I am little sad about the lack of Good Ol’ Rationality content on the site. Out of the 14 posts on my frontpage, 0 are about this. [I have Rationality and World Modeling tags at +10.]
It has been refreshing to read recent posts by Screwtape (several), and I very much enjoyed Social Dark Matter by Duncan Sabien. Reading these I got the feeling “oh, this is why I liked LessWrong so much in the first place”.
(Duncan Sabien has announced that he likely won’t post on LessWrong anymore. I haven’t followed the drama here too much—there seems to be a lot—but reading this comment makes me feel bad for him. I feel like LessWrong is losing a lot here: Sabien is clearly a top rationality writer.)
I second the basic concern “newcomers often don’t meet the discourse norms we expect on the site” others have expressed. I also second the stronger statement “a large fraction of people on the site are not serious about advancing the Art”.
What to do about this? Shrug. Seems like a tough problem. Just flagging that I think this indeed is a problem.
(I have reservations on complaining about this, as I don’t think my top-level posts really meet the bar here either.)
Ratio of positive/negative feedback leans more negative than I think is optimal.
[To be clear, this is a near-universal issue, both on the Internet and real life. Negativity bias, “Why our kind can’t cooperate”, “I liked it, but I don’t have anything else to say, so why would I comment?”, etc.]
[I was going to cite an example here, but then I noticed that the comments in fact did contain a decent amount of positive feedback. So, uh, update based on that.]
Doing introspection, this is among the main reasons I don’t contribute more.
(Not that my posts should have bunch of people giving lots of positive feedback. It’s that if I see other people’s excellent posts getting lukewarm feedback, then I think “oh, if even this isn’t good enough for LessWrong, then...”)
Upvotes don’t have quite the same effect as someone—a real person! - saying “I really liked this post, thanks for writing it!”
(Note how my feedback in this comment has so far been negative, as a self-referential example of this phenomenon)
On the positive side, I agree with many others on the agree-disagree voting being great. I also like the rich in-line reacts.
(I don’t really use the rich in-line reacts myself. I think if it were anonymous, I would do it much more. There’s some mental barrier regarding reacting with my own name. Trying to pin it down, it’s something like “if I start reacting, I am no longer a Lurker, but an Active Contributor and I am Accountable for my reactions, and wow that feels like a big decision, I won’t commit to it now”.)
(I don’t really endorse these feelings. Writing them down, they seem silly.)
(I think it’s overall much better that reacts are non-anonymous.)
I second concerns about (not-so-high-quality) alignment content flooding LessWrong.
(Again, I’m guilty of this as well, having written a couple of what-I-now-think-are-bad posts on AI.)
This is despite me following alignment a lot and being in the “intended audience”.
As you might infer from my first bullet points, I would like there to be more of Good Ol’ Rationality—or at least some place somewhere that was focused on that.
(The thought “split LW into two sites, one about AI and another about rationality” pops to my mind, and has been mentioned Nathan Helm-Burger below. Clearly, there are huge costs to this. I’d consider this a pointer towards the-type-of-things-that-are-desirable, not as a ready solution.)
The most novel idea in this comment: I think the ratio of comments/post is too small.
I think ideally there would be a lot more comments, discussion and back-and-forth between people than there is currently.
The dialogues help solve the problem, which is good.
(I am overall more positive about dialogues than a couple of negative comments I’ve seen about them.)
Still, I think there’s room for improvement. I think new posts easily flood the channels (c.f. point above) without contributing much, whereas comment threads have much smaller costs. Also, the back-and-forth between different people is often where I get the most value from.
The exception is high-quality top-level posts, which are, well, high-quality.
So: a fruitful direction (IMO) is “raise the bar for top-level posts, have much more discussion under such top-level posts and the bar for commenting lower”.
(What does “raising/lowering the bar” actually mean? How do we achieve it? I don’t know :/.)
And inspired by my thoughts on the positivity of feedback, let me say this: I still consider LessWrong a great website as websites go. Even if I don’t nowadays find it as worldview-changing as when I first read it, there’s still a bunch of great stuff here.
(Duncan Sabien has announced that he likely won’t post on LessWrong anymore. [...] I feel like LessWrong is losing a lot here: Sabien is clearly a top rationality writer.)
I think that Duncan writing on his own blog and we linking the good posts from LW may be the best solution for both sides. (Duncan approves of being linked.)
I think there are a lot of old posts that don’t get read. I’m most drawn to the Latest Posts because that’s where the social interaction via commenting is. LessWrong is quite tolerant of comments on old posts, but they don’t get as much engagement. It’s too diffuse to be self-sustaining, but I feel like the newcomers are missing out on that in the core material.
What can we do about that? Maybe someone else has a better idea, but I think I’d like to see an official community readthrough of the core sequences (at least RAZ, Codex, and old Best Of) pinned in the Latest Posts area so it actually gets engagement from newcomers. Maybe they should be copies so the comments start out empty, but with some added language encouraging newcomers to engage.
