I’m not really sure how obvious the need for a more engaging social community is. I suppose it depends on exactly what one sees the purpose of the site to be. The focus I’m mostly interested in is developing solid resources for good reasoning in various areas and reaching a large and diverse audience with them.
I’m thinking the resource developing part as basically something like how a science journal works. People come up with stuff, other people question it, and stuff gets hopefully iterated into better stuff. Good science journals generally have some balance between adversity and agreeing to common conventions. When people form a tight social community, they might start polarizing against the outside and producing groupthinky junk instead of argument-hardened stuff.
Also not sure about the community aspect for the audience thing. Basically the site should have some number of people writing useful posts, some more active participants giving feedback and having discussions, and a large number of readers who can hopefully make use of the stuff. It’d also be very nice to have people who actually do stuff on the outside participating, either doing serious scholarship or real-world empiricism, and distilling ideas from there into site content. Unfortunately this favors people who do a lot of stuff outside the forum and bring in the outside insights, while there’s a lot less main content to be made by just puttering around with in-forum stuff.
So cultivating a somewhat dry atmosphere might actually be an advantage, if it could be used to encourage people to bring in high-impact content based on research outside the site, to maintain the sort of constructively adversarial air useful science tends to emerge from and to keep the general tone sufficiently broad that the content is accessible to a diverse audience.
Is a close knit community, as opposed to just being a reasoning tool, part of the purpose of LW? Considering his support for the various IRL rationalist communities, many things in “”The Craft nd the Community sequence, and general temperament, Eliezer certainly seems to think so.
But yes, the risk of groupthink, contaminating the Science journal type functionality of LW, and so on are indeed important dangers that any solution to the problem must address.
I’m not really sure how obvious the need for a more engaging social community is. I suppose it depends on exactly what one sees the purpose of the site to be. The focus I’m mostly interested in is developing solid resources for good reasoning in various areas and reaching a large and diverse audience with them.
I’m thinking the resource developing part as basically something like how a science journal works. People come up with stuff, other people question it, and stuff gets hopefully iterated into better stuff. Good science journals generally have some balance between adversity and agreeing to common conventions. When people form a tight social community, they might start polarizing against the outside and producing groupthinky junk instead of argument-hardened stuff.
Also not sure about the community aspect for the audience thing. Basically the site should have some number of people writing useful posts, some more active participants giving feedback and having discussions, and a large number of readers who can hopefully make use of the stuff. It’d also be very nice to have people who actually do stuff on the outside participating, either doing serious scholarship or real-world empiricism, and distilling ideas from there into site content. Unfortunately this favors people who do a lot of stuff outside the forum and bring in the outside insights, while there’s a lot less main content to be made by just puttering around with in-forum stuff.
So cultivating a somewhat dry atmosphere might actually be an advantage, if it could be used to encourage people to bring in high-impact content based on research outside the site, to maintain the sort of constructively adversarial air useful science tends to emerge from and to keep the general tone sufficiently broad that the content is accessible to a diverse audience.
Is a close knit community, as opposed to just being a reasoning tool, part of the purpose of LW? Considering his support for the various IRL rationalist communities, many things in “”The Craft nd the Community sequence, and general temperament, Eliezer certainly seems to think so.
But yes, the risk of groupthink, contaminating the Science journal type functionality of LW, and so on are indeed important dangers that any solution to the problem must address.