Many of the most-influential, highly-respected people in SIAI/MIRI circles don’t read LessWrong much, or post but don’t make comments. I’m thinking of Eliezer, Michael Vassar, Carl Schulman, and Peter deBlanc, but if you look at the MIRI team, you’ll see mostly names I don’t recognize from LW. lukeprog does, now, and that’s great, but I suspect that within the MIRI org chart, spending time here costs a bit of status. It signals that you’re one of the followers rather than a leader. Replying to comments may also cost status if you perceive your status as higher than the person you’re responding to.
I also think earlier LW had more discussion about futurism, transhumanism, and artificial intelligence, and those things brought people in. More importantly, people engaged with those topics had specific questions that had answers.
The voting system favors posts that don’t have anything offensive or that you can disagree with over posts that are interesting and hence controversial.
Many of the most-influential, highly-respected people in SIAI/MIRI circles don’t read LessWrong much, or post but don’t make comments. I’m thinking of Eliezer, Michael Vassar, Carl Schulman, and Peter deBlanc, but if you look at the MIRI team, you’ll see mostly names I don’t recognize from LW. lukeprog does, now, and that’s great, but I suspect that within the MIRI org chart, spending time here costs a bit of status. It signals that you’re one of the followers rather than a leader. Replying to comments may also cost status if you perceive your status as higher than the person you’re responding to.
I also think earlier LW had more discussion about futurism, transhumanism, and artificial intelligence, and those things brought people in. More importantly, people engaged with those topics had specific questions that had answers.
The voting system favors posts that don’t have anything offensive or that you can disagree with over posts that are interesting and hence controversial.