Crossposted from my Facebook timeline (and, in turn, crossposted there from vaguely secret, dank corners of the rationalsphere)
“So Ray, is LessLong ready to completely replace Facebook? Can I start posting my cat pictures and political rants there?”
Well, um, hmm....
So here’s the deal. I do hope someday someone builds an actual pure social platform that’s just actually good, that’s not out-to-get you, with reasonably good discourse. I even think the LessWrong architecture might be good for that (and if a team wanted to fork the codebase, they’d be welcome to try)
But LessWrong shortform *is* trying to do a bit of a more nuanced thing than that.
Shortform is for writing up early stage ideas, brainstorming, or just writing stuff where you aren’t quite sure how good it is or how much attention to claim for it.
For it to succeed there, it’s really important that it be a place where people don’t have to self-censor or stress about how their writing comes across. I think intellectual progress depends on earnest curiosity, exploring ideas, sometimes down dead ends.
I even think it involves clever jokes sometimes.
But… I dunno, if looked ahead 5 years and saw that the Future People were using shortform mostly for cat videos and political rants, I’d have a sense that we fucked up somehow.
Hopefully the karma system will naturally reward shortform that’s thought provoking and interesting. If we get deluged in politics and cats and worse things I can’t predict, we might add some features that affect what shortform content gets most highly promoted.
But the bottom line is the whole thing is an experiment. The important bits to know for now are:
1) use some good judgment
2) don’t stress too much about it – if it turns out to be a problem we’ll most likely try to solve it via positive-selection tech
3) Shortform is one piece of the overall intellectual pipeline. We’re also looking into things we can also do to improve LessWrong’s reward for the upper end of the rigor spectrum
Crossposted from my Facebook timeline (and, in turn, crossposted there from vaguely secret, dank corners of the rationalsphere)
“So Ray, is LessLong ready to completely replace Facebook? Can I start posting my cat pictures and political rants there?”
Well, um, hmm....
So here’s the deal. I do hope someday someone builds an actual pure social platform that’s just actually good, that’s not out-to-get you, with reasonably good discourse. I even think the LessWrong architecture might be good for that (and if a team wanted to fork the codebase, they’d be welcome to try)
But LessWrong shortform *is* trying to do a bit of a more nuanced thing than that.
Shortform is for writing up early stage ideas, brainstorming, or just writing stuff where you aren’t quite sure how good it is or how much attention to claim for it.
For it to succeed there, it’s really important that it be a place where people don’t have to self-censor or stress about how their writing comes across. I think intellectual progress depends on earnest curiosity, exploring ideas, sometimes down dead ends.
I even think it involves clever jokes sometimes.
But… I dunno, if looked ahead 5 years and saw that the Future People were using shortform mostly for cat videos and political rants, I’d have a sense that we fucked up somehow.
Hopefully the karma system will naturally reward shortform that’s thought provoking and interesting. If we get deluged in politics and cats and worse things I can’t predict, we might add some features that affect what shortform content gets most highly promoted.
But the bottom line is the whole thing is an experiment. The important bits to know for now are:
1) use some good judgment
2) don’t stress too much about it – if it turns out to be a problem we’ll most likely try to solve it via positive-selection tech
3) Shortform is one piece of the overall intellectual pipeline. We’re also looking into things we can also do to improve LessWrong’s reward for the upper end of the rigor spectrum