Cool. I’m going to attempt to wrap up threads where possible (avoiding this turning into a many-headed-hydra). I think we’re mostly in agreement about what the problem is.
Things that still stand out as worth noting:
Arguably I could simply declare victory because you end up by saying that we should do something less visibly-weird than making HPMOR prominent on the front page
I want to push back a bit on “declare victory” being a thing that’s relevant here. (This is sort of semantic but I think it’s actually pretty important). A key element of Productive Disagreement is shifting away from “someone gets to win” to “we get to figure out the right/true/most-useful thing.”
And in this case I think we have similar enough goals that we’re actually able to do that (whereas in some disagreements, you have to recurse all the way to “do we even both believe in consequentialism?” or “do we even both believe in objective measurable truth, or on what counts as evidence about that?”)
I suspect the great majority of HPMOR readers are not inspired by it in a way that makes a substantial difference to their lives, and that those who are were probably already rationalist types before they read HPMOR
I’m not sure about the total numbers either, but this point is very salient to me because HPMOR radically changed my life trajectory, when several previous “why not change the world?” type people and books failed to do so. I read HPMOR before sequences and am not sure what it’d have been like if it’d been reversed, but my sense is “The Sequences are the System 2 content of LessWrong, HPMOR is the System 1 content.”
I’m guessing that “don’t pay too much attention to traditional prestige markers” wouldn’t be that near the top of the list, and even if it were “put some Harry Potter fanfiction on the front page of our website” probably wouldn’t be near the top of the list of the ways to say it.
I pretty much agree with this. Insofar as HPMOR is necessary to have easily-accessible, I think it is a solvable problem to make it look somewhat classier. (I’m not committed to replacing it with the “rationalist fiction” page, but I’ll note an advantage of that is if you aren’t trying to explain it in a single paragraph in a quarter-of-the-front-page, you have more room to set the context of why HPMOR exists and why to give it a second look if you have an allergic reaction to it)
Sum Consequences
(Or, converting this into an empirical question that’s answerable)
I don’t think either of us would consider this definitive, but I think we’d at least both consider it evidence if a LW Survey attempted to solicit questions about how big an effect size reading the Sequences, HPMOR and Slatestar have been on people’s ambition, life goals, etc.
Doing this properly is tricky. The ideal version of it would be a legit randomized control trial that included people outside this community. I think that’s impractical, but it should be tease out something.
I agree that it’s wrap-up time, so just a few comments on your few comments.
First, let me push back on your push-back on the “declare victory” comment. In the very same sentence as that comment I added: “but arguments aren’t meant to be about winning and losing around here”. Please don’t try to make it look as if I don’t appreciate this, when I’ve made it explicit that I do. Thanks.
The fact that you read HPMOR before the Sequences and found that it changed your life is very interesting, and is evidence for your inspiration theory (though obviously less evidence than it would be if someone else reported the same experience).
I agree that one advantage of putting the link to HPMOR somewhere less space-constrained is that you get to explain it better when it’s first seen.
And yes, I agree that we might get useful information from an LW survey if for some reason it prioritized this. Perhaps if no one but you reported having their life changed by HPMOR you’d change your mind; perhaps if 10% of readers did I’d change mine. I think it would be really difficult to get any handle on how many people see HPMOR on the front page, decide “I want nothing to do with these people”, and badmouth rationalism to their friends, from any sort of survey, but perhaps it’s fair to guess that the number who overreact so dramatically won’t be large.
> First, let me push back on your push-back on the “declare victory” comment. In the very same sentence as that comment I added: “but arguments aren’t meant to be about winning and losing around here”.
Yeah, I think my comment came across stronger/differently than I meant it to (and re-reading both your comment and mine I think that’s a mistake on my part).
I meant something like “I see that we’re both arguing in good faith and trying to do a good thing, but it feels a little sad that the ‘victory’ mindset from traditional debate is still lingering at all.”
For comparison: there were multiple times when I wrote recent comments on Double Crux that I accidentally wrote “your opponent.” In both cases, you and I generally were approaching things in the right mindset, but I think it’s a good habit, when one notices creeping “opposition-mindness” to flag it and let it pass.
Rereading your comment I think that is what you were intended to do, I just didn’t initially read it that way. Sorry.
Wrapping Up
So it sounded like some final things potentially worth doing are:
a) Actually put some effort into operationalizing the survey thing. (It so happens that the survey is in-the-zeitgeist right now, but it looks like this year’s survey was already pretty long).
I am interested in talking to the survey-folk about doing something with this next year. It doesn’t feel pressing to me to continue with this in the immediate future but seemed at least worth considering.
b) Potentially, take what we’ve written here and turn it into something more easily digestible (or maybe just more easily findable) as a publicly-available transcript. (Basically, I think turning our series of comments into a single top-level post would be useful. Is that something you’d be okay with and/or interested in doing?)
I’ve no objection to making our comments into a top-level post. My only concern (which has nothing to do with its being our comments rather than anyone else’s) is that this would fall firmly into the category of discussion of the community rather than discussion of the things the community is about, and maybe that’s a thing we want less of rather than more.
It occurs to me that I said something ambiguous. By “I’ve no objection to making our comments into a top-level post” I meant “I’ve no objection to our comments being made into a top-level post”; I wasn’t saying anything about my willingness or unwillingness to do the work myself.
… I suppose I should answer the obvious followup question. I don’t mind doing the work myself but if I do it’s likely to be quite some time before I get round to it. If someone else does the work I don’t mind offering constructive criticism, corrections, etc., and would probably be quicker about doing that.
