After digesting this a bit, I think I come away with the idea that the internet is bad for creating change in people and that the systemized winning training has to happen on the personal, real-life level.
Is there a function that a website like this can serve if it can’t create change?
What would you turn this forum into to be maximally beneficial towards your change?
LW2.0 in its current form isn’t ideal for creating measurable change in people on the object level, but if it promotes people to read more of the rationality material that isn’t currently popular blog posts, that’s a force for good.
If I was in charge, I’d divide the site up into cause areas and have things be tagged for which cause area they have relevance to. Possible categories:
Xrisk
Non-Xrisk EA
Craft development
Community meta
Meta insights
Otherwise interesting posts
This would allow multiple cause areas to benefit from a shared audience and mitigate most of the stepping on each other’s toes you get when each cause area is competing for dominance over the feed.
I’d also have more focus on wiki-like information distribution. Currently there is little effort being put into wikis and little status awarded for contributing to them, so they are currently inferior to blog posts written by a single author at a specific moment in time, but it doesn’t have to stay that way.
Right—wikis and blogs have different uses. Blogs (or magazines, or letters...) are for hashing things out; wikis (or books, or journals [although journals can do both]...) are for writing things up once they’ve been hashed out. This is useful to avoid the “Facebook search problem”, which IMO hasn’t been getting as much attention as it should, especially given that it was one of the reasons listed for why LW ought to be revived:
>The first bottleneck for our community, and the biggest I think, is the ability to build common knowledge. On facebook, I can read an excellent and insightful discussion, yet one week later I forgot it. Even if I remember it, I don’t link to the facebook post (because linking to facebook posts/comments is hard) and it doesn’t have a title so I don’t casually refer to it in discussion with friends. On facebook, ideas don’t get archived and built upon, they get discussed and forgotten. To put this another way, the reason we cannot build on the best ideas this community had over the last five years, is because we don’t know what they are. There’s only fragments of memories of facebook discussions which maybe some other people remember. We have the sequences, and there’s no way to build on them together as a community, and thus there is stagnation.
One possible solution to the problem that awarding status for wiki edits is hard would be to abandon the wiki model entirely, in favor of a curated encyclopedia model: instead of waiting around for someone to write up X, you’d have curators (status!) who can ask someone who understands X to write (status!) the encyclopedia page on X.
What do you do if their writeup is controversial or could be built upon? Well, that’s an implementation detail. Maybe a comments page? How do actually-existing curated encyclopedias handle that?
It could be a good idea to make a wiki in lw2.0 and award site karma to people contributing to it.
Per edit, per character, based on karma changes to a post after they edited it? It seems really hard to find a method of rewarding people for edits that isn’t easily gameable or rely on deep taste. (You could have editors vote on edits, but you’re not going to get many of those votes relative to the number of readers that might vote on articles, for example.)
I’m thinking of something like a section on the main lesserwrong.com page showing the latest edits to the wiki, so that the users of the site could see them and choose to go look at whether what changed in the article is worth points.
After digesting this a bit, I think I come away with the idea that the internet is bad for creating change in people and that the systemized winning training has to happen on the personal, real-life level.
Is there a function that a website like this can serve if it can’t create change?
What would you turn this forum into to be maximally beneficial towards your change?
LW2.0 in its current form isn’t ideal for creating measurable change in people on the object level, but if it promotes people to read more of the rationality material that isn’t currently popular blog posts, that’s a force for good.
If I was in charge, I’d divide the site up into cause areas and have things be tagged for which cause area they have relevance to. Possible categories:
Xrisk
Non-Xrisk EA
Craft development
Community meta
Meta insights
Otherwise interesting posts
This would allow multiple cause areas to benefit from a shared audience and mitigate most of the stepping on each other’s toes you get when each cause area is competing for dominance over the feed.
I’d also have more focus on wiki-like information distribution. Currently there is little effort being put into wikis and little status awarded for contributing to them, so they are currently inferior to blog posts written by a single author at a specific moment in time, but it doesn’t have to stay that way.
I think the lesswrong wiki was supposed to be that repository of the interesting/important things that were posted to the community blog.
It could be a good idea to make a wiki in lw2.0 and award site karma to people contributing to it.
Right—wikis and blogs have different uses. Blogs (or magazines, or letters...) are for hashing things out; wikis (or books, or journals [although journals can do both]...) are for writing things up once they’ve been hashed out. This is useful to avoid the “Facebook search problem”, which IMO hasn’t been getting as much attention as it should, especially given that it was one of the reasons listed for why LW ought to be revived:
>The first bottleneck for our community, and the biggest I think, is the ability to build common knowledge. On facebook, I can read an excellent and insightful discussion, yet one week later I forgot it. Even if I remember it, I don’t link to the facebook post (because linking to facebook posts/comments is hard) and it doesn’t have a title so I don’t casually refer to it in discussion with friends. On facebook, ideas don’t get archived and built upon, they get discussed and forgotten. To put this another way, the reason we cannot build on the best ideas this community had over the last five years, is because we don’t know what they are. There’s only fragments of memories of facebook discussions which maybe some other people remember. We have the sequences, and there’s no way to build on them together as a community, and thus there is stagnation.
One possible solution to the problem that awarding status for wiki edits is hard would be to abandon the wiki model entirely, in favor of a curated encyclopedia model: instead of waiting around for someone to write up X, you’d have curators (status!) who can ask someone who understands X to write (status!) the encyclopedia page on X.
What do you do if their writeup is controversial or could be built upon? Well, that’s an implementation detail. Maybe a comments page? How do actually-existing curated encyclopedias handle that?
Per edit, per character, based on karma changes to a post after they edited it? It seems really hard to find a method of rewarding people for edits that isn’t easily gameable or rely on deep taste. (You could have editors vote on edits, but you’re not going to get many of those votes relative to the number of readers that might vote on articles, for example.)
I’m thinking of something like a section on the main lesserwrong.com page showing the latest edits to the wiki, so that the users of the site could see them and choose to go look at whether what changed in the article is worth points.
There already is a seperate EA forum.