In a recent post, AnnaSalamon brought attention to the way Less Wrong’s decline has left the community without a locus for discourse, leaving important conversations fragmented and hindering our collective truth-seeking and future-steering abilities.
We agree with this assessment, and think Arbital is well-placed to step up to fill this role. It fits within our broad vision of improving important information flows, and we have a strong set of wiki and explanation features which will allow the discussion be closely integrated with a usefully structured body of collaboratively improved knowledge.
I’ll start by explaining the problem as we see it, go into details around the vision we have for Arbital, and outline the next steps.
Understanding the problem
What is the shape of the hole Less Wrong used to fill? What is the problem that needs solving? In a nutshell, I’d say it’s: current inability to have a healthy, online discussion in order to build and improve our shared understanding of the world. [1] At Arbital we think the key parts of this problem fall roughly into three categories:
Explanation. This involves standard wiki features with a comprehensive, easily searchable network of knowledge. The website should also be good at transferring the knowledge into the readers’ heads.
Without this part the knowledge is only accumulated in the readers’ minds. If someone wants to catch up on the state of the debate, they either need to get a summary from someone, figure it out as they go along, or catch up by reading the entire discussion. This makes it hard for everyone, not just newcomers, to join an in-progress discussion. [2]
Discussion. Knowledge doesn’t precipitate out of thin air. It comes from discovery and discussion. Anyone should be able to see the current state of the important debates, see what the most relevant (counter-)arguments are, and what best predictors are thinking. The platform should make it easy to find the one place where the discussion on a particular topic should happen.
Without any discussion, the platform would only represent the settled parts of the accumulated knowledge. That would make a great reference, but not a place you would go to for the latest info or to collaborate on figuring out the right answers. There is also no chance for such a website to steer the course of the ongoing research or debate.
If the debate is not centralized, you end up with the current problem, where a particular debate happens in dozens of places, but each place only captures different sparse subsets of the relevant claims. If those discussions were aggregated (or never separate in the first place), one could hope for a fuller coverage, making it easier to spot and fill the missing parts.
Community. How do you start a community that has a high value of X and help it grow, while preserving the high value of X? For AI safety X equals epistemology. For Wikipedia X equals “neutral point of view, notable information, and verifiable facts”. For many other communities it’s something looser and broader, like “good vibes and accurate information”.
Without an empowered admin class, every community faces Eternal September. With an admin class gone too far, you could end up with stifling bureaucracy and deletionism. When balanced just right, most users are able to have productive, high quality discussions and find it easy to contribute to the platform.
Without an empowered expert class, the quality of the content goes down. With an expert class gone too far, you sometimes end up with too much elitism and a hostile atmosphere. When balance just right, new expert users can quickly rise to prominence and best ideas receive the most views.
Why Arbital?
Most importantly, we have a really good team: Alexei, Eric Rogstad, Steph, Eric Bruylant, and support from some excellent advisers: Eliezer Yudkowsky[3] and AnnaSalamon[4]. We also have enough funds to spend at least a year experimenting with and improving the product. [5]
Arbital’s first goal was to create a centralized place for math explanations. This allowed us to build the foundations for a wiki platform as well as learn how to think and act as a startup team. We got experience nurturing and working with a small community, listening to feedback, and quickly iterating on the product. This allowed us to take the present step towards our bigger goal: solving the problem of online discussion.
I think of Arbital as a grand experiment: both in terms of community building and software design. Community building is hard because writing and enforcing good guidelines is hard, and we still haven’t figured out the best way to have productive disagreements. Thankfully, it seems like there are many people who would like to work together on fixing this problem.
The software part is going to be challenging as well, because the ultimate feature set is something like a union between Reddit, Wikipedia, StackExchange, and core Facebook. Thankfully we have three full-time experienced engineers on board and the product we built so far is flexible enough to support personal pages, external links, claims, discussion, and other entities we might want the platform to have.
All in all, I’d say we have most of the necessary ingredients, the capability to acquire the missing ones, and the relentless motivation to have a good chance at creating a great locus of discussion. [6]
Moving forward
Our eventual goal is to have an open platform with all sorts of communities and topics, but for now we will be running a closed beta. There are two ways you can helps us:
You can be a part of our first experimental community, Arbital Labs. We are going to selectively accept people a few at a time, while we monitor how the platform and the discussion scale. We want to catch and address any issues early on, while it’s still easy to make large platform changes. If you would like to participate, let us know.
You can create your own content, write up your own thoughts and claims. There is no guarantee your content will show up in Arbital Labs feed, but others will be able to see your content if they have a link or if they follow you on Arbital. (You can think of Arbital as Medium or WordPress.) If you would like to do that, let us know as well.
Until we can support a wide array of users, Arbital will not be a suitable replacement for Less Wrong. However, it’s one of our core priorities to implement the features necessary to open the doors to everyone, while not sacrificing content and community quality. if everything goes as planned, my best guess is that at some point LW will be archived and Arbital will become the official replacement. [7]
I’d like to hear your thoughts, both critical and constructive, on everything I covered in this post and anything related.
- ^︎
This is similar in ambition to Google’s mission “to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.” It doesn’t mean we are going to solve the entire problem in one fell swoop, but it does indicate our intent both in terms of the direction and scope.