Cool. I’m going to attempt to wrap up threads where possible (avoiding this turning into a many-headed-hydra). I think we’re mostly in agreement about what the problem is.
Things that still stand out as worth noting:
I want to push back a bit on “declare victory” being a thing that’s relevant here. (This is sort of semantic but I think it’s actually pretty important). A key element of Productive Disagreement is shifting away from “someone gets to win” to “we get to figure out the right/true/most-useful thing.”
And in this case I think we have similar enough goals that we’re actually able to do that (whereas in some disagreements, you have to recurse all the way to “do we even both believe in consequentialism?” or “do we even both believe in objective measurable truth, or on what counts as evidence about that?”)
I’m not sure about the total numbers either, but this point is very salient to me because HPMOR radically changed my life trajectory, when several previous “why not change the world?” type people and books failed to do so. I read HPMOR before sequences and am not sure what it’d have been like if it’d been reversed, but my sense is “The Sequences are the System 2 content of LessWrong, HPMOR is the System 1 content.”
I pretty much agree with this. Insofar as HPMOR is necessary to have easily-accessible, I think it is a solvable problem to make it look somewhat classier. (I’m not committed to replacing it with the “rationalist fiction” page, but I’ll note an advantage of that is if you aren’t trying to explain it in a single paragraph in a quarter-of-the-front-page, you have more room to set the context of why HPMOR exists and why to give it a second look if you have an allergic reaction to it)
Sum Consequences
(Or, converting this into an empirical question that’s answerable)
I don’t think either of us would consider this definitive, but I think we’d at least both consider it evidence if a LW Survey attempted to solicit questions about how big an effect size reading the Sequences, HPMOR and Slatestar have been on people’s ambition, life goals, etc.
Doing this properly is tricky. The ideal version of it would be a legit randomized control trial that included people outside this community. I think that’s impractical, but it should be tease out something.
I agree that it’s wrap-up time, so just a few comments on your few comments.
First, let me push back on your push-back on the “declare victory” comment. In the very same sentence as that comment I added: “but arguments aren’t meant to be about winning and losing around here”. Please don’t try to make it look as if I don’t appreciate this, when I’ve made it explicit that I do. Thanks.
The fact that you read HPMOR before the Sequences and found that it changed your life is very interesting, and is evidence for your inspiration theory (though obviously less evidence than it would be if someone else reported the same experience).
I agree that one advantage of putting the link to HPMOR somewhere less space-constrained is that you get to explain it better when it’s first seen.
And yes, I agree that we might get useful information from an LW survey if for some reason it prioritized this. Perhaps if no one but you reported having their life changed by HPMOR you’d change your mind; perhaps if 10% of readers did I’d change mine. I think it would be really difficult to get any handle on how many people see HPMOR on the front page, decide “I want nothing to do with these people”, and badmouth rationalism to their friends, from any sort of survey, but perhaps it’s fair to guess that the number who overreact so dramatically won’t be large.
> First, let me push back on your push-back on the “declare victory” comment. In the very same sentence as that comment I added: “but arguments aren’t meant to be about winning and losing around here”.
Yeah, I think my comment came across stronger/differently than I meant it to (and re-reading both your comment and mine I think that’s a mistake on my part).
I meant something like “I see that we’re both arguing in good faith and trying to do a good thing, but it feels a little sad that the ‘victory’ mindset from traditional debate is still lingering at all.”
For comparison: there were multiple times when I wrote recent comments on Double Crux that I accidentally wrote “your opponent.” In both cases, you and I generally were approaching things in the right mindset, but I think it’s a good habit, when one notices creeping “opposition-mindness” to flag it and let it pass.
Rereading your comment I think that is what you were intended to do, I just didn’t initially read it that way. Sorry.
Wrapping Up
So it sounded like some final things potentially worth doing are:
a) Actually put some effort into operationalizing the survey thing. (It so happens that the survey is in-the-zeitgeist right now, but it looks like this year’s survey was already pretty long).
I am interested in talking to the survey-folk about doing something with this next year. It doesn’t feel pressing to me to continue with this in the immediate future but seemed at least worth considering.
b) Potentially, take what we’ve written here and turn it into something more easily digestible (or maybe just more easily findable) as a publicly-available transcript. (Basically, I think turning our series of comments into a single top-level post would be useful. Is that something you’d be okay with and/or interested in doing?)
Apology accepted, obviously.
I’ve no objection to making our comments into a top-level post. My only concern (which has nothing to do with its being our comments rather than anyone else’s) is that this would fall firmly into the category of discussion of the community rather than discussion of the things the community is about, and maybe that’s a thing we want less of rather than more.
Ah, gotcha. Maybe make it a Meta post in this case.
Yeah, I think it should be Meta.
It occurs to me that I said something ambiguous. By “I’ve no objection to making our comments into a top-level post” I meant “I’ve no objection to our comments being made into a top-level post”; I wasn’t saying anything about my willingness or unwillingness to do the work myself.
… I suppose I should answer the obvious followup question. I don’t mind doing the work myself but if I do it’s likely to be quite some time before I get round to it. If someone else does the work I don’t mind offering constructive criticism, corrections, etc., and would probably be quicker about doing that.
I actually went ahead and did it last night (wording was ambiguous but seemed to imply you weren’t up for it in near future anyway)
So here it is. If you feel any of my commentary is misrepresenting you let me know.