Announcing the Progress Forum
I’d like to invite you to join the Progress Forum, the new online home for the progress community. It’s a clone of this site, but with a focus on progress studies and the philosophy of progress.
This forum was pre-announced in January 2022, and quietly opened in April. Although anyone could sign up, we deliberately didn’t make any big announcement about it, aiming first for a small, high-quality community. Now that we have a lot of good content on the site, we’re announcing it more broadly.
The primary goal of this forum is to provide a place for long-form discussion of progress studies. It’s also, like LW, a place to find local clubs and meetups.
The broader goal is to share ideas, strengthen them through discussion and comment, and over the long term, to build up a body of thought that constitutes a new philosophy of progress for the 21st century (and beyond).
I invite you to post:
Essays (original, or cross-posted from your blog)
Drafts, half-baked ideas, and work-in-progress thinking, for feedback
Questions for brainstorming
Local events and community groups
Etc.
And please read and comment on what others have shared.
You can subscribe to Forum posts via email, RSS, or Twitter.
The Forum is sponsored by The Roots of Progress. Huge thanks to the people who worked to create and run it: Lawrence Kestleoot, Andrew Roberts, Sameer Ismail, David Smehlik, Alec Wilson, and Ross Graham. Thanks also to Kris Gulati for nudging this project along, and to Ruth Grace Wong for helpful conversations about community and moderation. Finally, thanks to the LessWrong team for creating this software platform, and especially to Oliver Habryka, Ruby Bloom, Raymond Arnold, JP Addison, James Babcock, and Ben Pace for answering questions and helping us customize this instance of it.
Good luck with your forum! While I disagree about whether more broad technological progress is good right now (as we run head first into novel technological extinction threats), I still expect to learn a lot about the history of progress and factors that affect it by reading your forum, which I look forward to.
Thanks Ben! The critiques of progress from the EA/x-risk community have been the most thoughtful, well-informed, and difficult to answer of all the ones I’ve heard. In the spirit of epistemic humility, I invite you to keep up the criticism.
How, complex was it to fork the forum? Is the software now at a stage where it’s easy to set up new forums with the same structure?
It took some dedicated developer effort but not an enormous amount. “Easy” is probably too strong a term!
Have you (and the LW team) considered having the forum integrated and cross-posted into LW in the same way as the alignment forum is? I think that could be pretty cool. I’m more likely to keep just checking LW even though I am interested in essays about progress, and I think that would help balance the AI content on LW (which has been a topic lately).
I will continue to cross-post most of my blog posts to LW, but the forums will evolve separate user bases and content bases.
That’s a shame. LW readers seem to be complaining about being inundated with AI content, so I suspect regular injections of progress studies content would be a breath of fresh air.
people have been complaining about too much ai content on this ai forum since its founding 15 years ago. I used to be one of them
Nod. There is still, like a lot more than there historically has been.