The issue is that the content does get written. It just doesn’t find its way here.
Alexandros
Karma: 2,163
I admire your optimism and determination. It’s not my intention to convince you not to try. Even if you don’t succeed, and it’s not impossible that you could succeed, you will certainly get a lot out of it. So take my negativity as a challenge, and prove me wrong :).
Consider the fact that many, many programmers frequent LW. It’s quite likely the majority of members know how to program a computer, and most of them have a very high level of skill. Despite this, contributions to LW’s codebase have been minimal over the life of this website. I take this as extremely strong evidence that the friction to getting any change through is very, very high.
the problem is that these suggestions have orders of magnitude higher cost of implementation. This is further compounded by the fact that 1. LW uses a fork of the reddit codebase, which was not built with modification in mind, and 2. the fact that the owners of LW are (a) hard to engage in a conversation about changes and (b) even harder to get them to actually apply it.
The suggestion I made above suffers from none of these, and is technically implementable in a weekend (tops) by a single developer—me. Whether it will be successful or not is a different story.
All in all I share your sense that this community is not nearly as optimally organised as it could to be, given the subject matter. Unfortunately we seem stuck in a local maxima of organisation.
I have spent a fair amount of time thinking about this. Fundamentally in order to discuss improvements, it’s necessary to identify the sources of pain. The largest problem (and/or existential threat) I can see with LW is its stagnation/decline, both in content, and in new insights generated here.
Charitably, I suspect LW was built with the assumption that it would always have great content coming in, so the target and focus of most design decisions, policies, implied norms, and ad hoc decisions (let’s call all these ‘constraints’) was to restrict bad content. Even its name can be thought to point to this principle, but the infamous ‘Well kept gardens’ post is also a good pointer. Unfortunately, the side effects of these constraints plus the community as shaped these constraints has been to push out most of the best authors in the community, including the earliest active members, who have spiraled in many different directions, while being nominally still affiliated with LW and/or it’s community. As a result, LW itself is a shadow of its former self. Currently, the community is in a process of concentrating in other venues, with Slate Star Codex probably having more comments/day than LW itself, and SSC is not the only alternate venue.
With the above problem statement in mind, the best ROI for a developer wanting to improve the experience of the broader LW community I can find, is to set up a Hacker News clone (e.g. an instance of telesc.pe) aimed at the issues the LW community cares about.
Having a central location that aggregates worthy content from LW, SSC, OB, the MIRI blog, most other rationlist-sphere blogs, plus an equal amount of content from the rest of the web that is of rationalist interest, collectively filtered by the community, would make my experience of the LW-sphere much, much better, and I suspect I am pretty typical in this regard.
The aggregator not being under MIRI/LW control would probably be a net positive, given the history of management of LW itself. The point would not be to replace the things LW does well (giving a venue for people to post relevant material), but to replace the things it does not do well (aggregating the wider rationality community, filtering quality in a quasi-democratic way)
The major problem for such an aggregator would of course be lack of adoption, so I would like to hear from other LW members if such a move would interest them. I am committing to set this up if convinced that there is indeed enough interest. I have provisionally bought distributedconspiracy.com for this purpose.
I wonder to what degree ‘follow your dreams’ is a counterbalance to Dunning-Kruger. I.e. the people that should follow their dreams are likely to underestimate themselves, so a general ‘go for it against the odds’ climate might be just enough to push them to actually follow through. This would still leave the less skilled to suffer in following dreams they can’t succeed at, but there should be some thought as to whether the end result is positive for humanity-in-general or not.
There is also something to be said that some times the people that should follow their dreams are not apparent, and you only figure out they “had it in them” if indeed they go through the process of actually pushing through and improving themselves for it. This is why investment (and hiring) is so hard. All of a person’s history isn’t enough to tell you whether they will succeed in a new environment. You can select for an unbroken string of success, but that still leaves a huge amount of false negatives. Again, this lends credence as to whether it is better for humanity-in-general to contain the ‘follow your dreams’ meme.
