Periodically I describe a particular problem with the rationalsphere with the programmer metaphor of:
“For several years, CFAR took the main LW Sequences Git Repo and forked it into a private branch, then layered all sorts of new commits, ran with some assumptions, and tweaked around some of the legacy code a bit. This was all done in private organizations, or in-person conversation, or at best, on hard-to-follow-and-link-to-threads on Facebook.
“And now, there’s a massive series of git-merge conflicts, as important concepts from CFAR attempt to get merged back into the original LessWrong branch. And people are going, like ‘what the hell is focusing and circling?’”
And this points towards an important thing about _why_ think it’s important to keep people actually writing down and publishing their longform thoughts (esp the people who are working in private organizations)
And I’m not sure how to actually really convey it properly _without_ the programming metaphor. (Or, I suppose I just could. Maybe if I simply remove the first sentence the description still works. But I feel like the first sentence does a lot of important work in communicating it clearly)
We have enough programmers that I can basically get away with it anyway, but it’d be nice to not have to rely on that.
Periodically I describe a particular problem with the rationalsphere with the programmer metaphor of:
“For several years, CFAR took the main LW Sequences Git Repo and forked it into a private branch, then layered all sorts of new commits, ran with some assumptions, and tweaked around some of the legacy code a bit. This was all done in private organizations, or in-person conversation, or at best, on hard-to-follow-and-link-to-threads on Facebook.
“And now, there’s a massive series of git-merge conflicts, as important concepts from CFAR attempt to get merged back into the original LessWrong branch. And people are going, like ‘what the hell is focusing and circling?’”
And this points towards an important thing about _why_ think it’s important to keep people actually writing down and publishing their longform thoughts (esp the people who are working in private organizations)
And I’m not sure how to actually really convey it properly _without_ the programming metaphor. (Or, I suppose I just could. Maybe if I simply remove the first sentence the description still works. But I feel like the first sentence does a lot of important work in communicating it clearly)
We have enough programmers that I can basically get away with it anyway, but it’d be nice to not have to rely on that.