Having read the post, Alexei’s comments, and now a couple of Eliezer’s comments, it seems to me that the takeaway is this:
Arbital has not been tried and found wanting; it has been found difficult [to make] and not tried.
Well… does anyone else think that it might be valuable to give it another go? It sounds like some critical parts of Eliezer’s design never actually made it into any product that was ever made, much less user tested and much much less released to any significant population of users, so really, we still don’t know much, if anything, about whether the idea would succeed.
Is the thing inherently difficult to make? Some of what Alexei said suggests this, and no doubt there’s some amount of inherent difficulty. On the other hand, many of the difficulties Alexei describes, that plagued the development process, seem eminently avoidable.
Eliezer, do you still think that Arbital (i.e., your idea for it) would be a good thing to make?
Yes, there is a good case to be made that Eliezer’s vision hasn’t been fully tried. But I also think it’s impossible to try it because the exact design is locked inside Eliezer’s head, so he would be the bottleneck. (That is, unless you found someone who thought like him and could be on the team full time. We have tried to find a person like that, but couldn’t.)
I maintain that someone doing their own project in this area would be a better bet. And they can take features / inspiration / overall direction from Arbital.
But I also think it’s impossible to try it because the exact design is locked inside Eliezer’s head, so he would be the bottleneck.
Well, Eliezer has access to a keyboard, and a computer, and the Internet, doesn’t he? The design need not remain locked in his head!
(“But Eliezer is too busy to type up all of his thoughts!” Well, you (Alexei & the Arbital gang) kept design notes, right? Why not publish them? Or are you keeping them to yourself because you still have plans to develop a project on their basis in the future? In any case, here’s another possibility: have Eliezer explain the thing to someone (perhaps verbally), record it, then publish that!)
In short, this seems like an eminently solvable problem; I find ‘impossible’ to be a strange thing to say of it!
I’m confused why there is such a focus on understanding Eliezer’s ideas, given that everyone seems to agree the first online community Eliezer had custom-built for him (LW 1.0) was a failure. Having someone custom create an online community for you is an incredible luxury. I suspect there are a lot of other people who have detailed models of how online communities work and/or large internet followings that could be induced to migrate to a new community.
I do think it’d be valuable if the Arbital team released their design documents so others could draw inspiration—I just don’t see any compelling reason to treat Eliezer as an authority for the purpose of making decisions.
It seems very weird to me to call LW 1.0 a failure. Sure, nobody maintained it and so it slowly declined, but it still gave rise to a pretty massive and active community and was the hub of a lot of excellent writing for quite a few years (e.g. Scott Alexander, lukeprog, etc.).
The way I think about online communities, there are two important inputs: There’s your initial endowment of users & attention, and there’s the skill with which you design the community culture, rules, software, etc. These interact in the form of an exponential function.
If you do a great job of designing community software, your community can grow exponentially in to something massive/beautiful like Facebook, Wikipedia, etc. Online community success is power law distributed.
If you don’t do a great job, you get exponential decay instead, and the community gradually fades away. Eliezer put a lot of effort in to the exponent for Less Wrong 1.0: A custom platform was built to Eliezer’s specification, and he wrote an entire sequence about the sort of culture he wanted. But none of that prevented exponential decay—even while the rationalist community itself expanded! Instead, LW 1.0 turned in to a site Eliezer himself didn’t want to use.
It’s possible that LW 1.0 would have thrived with more maintenance. But I think it still counts as evidence against the idea that Eliezer has unusual ability as an online community designer. First, if people get enthusiastic enough about an online community, some of them will step up to maintain it. So “lack of maintenance” is not cleanly separable from other trends toward decline. Second, by saying that LW 1.0 failed due to lack of maintenance, you’re effectively saying that the Eliezer strategy of carefully figuring out how the community should work from first principles, without any empirical feedback, is inferior to a more hands-on strategy of keeping your hands on the wheel and seeing where things lead. This also appears to be one of Alexei’s takeaways.
Again, I’m not saying we shouldn’t listen to Eliezer’s ideas. If I was creating an online community, I’d love to take a look at the Arbital design document. But I would not follow Eliezer’s advice if it didn’t make sense to me, and it seems Alexei also reached this conclusion. Indeed, I see this as a big takeaway of Inadequate Equilibria: if the advice of high status people doesn’t make sense to you, consider not following it.