Bullet points of things that come to mind:
I am little sad about the lack of Good Ol’ Rationality content on the site. Out of the 14 posts on my frontpage, 0 are about this. [I have Rationality and World Modeling tags at +10.]
It has been refreshing to read recent posts by Screwtape (several), and I very much enjoyed Social Dark Matter by Duncan Sabien. Reading these I got the feeling “oh, this is why I liked LessWrong so much in the first place”.
(Duncan Sabien has announced that he likely won’t post on LessWrong anymore. I haven’t followed the drama here too much—there seems to be a lot—but reading this comment makes me feel bad for him. I feel like LessWrong is losing a lot here: Sabien is clearly a top rationality writer.)
I second the basic concern “newcomers often don’t meet the discourse norms we expect on the site” others have expressed. I also second the stronger statement “a large fraction of people on the site are not serious about advancing the Art”.
What to do about this? Shrug. Seems like a tough problem. Just flagging that I think this indeed is a problem.
(I have reservations on complaining about this, as I don’t think my top-level posts really meet the bar here either.)
Ratio of positive/negative feedback leans more negative than I think is optimal.
[To be clear, this is a near-universal issue, both on the Internet and real life. Negativity bias, “Why our kind can’t cooperate”, “I liked it, but I don’t have anything else to say, so why would I comment?”, etc.]
[I was going to cite an example here, but then I noticed that the comments in fact did contain a decent amount of positive feedback. So, uh, update based on that.]
Doing introspection, this is among the main reasons I don’t contribute more.
(Not that my posts should have bunch of people giving lots of positive feedback. It’s that if I see other people’s excellent posts getting lukewarm feedback, then I think “oh, if even this isn’t good enough for LessWrong, then...”)
Upvotes don’t have quite the same effect as someone—a real person! - saying “I really liked this post, thanks for writing it!”
(Note how my feedback in this comment has so far been negative, as a self-referential example of this phenomenon)
On the positive side, I agree with many others on the agree-disagree voting being great. I also like the rich in-line reacts.
(I don’t really use the rich in-line reacts myself. I think if it were anonymous, I would do it much more. There’s some mental barrier regarding reacting with my own name. Trying to pin it down, it’s something like “if I start reacting, I am no longer a Lurker, but an Active Contributor and I am Accountable for my reactions, and wow that feels like a big decision, I won’t commit to it now”.)
(I don’t really endorse these feelings. Writing them down, they seem silly.)
(I think it’s overall much better that reacts are non-anonymous.)
I second concerns about (not-so-high-quality) alignment content flooding LessWrong.
(Again, I’m guilty of this as well, having written a couple of what-I-now-think-are-bad posts on AI.)
This is despite me following alignment a lot and being in the “intended audience”.
As you might infer from my first bullet points, I would like there to be more of Good Ol’ Rationality—or at least some place somewhere that was focused on that.
(The thought “split LW into two sites, one about AI and another about rationality” pops to my mind, and has been mentioned Nathan Helm-Burger below. Clearly, there are huge costs to this. I’d consider this a pointer towards the-type-of-things-that-are-desirable, not as a ready solution.)
The most novel idea in this comment: I think the ratio of comments/post is too small.
I think ideally there would be a lot more comments, discussion and back-and-forth between people than there is currently.
The dialogues help solve the problem, which is good.
(I am overall more positive about dialogues than a couple of negative comments I’ve seen about them.)
Still, I think there’s room for improvement. I think new posts easily flood the channels (c.f. point above) without contributing much, whereas comment threads have much smaller costs. Also, the back-and-forth between different people is often where I get the most value from.
The exception is high-quality top-level posts, which are, well, high-quality.
So: a fruitful direction (IMO) is “raise the bar for top-level posts, have much more discussion under such top-level posts and the bar for commenting lower”.
(What does “raising/lowering the bar” actually mean? How do we achieve it? I don’t know :/.)
And inspired by my thoughts on the positivity of feedback, let me say this: I still consider LessWrong a great website as websites go. Even if I don’t nowadays find it as worldview-changing as when I first read it, there’s still a bunch of great stuff here.
I think that Duncan writing on his own blog and we linking the good posts from LW may be the best solution for both sides. (Duncan approves of being linked.)
I think there are a lot of old posts that don’t get read. I’m most drawn to the Latest Posts because that’s where the social interaction via commenting is. LessWrong is quite tolerant of comments on old posts, but they don’t get as much engagement. It’s too diffuse to be self-sustaining, but I feel like the newcomers are missing out on that in the core material.
What can we do about that? Maybe someone else has a better idea, but I think I’d like to see an official community readthrough of the core sequences (at least RAZ, Codex, and old Best Of) pinned in the Latest Posts area so it actually gets engagement from newcomers. Maybe they should be copies so the comments start out empty, but with some added language encouraging newcomers to engage.
There has got to be a better, more durable way to show recent comments than the current recent comments view.