be increasingly seen as a chore by SI folks, to be assigned to interns with nothing better to do. The more academic types will eventually decide it’s worth their while to create a new venue for their discussions.
If the book is published and achieves any degree of popularity, there will be a wave of new people joining to talk about the book. This will have all kinds of consequences, but one of them will be a huge increase in the 101-level discussions on LW, as high-school students all over the country decide to share their insights about reality and truth and rationality and philosophy, reminiscent of alt.fan.hofstadter Back in the Day.
My working theory is that the original purpose of the OB blog posts that later became LW was to motivate Eliezer to write down a bunch of his ideas (aka “the Sequences”) and get people to read them.
Like NaNoWriMo or thirty things in thirty days (which EY indirectly inspired) - giving the muse an office job. Except, of course, being Eliezer, he made it one a day for two years.
I’ve lurked here for over a year and just started posting in the fan fic threads a month ago. I have read a handful of posts from the sequences and I believe that some of those are changing my life. Sometimes when I start a sequence post I find it uninteresting and I stop. Posts early in the recommended order do this, and that gets in the way every time I try to go through in order. I just can’t be bothered because I’m here for leisure and reading uninteresting things isn’t leisurely.
I am noise and I am part of the doom of your community. You have my sympathy, and also my unsolicited commentary:
Presently your community is doomed because you don’t filter.
Noise will keep increasing until the community you value splinters, scatters, or relocates itself as a whole. A different community will replace it, resembling the community you value just enough to mock you.
If you intentionally segregate based on qualifications your community is doomed anyway.
The qualified will stop contributing to the unqualified sectors, will stop commending potential qualifiers as they approach qualification, and will stop driving out never qualifiers with disapproval. Noise will win as soon as something drives a surge of new interest and the freshest of the freshmen overwhelm the unqualified but initiated.
Within the fortress of qualification things will be okay. They might never feel as good as you think you remember, but when you look through that same lens from further ahead you might recognize a second Golden Age of Whatever. Over time less new blood will be introduced, especially after the shanty town outside the fortress burns to the ground a couple times. People will leave for the reasons people leave. The people left will become more insular and self referential. That will further drive down new blood intake.
Doomed.
What are you going to do about it?
The best steps to take to sustain the community you value in this instance may be different than the best steps to take to build a better instance of the community.
I suspect communities have a natural life cycle and most are doomed. Either they change unrecognisably or they die. This is because the community members themselves change with time and change what they want, and what they want and will put up with from newbies, and so on. (I don’t have a fully worked-out theory yet, but I can see the shape of it in my head. I’d be amazed if someone hasn’t written it up.)
What this theory suggests: if the forum has a purpose beyond just existence (as this one does), then it needs to reproduce. The Center for Modern Rationality is just the start. Lots of people starting a rationality blog might help, for example. Other ideas?
This is a good idea if and only if we can avoid summoning Azartoth.
You seem to be implying here that LW’s purpose is best achieved by some forum continuing to exist in LW’s current form.
Yes?
If so, can you expand on your reasons for believing that?
No, that would hold only if one thinks a forum is the best vehicle. It may not even be a suitable one. My if-then does assume a further “if” that a forum is, at the least, an effective vehicle.
(nods) OK, cool.
My working theory is that the original purpose of the OB blog posts that later became LW was to motivate Eliezer to write down a bunch of his ideas (aka “the Sequences”) and get people to read them. LW continues to have remnants of that purpose, but less and less so with every passing generation.
Meanwhile, that original purpose has been transferred to the process of writing the book I’m told EY is working on. I’m not sure creating new online discussion forums solves a problem anyone has.
As that purpose gradually becomes attenuated beyond recognition, I expect that the LW forum itself will continue to exist, becoming to a greater and greater extent a site for discussion of HP:MoR, philosophy, cognition, self-help tips, and stuff its users think is cool that they can somehow label “rational.” A small group of SI folks will continue to perform desultory maintenance, and perhaps even post on occasion. A small group of users will continue to discuss decision theory here, growing increasingly isolated from the community.
If/when EY gets HP:MoR nominated for a Hugo award, a huge wave of new users will appear, largely representative of science-fiction fandom. The proportion of LW devoted to HP:MoR discussion will double, as will the frequency of public handwringing about the state of the site. The level of discussion will rapidly plummet to standard Internet Geek. LW maintenance will be increasingly seen as a chore by SI folks, to be assigned to interns with nothing better to do. The more academic types will eventually decide it’s worth their while to create a new venue for their discussions.
If the book is published and achieves any degree of popularity, there will be a wave of new people joining to talk about the book. This will have all kinds of consequences, but one of them will be a huge increase in the 101-level discussions on LW, as high-school students all over the country decide to share their insights about reality and truth and rationality and philosophy, reminiscent of alt.fan.hofstadter Back in the Day.
And, more precisely
Like NaNoWriMo or thirty things in thirty days (which EY indirectly inspired) - giving the muse an office job. Except, of course, being Eliezer, he made it one a day for two years.
I’m responding to congratulate you on your correct prediction.
I see this account hasn’t been active in over four years.