And of course there is the related thought that the success cases of following your dreams might be wider than actually succeeding at them. In that case, following your dreams pushes you to strive for excellence, and that will push you to develop conscientiousness, a positive attitude towards learning, potentially improve your degree of agency. These characteristics are extremely valuable in many roles. Following something more conventional might not have motivated you enough to actually mould yourself into a more fierce agent. If this last thought is true, following your dreams, even in zero-sum games, might me a positive-sum game when looked at with a wide enough lens.
and of course this is another case of ‘just because you hired the top 1% of the CVs you got, doesn’t mean that those you hired are in the top 1% of programmers’. Less good programmers are more often looking for a job.
Is there a name for this pattern?
funnily enough this list translates pretty well in the context of a whole business or organisation. great work!
The bay is where it’s at for the kind of thing I want to do. The amount and seniority of people I spoke to face-to-face in 2 months in SF I didn’t speak to in 3 years in London. San Francisco is a city so dense with developers and startup folk that New Relic feels comfortable paying for poster ads on the street. Being where the density of talent is, is a no-brainer. Besides that, the money is there, the partners are there, and the developer thought leaders are mostly there. It’s kind of hard to make a case for being anywhere else, really. Plus, it’s a pretty awesome area to live in, on the balance.
I spent the last two months in the valley away from my team and close ones. Pitched my startup to several investors big and small. I had to learn the game and the local culture on the fly. I went through insane ups and downs while keeping it together (mostly).
In the end I returned with signed a term sheet with one of the biggest funds in the valley for about 2.5x the amount I was looking for. This quadruples the value of our shares from our last round in September. Assuming term sheet converts to money in the bank, me and my team will be moving to the bay in the next 6 months with enough backing to take a proper shot at building a huge company. And now, to actually get some work done :)
Complaint isn’t actually a high enough barrier. If I had a waiter serve me breakfast every morning in bed, and suddenly I had to go to the kitchen for it, you bet I’d complain. The question is, would people not visit links based on the title alone?
In any case, I’ve explained this enough times that I think I’ve done as much as I could have. I’ll just leave it at this.
All I’m saying is that we have a supply problem, and you’re raising a demand issue. Also, the issue you’re raising is based on an anecdote that seems sufficiently niche as to not be worth the tradeoff (i.e. not solving the supply issue). If you have evidence of generality of the demand for summaries, I’d like to see it.
But what does it matter if 1% of all links that should end up here, actually do? Hacker news is a proven model, people not clicking without summaries isn’t an issue.
And growth in status of the survey.
I was, for a period, a major submitter of links to Hacker News. The process for doing that with the bookmarklet they provide is literally two clicks and 10 seconds. How many of each is it for LW today?
That’s the problem. Posting a summary is a trivial (or not so trivial) inconvenience.
posts per month, upvotes per month. (i understand score is positive minus negative, but it cancels out). potentially comments per month too, but I didn’t fetch that data. substitute month for your preferred granularity of course.
but if we’re talking startups, I’d probably look at where the money is and go there. Can this be applied to groups of traders? c-level executives? medical teams? maybe some other target group are both flush with cash and early adopters of new tech?
whatever team state matters. maybe online/offline, maybe emotional states, maybe doing biofeedback (hormones? alpha waves?) but cross-team. maybe just ‘how many production bugs we’ve had this week’.
I don’t know, I haven’t done the effort estimation. It just looks like more than I’d be willing to put in.
One hypothesis is that LessWrong.com is a low priority item to them, but they like having it around, so they are averse to putting in the required amount of thought to evaluate a change, and inclined to leave things as they are.
I think it is unlikely it will have as much benefit as you expect, and that the pain will be bigger than you expect. However, if you add the fact that your drive may help you learn to program, then the ROI tips the other way massively.
By the way, an alternative explanation for the fact that so many developers are here but so few (or none) actually contribute to LW code, is that they’re busy making lots of money or working on other things they find exciting. This is good news for you, because making the changes may be easier than I originally estimated. As long as you are determined enough.