As someone who has worked at Arbital (though I joined after Alexei went on break, so he might think differently, and I never talked to Eliezer directly during my time there), my read is that the things that Eliezer did write down were not comprehensive enough to build a coherent model of his internal model. Multiple long conversations with Eliezer did also not seem good enough to get someone to build a strong enough model so that they wouldn’t very quickly propose things that Eliezer thought were very bad ideas. Having the notes and conversations publicly, allowing more people to study them, might help here – but I am currently skeptical that that would be enough for anyone to successfuly extract Eliezer’s models.
What habryka said. Basically you’re totally underestimating the complexity of the project and how granular and specific things get if you’re to build them in a way Eliezer would approve.
Later that year Eliezer wrote a 55 page document describing Arbital and how and why it was different and necessary.
Given that Eliezer, you and habryka are saying what you’re saying, out of respect for all of you, I truly do believe that you are right. But it is hard not to be curious when a 55 page document was released and about three years worth of work had been done (meaning that there’s notes, designs, code, and mental models that you and the other people who worked on the project have).
I can sorta grok the idea that it wouldn’t be possible to get every small detail exactly the way Eliezer envisions. But what about using the big document plus everything else for the broad (and medium) strokes, and filling in the details by using ones judgement? The details won’t get filled exactly the way Eliezer envisioned, but I’d think that it’d be a decent approximation. And even if it isn’t such a great approximation, the broad strokes would still be there, right? To wrap up this thought: I’m having trouble grokking why it would be essential to get all of the small details exactly the way Eliezer envisioned.
I sympathize. It’s a giant and weird project the likes of which the world has not seen in a while. If I wrote down how to implement just what we built so far so that someone could read it an unambiguously translate it into the current product, I think the document would be around 200 pages. And what we implemented was may be ~15% of Eliezer’s full vision that he was describing in his document.
By the way, we followed Eliezer’s direct vision for only 1.5 years. Then we took matters into our own hands and the design went elsewhere.
Turns out it’s hard to get the broad details right too. It’s basicly hard on every level.
If it’s not according to Eliezer’s specification, then it doesn’t have Eliezer’s “magic touch”. I think if you’d ask Eliezer, he would tell you that the feature you built (or the whole product) won’t work as well or at all.
if you can’t unlock ideas by writing a clear spec, you shouldn’t even be trying to run a software project. That woud be like hiring someone who can’t code to develop.
Having read the post, Alexei’s comments, and now a couple of Eliezer’s comments, it seems to me that the takeaway is this:
Arbital has not been tried and found wanting; it has been found difficult [to make] and not tried.
Well… does anyone else think that it might be valuable to give it another go? It sounds like some critical parts of Eliezer’s design never actually made it into any product that was ever made, much less user tested and much much less released to any significant population of users, so really, we still don’t know much, if anything, about whether the idea would succeed.
Is the thing inherently difficult to make? Some of what Alexei said suggests this, and no doubt there’s some amount of inherent difficulty. On the other hand, many of the difficulties Alexei describes, that plagued the development process, seem eminently avoidable.
Eliezer, do you still think that Arbital (i.e., your idea for it) would be a good thing to make?
Yes, there is a good case to be made that Eliezer’s vision hasn’t been fully tried. But I also think it’s impossible to try it because the exact design is locked inside Eliezer’s head, so he would be the bottleneck. (That is, unless you found someone who thought like him and could be on the team full time. We have tried to find a person like that, but couldn’t.)
I maintain that someone doing their own project in this area would be a better bet. And they can take features / inspiration / overall direction from Arbital.
Well, Eliezer has access to a keyboard, and a computer, and the Internet, doesn’t he? The design need not remain locked in his head!
(“But Eliezer is too busy to type up all of his thoughts!” Well, you (Alexei & the Arbital gang) kept design notes, right? Why not publish them? Or are you keeping them to yourself because you still have plans to develop a project on their basis in the future? In any case, here’s another possibility: have Eliezer explain the thing to someone (perhaps verbally), record it, then publish that!)
In short, this seems like an eminently solvable problem; I find ‘impossible’ to be a strange thing to say of it!
I’m confused why there is such a focus on understanding Eliezer’s ideas, given that everyone seems to agree the first online community Eliezer had custom-built for him (LW 1.0) was a failure. Having someone custom create an online community for you is an incredible luxury. I suspect there are a lot of other people who have detailed models of how online communities work and/or large internet followings that could be induced to migrate to a new community.
I do think it’d be valuable if the Arbital team released their design documents so others could draw inspiration—I just don’t see any compelling reason to treat Eliezer as an authority for the purpose of making decisions.