- ^︎
For example, this manifested on Less Wrong when new users would be told to go read The Sequences. If the concepts were more modular and had canonical explanations, one could instead send a new user to a specific concept they are missing and let them explore from there.
- ^︎
Arbital was originally Eliezer’s idea. The first iteration of Arbital was built directly following his product vision.
- ^︎
Anna played a large role in helping us to explore and transition to the Less Wrong 2.0 product space.
- ^︎
We have raised a modest pre-seed round in 2016 from individual rationalist / EA angel investors, which should last us for a bit while we grow the platform to secure future funding.
- ^︎
It’s also worth noting that our ambition is to grow very very large. Our current best strategy, in a typical B2C startup fashion, is to build a valuable product, get lots of users, and then find a way to monetize the platform.
- ^︎
When and how that happens will be up to LW admins. We’d be happy to assist with porting over the content.
First use of “we” should indicate who “we” are, e.g. “We at Arbital...”
Overall, I think the post covers most of the important points, but I think I’d want to cut some parts.
I’ll try making an outline of what I think the key points are.
I might rephrase this to, “initial target” so it’s clear that it was intended as a step along the path, not that it was our entire vision.
I think this section conflates two things: 1) the role LW used to play, and 2) the role ultimate-Arbital will play.
I think 1 is a subset of 2.
In particular, I don’t think LW had solved the problem you describe here: “If someone wants to catch up on the state of the debate, they either need to get a summary from someone, figure it out as they go along, or catch up by reading the entire discussion.”
soften, perhaps talk about encouraging good epistemic norms, give details/examples so people don’t get scared? no enforcement or require.
Perhaps this could be all in a note, with the only default-viewable thing saying we’re financially stable? Unsure about this one, but my guess is the average reader does not care about the details too much.
The current note feels kinda startup-pitchy, which is probably not a good look here.
Repetition of scope in the note is mildly awkward.
I’d lean towards mostly positives / integrating these two, rather than just negatives we want to avoid (not pure positive either though). Perhaps emphasize that we want a system where the staff are helpful and approachable? And where new people with valuable input are rapidly recognized and their ideas shown to more people?
I’d add a once sentence “this is what it is / why it matters” thing. Perhaps something about efficiently bringing people to to the edge of human understanding?
Discussions should be taggable with multiple domains, so the one place seems not quite right. Keep up with all discussion in any topic?
soften or remove, especially the word dictate. facilitate perhaps?
Links to examples would go great here.
kinda awkwardly worded, could pack more of a punch with some optimization.
Seems ill-fitting with the others, I’d drop this entirely. I doubt anyone who would aggressively exploit bugs will be swayed by it.
Encourage, not demand :), and maybe link to a blog post about why betting is good too?
Something more humble will probably work better, “hope” is a good word here. Deprecated → archived ? And we’d probably want to bulk-import including comments before stepping up as official replacement (“good content” is questionable PR), the work will be in hooking up the sequences and similar to Arbital’s nav features.
eventual and unilateral don’t really fit, and this sentence does not really make sense in general. Community building is hard because humans are messy systems with all sorts of behavioral patterns and complex interactions, not because we need mass adoption. Also, mass readership and mass community involvement are pretty different, we can do okay with a smallish community of awesome people if they’re working well.
In both the notes, “recent pivot”, I’d avoid pivot framing, to go with the whole “we’re building the next part” thing.
Also, the framing of “the final decisions are made by the core team” sounds vaguely power / conflict-y, I’d suggest something more gentle.
And mention Nate as a previous adviser?
Is there any part of Arbital we can put as “hey, want to make this part?” so the community can help push this forward (an external prediction market for bayes points with an API we can use?)? If yes or maybe, maybe saying we’re looking into ways to harness devs who want to help out part time?
Perhaps, it currently feels ambiguous as to whether you’re looking to use volunteers, or just saying you’ve got a good hiring pool.
No. My intention there wasn’t to ask for help, and in fact, I’d prefer to be clear that we don’t need outside help. Right now we are in no position to absorb it well. Perhaps that part should be rewritten?
I’d really want to tell this not as a whole new vision, but as moving onto a different part of an existing vision. We did already have plans for discussion, and the grand experiment to improve human knowledge exchange was there.
I’d tell this story fairly differently. This is not really how I saw math, and presenting it as not-a-failure is pretty important PR-wise. We do have a really good amount of math content, and want to talk about it as a place we got to test out our wiki features and get valuable feedback in a non-controversial domain before moving on to building other parts.
awkwardish, probably best drop functional, and maybe use network of knowledge rather than database?
Hits good points, but awkwardly structured / worded in a few places. I can fix, but would reorganize/rewrite a bunch.
Also worth considering quoting or summarizing one core paragraph, for people who have not read it or want a refresher. Load the things into readers heads :)
Oh, and the greenlink to her post wants a summary.
Needs some cushioning, to avoid setting expectations of not just powerful dictator-staff and arrogant experts. Something showing we want the higher ups to be helpful and awesome, not just powerful and able to suppress bad things.
The structuring feels fairly awkward, I’d rewrite with high-value of X changed to something more human-friendly, and naturally integrated with examples.