LessWrong 2.0 Reader

The title is strong with this one. I like it.

I wish there were more discussion posts on LessWrong.

Right now it feels like it weakly if not moderately violates some sort of cultural norm to publish a discussion post (similar but to a lesser extent on the Shortform). Something low effort of the form "X is a topic I'd like to discuss. A, B and C are a few initial thoughts I have about it. Thoughts?"

It seems to me like something we should encourage though. Here's how I'm thinking about it. Such "discussion posts" currently happen informally in social circles. Maybe you'll text a friend. Maybe you'll bring it up at a meetup. Maybe you'll post about it in a private Slack group.

But if it's appropriate in those contexts, why shouldn't it be appropriate on LessWrong? Why not benefit from having it be visible to more people? The more eyes you get on it, the better the chance someone has something helpful, insightful, or just generally useful to contribute.

The big downside I see is that it would screw up the post feed. Like when you go to lesswrong.com and see the list of posts, you don't want that list to have a bunch of low quality discussion posts you're not interested in. You don't want to spend time and energy sifting through the noise to find the signal.

But this is easily solved with filters. Authors could mark/categorize/tag their posts as being a low-effort discussion post, and people who don't want to see such posts in their feed can apply a filter to filter these discussion posts out.

The LessWrong Review [? · GW] runs every year to select the posts that have most stood the test of time. This post is not yet eligible for review, but will be at the end of 2024. The top fifty or so posts are featured prominently on the site throughout the year. Will this post make the top fifty?

It definitely should not move by anything like a Brownian motion process. At the very least it should be bursty and updates should be expected to be very non-uniform in magnitude.

In practice, you should not consciously update very often since almost all updates will be of insignificant magnitude on near-irrelevant information. I expect that much of the credence weight turns on unknown unknowns, which can't really be updated on at all until something turns them into (at least) known unknowns.

But sure, if you were a superintelligence with practically unbounded rationality then you might in principle update very frequently.

Thanks! Glad you are enjoying it.

Thanks, appreciate it.

It is not cheap. It's around ~$20 per hour of audio. Luckily there are people on bord with this project who help cover cost through a Patreon

Thanks so much! Glad you are enjoying the audio format. I really agree this story is worth "reading" in some form, it's why I'm working on this project.

Yes! There are RSS feeds for Planecrash, Luminosity, Animorphs and the article feed.

To be honest, I downplayed much of my situation in my post. After all, it is my first post. I have contributed nothing to this community so far. I feel it's irresponsible and sort of entitled to hose people down with the full weight of my very negative and emotionally draining circumstances as an introductory post. It's not charming. I kept thinking, while writing this post, "do I really want this to be the first thing I say to these people?" I respect this community more than any other one and understand that it can only absorb so many posts that essentially "take" (or seek to take) more than they offer before the quality standards that set LW apart begin to suffer. I feel a sense of duty to be an interesting conversationalist and add value here, and I hate to be tiresome.

I posted anyway for a couple reasons. For one thing, I have read LW for years. It nourishes something in me that I don't get anywhere else in my life - the inquisitive, slow-thinking, human-oriented, analytical, diplomatic part of me that I am constantly forced by my life circumstances to suppress in view of the fact that these qualities are considered unfortunate in the world I inhabit.

In other words, I feel very strongly that I "belong" here and can therefore justify asking the community to afford me the luxury of venting and soliciting its assistance without tweaking people's noses too much. I feel like I can signal in-group membership and long-standing familiarity with LW strongly enough to justify doing this, because it really is my respect for this community's collective excellence that sets it apart for me as the ideal place to seek advice and insight.

I also figure this could be useful to someone else at some point, so it may also pull its weight in that sense.

But yes, you're right. There's more to my circumstances. Of course there is. They're much worse than I can justify disclosing.

Reaching out to startups on sites like ycombinator is a great idea. It never occurred to me to market to them. Thank you for suggesting it. Your consideration means a lot to me.