Ideas on growth of the community

1) A crazy idea -- how about creating a "welcoming committee"; a group of people who would offer to spend some of their time welcoming the new LW members personally (on Skype). They would be volunteers who see the community aspect of LW as important, but also would have to be accepted by the LW vote as representatives of the community (instead of e.g. people who have incompatible ideas, and try to abuse LW for spreading their personal goals).

Now every new user would have an opportunity (and be encouraged) to request e.g. two 10-minutes talks with two members of the "welcoming committee". The new user would provide a short introduction about themselves (hobbies, what do they expect from LW), and the committee would contact them and have a talk. There would be an (unenforceable) expectation that in return, the new user will write an article on LW, and generally, start being active in the community, if they are compatible with the community.

2) A part of the impression of LW decay could be an artifact of how article publishing works here. The popularity of an author grows gradually, but when a well-known author leaves, it is visible. If we imagine the article quality graph, it could be a curve with a lot of small growth (which we don't notice) and an occasional sharp drop (noticed by many).

For example, someone new would come, post an article in Discussion with 5 karma, a month later another with 15 karma, yet a month later an article with 30 karma would get to Main, then five more articles in Main... and then the person would decide to start their own blog. What would be our impression of this whole process? Probably that LW is getting worse than before, because yet another important author has left. (We wouldn't contrast the end situation with what was before the author came to LW.)

3) Related to recent article by Robin Hanson and the discussion below it: people often don't read sources for information per se, but for information useful socially. For example, if you could read two articles in a newspaper, equally useful, but one published today and another published a year ago, you would prefer to read the article written today, because then you can go out and have a debate with people about it.

Analogically, LessWrong became "old news". The great old articles (from Sequences, but also by Yvain, lukeprog, etc.) are old. Reading them now for the first time is lower-status than having them read when they were published. MIRI and CFAR themselves are "old news"; they exist, just like they have existed years before. There is no new exciting topic for the new readers. It is like joining an already huge pyramid scheme at the bottom.

This could potentially be helped by creating sub-communities on LW. The new members were not here when LW started, but they can still participate at starting some subgroup, and get status there. (Similarly how people who start a local LW meetup can get high status for that.)

One more rarely mentioned thing.

There is an expression (mostly in business): "take ownership of a problem". If you take ownership of an issue, it is now yours -- you're responsible for it, it's up to you to find ways to deal with it, fix it, keep working whatever needs to be working, etc. You cannot say "not my problem, somebody else will fix it" any more.

No one "owns" LW.

The biggest problem as I see it is loss of members and lack of talented new ones. I'm willing to bet if you plotted the histogram of user activity, you'd see virtually all of the posts and comments coming from a very small number of members. The 'Top Contributors' section in the side panel probably contains most of them, and has been relatively stable in composition over the past two years. If the first step in instrumental rationality is to identify reality in an objective way, then we have to realize this site has become an echo chamber for a small few, with their own vocabulary and system of thought which is incompatible with the outside world. The barriers to entry (reading the sequences, reading the 'seminal' comment threads, etc.) are too high for most people. HPMOR offers a pathway for new members to start reading the rationality materials, but it doesn't equip them to meaningfully contribute.

Another thing is that there is only so much 'low-hanging fruit' lying around. In terms of general rationality, we've covered most everything. There are only so many threads you can have about biases and logical inconsistencies. The topic has become quite stale.

I like AI because at least it offers the possibility for new material to arise every once in a while, leading to useful discussions. Other people might like other topics. I have a huge list of topics whose implications are quite relevant to the art of rationality and so would be quite compatible with the goals of this site:

• Thermodynamics
• Neuroscience
• Neural Networks
• Social organization & Forms of government
• Human sexual dynamics

The problem is, the types of people likely to be knowledgeable about these things probably have no idea this site exists. And if they do it is unreasonable to expect them to learn the required information to be 'on the same page' as this site's core users. And this is very bad, because it means that this site's users will attempt to foray into these topics themselves without any help from actual experts.

I don't know what the solution is. Maybe it's already too late to do anything.

One problem as I see it is that Self-help as a community driven thing never really took off here. I think a big reason why is the perceived high bar to post quality. Self-help involves engaging with lots of idle weird ideas that don't work out before you hit on something useful. I'll also note that most of the online communities that really seem to be "communities" have an off-topic area that attracts a lot of posts where people feel free to be more casual. When brought up in the context of LW people point to the IRC chatroom, but that is a very different type of interaction.

Before wanting to grow "the community" it makes sense to ask what "the community" happens to be. You can count Scott's blog into the community or you can decide that the community is only what's branded as LW.

This community is some kind of organization, and it has a goal. To be precise, it probably has two goals, as I see it: to make existing members more rational to get more members.

I wouldn't consider that to be the main goals.

For me one of the most important goals is developing the "art of rationality". A lot of discussion on LW is not about simply applying existing techniques of how to be rational but to develop new concepts. A while ago someone complained that he read a LW post about how to estimate whether a woman will say yes when asked out for a date as probability.

