“Secondly it seems that they very best content creators spend some time writing and making information freely available, detailing their goals and so on, and then eventually go off to pursue those goals more concretely, and the content creation on the site goes down.”
That is a rather good point. The point suggests that if we want to keep lesswrong a healthy community we need to maintain a strong pipeline.
I see both sides of the ’radio silence” thing. On one hand its good to let other people know about your project in case they want to get involved. On the other hand making a project “public” creates alot of stuff to deal with. We both agree public criticism can be quite harsh. Organazing a group effort is difficult. Maintaining a cohesive vision becoems more difficult the more people that are invovled. Finally a decent number of hyped rationalsit project seemed to have fundamental problems (Arbital comes to mind*).
My personal intuition is that in many cases its better to take the middle ground about when to take ideas public. Put together something like a “minimum viable project” or at least a true” proof of concept”. Once you have that its easier to keep a coherent vision and its more likely the project is a good idea. It is suboptimal to spend lots of time organizing people and dealing with feedback before you have determined your project is a fundamentally sound idea.In this post I tried to mention projects which were already underway or that could be done on a small scale. I should note I am not very confidant in my preceding intuition and would welcome your feedback.
*I am aware of the personal problems that hurt Arbital. I am also aware that there are/were plans for it to pivot directions to a micro-blogging platform. But the original vision of arbital seems flawed. Ther arbital leadership basically confimed this some time ago.
“Secondly it seems that they very best content creators spend some time writing and making information freely available, detailing their goals and so on, and then eventually go off to pursue those goals more concretely, and the content creation on the site goes down.”
That is a rather good point. The point suggests that if we want to keep lesswrong a healthy community we need to maintain a strong pipeline.
I see both sides of the ’radio silence” thing. On one hand its good to let other people know about your project in case they want to get involved. On the other hand making a project “public” creates alot of stuff to deal with. We both agree public criticism can be quite harsh. Organazing a group effort is difficult. Maintaining a cohesive vision becoems more difficult the more people that are invovled. Finally a decent number of hyped rationalsit project seemed to have fundamental problems (Arbital comes to mind*).
My personal intuition is that in many cases its better to take the middle ground about when to take ideas public. Put together something like a “minimum viable project” or at least a true” proof of concept”. Once you have that its easier to keep a coherent vision and its more likely the project is a good idea. It is suboptimal to spend lots of time organizing people and dealing with feedback before you have determined your project is a fundamentally sound idea.In this post I tried to mention projects which were already underway or that could be done on a small scale. I should note I am not very confidant in my preceding intuition and would welcome your feedback.
*I am aware of the personal problems that hurt Arbital. I am also aware that there are/were plans for it to pivot directions to a micro-blogging platform. But the original vision of arbital seems flawed. Ther arbital leadership basically confimed this some time ago.