It seems very weird to me to call LW 1.0 a failure. Sure, nobody maintained it and so it slowly declined, but it still gave rise to a pretty massive and active community and was the hub of a lot of excellent writing for quite a few years (e.g. Scott Alexander, lukeprog, etc.).
Yes, I agree all that was valuable and important.
The way I think about online communities, there are two important inputs: There’s your initial endowment of users & attention, and there’s the skill with which you design the community culture, rules, software, etc. These interact in the form of an exponential function.
If you do a great job of designing community software, your community can grow exponentially in to something massive/beautiful like Facebook, Wikipedia, etc. Online community success is power law distributed.
If you don’t do a great job, you get exponential decay instead, and the community gradually fades away. Eliezer put a lot of effort in to the exponent for Less Wrong 1.0: A custom platform was built to Eliezer’s specification, and he wrote an entire sequence about the sort of culture he wanted. But none of that prevented exponential decay—even while the rationalist community itself expanded! Instead, LW 1.0 turned in to a site Eliezer himself didn’t want to use.
It’s possible that LW 1.0 would have thrived with more maintenance. But I think it still counts as evidence against the idea that Eliezer has unusual ability as an online community designer. First, if people get enthusiastic enough about an online community, some of them will step up to maintain it. So “lack of maintenance” is not cleanly separable from other trends toward decline. Second, by saying that LW 1.0 failed due to lack of maintenance, you’re effectively saying that the Eliezer strategy of carefully figuring out how the community should work from first principles, without any empirical feedback, is inferior to a more hands-on strategy of keeping your hands on the wheel and seeing where things lead. This also appears to be one of Alexei’s takeaways.
Again, I’m not saying we shouldn’t listen to Eliezer’s ideas. If I was creating an online community, I’d love to take a look at the Arbital design document. But I would not follow Eliezer’s advice if it didn’t make sense to me, and it seems Alexei also reached this conclusion. Indeed, I see this as a big takeaway of Inadequate Equilibria: if the advice of high status people doesn’t make sense to you, consider not following it.
As someone who has worked at Arbital (though I joined after Alexei went on break, so he might think differently, and I never talked to Eliezer directly during my time there), my read is that the things that Eliezer did write down were not comprehensive enough to build a coherent model of his internal model. Multiple long conversations with Eliezer did also not seem good enough to get someone to build a strong enough model so that they wouldn’t very quickly propose things that Eliezer thought were very bad ideas. Having the notes and conversations publicly, allowing more people to study them, might help here – but I am currently skeptical that that would be enough for anyone to successfuly extract Eliezer’s models.
I see, thanks. Does anyone other than Eliezer have a good idea of what Eliezer wanted (wants?) to build?
Nate Soares had some strong opinions, and I generally expect him to have good models of Eliezer, but he is not any less busy than Eliezer is.
What habryka said. Basically you’re totally underestimating the complexity of the project and how granular and specific things get if you’re to build them in a way Eliezer would approve.
Given that Eliezer, you and habryka are saying what you’re saying, out of respect for all of you, I truly do believe that you are right. But it is hard not to be curious when a 55 page document was released and about three years worth of work had been done (meaning that there’s notes, designs, code, and mental models that you and the other people who worked on the project have).
I can sorta grok the idea that it wouldn’t be possible to get every small detail exactly the way Eliezer envisions. But what about using the big document plus everything else for the broad (and medium) strokes, and filling in the details by using ones judgement? The details won’t get filled exactly the way Eliezer envisioned, but I’d think that it’d be a decent approximation. And even if it isn’t such a great approximation, the broad strokes would still be there, right? To wrap up this thought: I’m having trouble grokking why it would be essential to get all of the small details exactly the way Eliezer envisioned.
I sympathize. It’s a giant and weird project the likes of which the world has not seen in a while. If I wrote down how to implement just what we built so far so that someone could read it an unambiguously translate it into the current product, I think the document would be around 200 pages. And what we implemented was may be ~15% of Eliezer’s full vision that he was describing in his document.
By the way, we followed Eliezer’s direct vision for only 1.5 years. Then we took matters into our own hands and the design went elsewhere.
Turns out it’s hard to get the broad details right too. It’s basicly hard on every level.
If it’s not according to Eliezer’s specification, then it doesn’t have Eliezer’s “magic touch”. I think if you’d ask Eliezer, he would tell you that the feature you built (or the whole product) won’t work as well or at all.
if you can’t unlock ideas by writing a clear spec, you shouldn’t even be trying to run a software project. That woud be like hiring someone who can’t code to develop.