If you think the goal is effective action, there are a lot of reasons why that's not a good way to approach the subject of asking out a woman. If you on the other hand care about how probability estimates are made in emotionally charged real life situations the inquiry is a lot more interesting.

When it comes to gathering new members quality is more important than quantity. At our Berlin LW meetup we could trivially increase the attendance by putting it on meetup.com. We don't and as a result have a meetup with the kind of people who find the event without having to check meetup.

I would STRONGLY encourage new topics

So, what's stopping you from posting new topics yourself?

I'd also like to see targeted interaction and outreach to the academic research community.

GiveWell has a good model of validating and checking intuitions against prominent people in development, but seems to opt for public intellectuals over less famous experts in the field who's thinking those public intellectuals may defer to. In the EA community, I feel this has lead to such confidence in deworming, when deworming is actually one of if not the most controversial topics in academic impact evaluation (nicknamed worm wars. And DALY's are the pariah outside of specific subcommunities of impact analysis looking to the future, not immediate use.

There may be many similar misunderstandings in the rationality community which are taken for granted. But unlike the EA community, the rationalist community seems to be less transparent. MIRI technical research agenda is still secret, amongst other things..

By contrasts, I can go on GiveWell, which in some ways isn't part of the EA community so much as the inspiration for it, and see how they think they think and motivating influences cleanly laid out, without even going into their methodology. Be warmed, ordinary readers, I'm playing the critic here. MIRI is much more technically complicated that GiveWell, I'm just trying to give criticism to be constructive. Path dependence and novelty of MIRI's agenda, amongst other things, are obvious barriers to doing things the EA way in the rationalist community.

Btw, I think you've misspelled 'community'. Some members of the community seem really neurotic about that sort of thing and it would be shame if you were downvoted or missed upvotes for something as trivial as that.

I think it is important to answer why people go to LessWrong and whether it is perceived to be primarily a place where you go to improve one's rationality that happens to be an internet forum, or an internet forum where you can read interesting things, such as rationality (I think that experiencing an intellectual journey is somewhere in between, but probably closer to the latter). Because there are a lot of large forums where you can read a lot of interesting things - for example, r/askscience and r/askhistorians have hundreds of thousands subscribers and a lot of contributors who produce huge quantities of interesting content.

A place where people go to improve their rationality can take many forms. It doesn't even have to be a blog, a forum, or a wiki. If I allowed myself to be a bit starry-eyed, I would say, that it would be really interesting, if, for example, LessWrong had its own integrated Good Judgement Project. Or if LW had its own karma (or cryptocurrency) denominated prediction markets. Of course, ideas like these would require a lot of effort to implement.

I made a post recently that Less Wrong Lacks Direction that seems very similar to point 3. Less Wrong has moderation, but it doesn't have leadership. There is almost no concerted group action. Everyone has their own ideas of what Less Wrong needs to do next, and they are all different.

I think Why our kind can't co-operate is an excellent article. Whenever you post an idea, you might get a few upvotes, but you'll also get a lot of comments saying that something else is a better idea instead.

The reason why Less Wrong is getting less readers is because Less Wrong has much less content. Either 1) we need someone crazy like Scott Alexander who will solo producing huge amounts of content 2) we need some way to encourage the posting of new content. The ability to create separate sections of Less Wrong would be a great way to increase the amount of content posted. The programming wouldn't even be that hard, the issue is that the moderators still haven't commented on whether they'd turn it on if someone went out and did it.

I'd also like to see targeted interaction and outreach to the academic research community.

GiveWell has a good model of validating and checking intuitions against prominent people in development, but seems to opt for public intellectuals over less famous experts in the field who's thinking those public intellectuals may defer to. In the EA community, I feel this has lead to such confidence in deworming, when deworming is actually one of if not the most controversial topics in academic impact evaluation (nicknamed worm wars. And DALY's are the pariah outside of specific subcommunities of impact analysis looking to the future, not immediate use.

There may be many similar misunderstandings in the rationality community which are taken for granted. But unlike the EA community, the rationalist community seems to be less transparent. MIRI technical research agenda is still secret, amongst other things..

By contrasts, I can go on GiveWell, which in some ways isn't part of the EA community so much as the inspiration for it, and see how they think they think and reason to be skeptical about charity cleanly laid out, without even going into their methodology. Be warmed, ordinary readers, I'm playing the critic here. MIRI is much more technically complicated that GiveWell, I'm just trying to give criticism to be constructive. Path dependence and novelty of MIRI's agenda, amongst other things, are obvious barriers to doing things the EA way in the rationalist community.

Btw, I think you've misspelled 'community'. Some members of the community seem really neurotic about that sort of thing and it would be shame if you were downvoted or missed upvotes for something as trivial as that.

I am a lazy and selfish person. I want to get more rational myself, but I don't want to put any effort into helping others become more rational.