It’s refreshing to see someone who has accomplished something outwardly impressive and generally well-regarded to be so pessimistic about their own work. That seems like a really hard thing to be well-calibrated about.
To me, LW still feels like it is way ahead of anywhere else on the internet in terms of general sanity and likelihood of having a net-positive impact. But it’s a good reminder that life is not graded on a curve, and that “way ahead” might be a far cry from “actually good”.
I do think putting more effort into articulating object-level takes on a lot of stuff is a good idea for you in particular. Speaking from my own experience trying to have a lot of takes recently, it doesn’t feel like there’s any huge problems with norms or groupthink or goodharting around here. But it does feel like there’s a lot of popular ideas floating around that are confused or just wrong, not because there’s anything cynical going on, but because a lot of these topics are just genuinely pretty complicated and confusing, at least for earthlings.
Building infrastructure and enforcing norms is one way of fixing those problems, but there’s also something to be said for just directly saying a bunch of true things, over and over again in different ways, until it sinks in. Also, there’s probably a bunch of other things besides those two approaches you could also try!
It’s refreshing to see someone who has accomplished something outwardly impressive and generally well-regarded to be so pessimistic about their own work. That seems like a really hard thing to be well-calibrated about.
To me, LW still feels like it is way ahead of anywhere else on the internet in terms of general sanity and likelihood of having a net-positive impact. But it’s a good reminder that life is not graded on a curve, and that “way ahead” might be a far cry from “actually good”.
I do think putting more effort into articulating object-level takes on a lot of stuff is a good idea for you in particular. Speaking from my own experience trying to have a lot of takes recently, it doesn’t feel like there’s any huge problems with norms or groupthink or goodharting around here. But it does feel like there’s a lot of popular ideas floating around that are confused or just wrong, not because there’s anything cynical going on, but because a lot of these topics are just genuinely pretty complicated and confusing, at least for earthlings.
Building infrastructure and enforcing norms is one way of fixing those problems, but there’s also something to be said for just directly saying a bunch of true things, over and over again in different ways, until it sinks in. Also, there’s probably a bunch of other things besides those two approaches you could also try!