I think you may be taking me to have meant “You’re a weirdo, because obviously The People Of Less Wrong want something different from what you want”, but what I actually meant was “I bet you’re not alone, and if I’m right then as more people with preferences like yours join LW2 it will become somewhat more informal and chatty, so rather than just deciding LW2 isn’t for you you should use it and try to nudge it in directions that suit your preferences better, and see what happens”.
(Overcoming Bias was “publish thoughts, get some comments”. So was Less Wrong, to begin with. I think the only reason LW now leans as heavily toward chat as it does is that not much is being written and published here. My guess is that if LW2 succeeds in its goals then it will not be as chatty as present-LW, and that will be a good thing since it will be because there’s lots of interesting stuff there that isn’t chat.)
I tend to think I’m a weirdo, but that’s not the issue (in this case, at least). More importantly, I don’t think that either I nor The People Of Less Wrong have coherent enough wants to really identify whether my preference for how I remember LW being a few years ago is divergent or not.
I think the only reason LW now leans as heavily toward chat as it does is that not much is being written and published here.
Sounds reasonable to me. It’s like sometimes there are more good articles and sometimes there are fewer good articles (depending on how motivated or busy or burned out the few good authors are), but the amount of comments is more or less constant, or slowly increasing over time. So when e.g. Eliezer suddenly stops producing tons of text, instead of the whole website slowing down evenly, it just becomes more chatroom-y, because people are still used to spending certain amount of time and posting certain amount of comments per week.
Maybe it would be better to have a separate chat area, so that when great articles temporarily stop coming, people won’t react by converting their open-thread-level comments into articles.
I think you may be taking me to have meant “You’re a weirdo, because obviously The People Of Less Wrong want something different from what you want”, but what I actually meant was “I bet you’re not alone, and if I’m right then as more people with preferences like yours join LW2 it will become somewhat more informal and chatty, so rather than just deciding LW2 isn’t for you you should use it and try to nudge it in directions that suit your preferences better, and see what happens”.
(Overcoming Bias was “publish thoughts, get some comments”. So was Less Wrong, to begin with. I think the only reason LW now leans as heavily toward chat as it does is that not much is being written and published here. My guess is that if LW2 succeeds in its goals then it will not be as chatty as present-LW, and that will be a good thing since it will be because there’s lots of interesting stuff there that isn’t chat.)
I tend to think I’m a weirdo, but that’s not the issue (in this case, at least). More importantly, I don’t think that either I nor The People Of Less Wrong have coherent enough wants to really identify whether my preference for how I remember LW being a few years ago is divergent or not.
Sounds reasonable to me. It’s like sometimes there are more good articles and sometimes there are fewer good articles (depending on how motivated or busy or burned out the few good authors are), but the amount of comments is more or less constant, or slowly increasing over time. So when e.g. Eliezer suddenly stops producing tons of text, instead of the whole website slowing down evenly, it just becomes more chatroom-y, because people are still used to spending certain amount of time and posting certain amount of comments per week.
Maybe it would be better to have a separate chat area, so that when great articles temporarily stop coming, people won’t react by converting their open-thread-level comments into articles.