Revitalizing Less Wrong seems like a lost purpose, but here are some other ideas

Well, this is discouraging to someone who had the opposite reaction to ingres' recent survey analysis. I heard, "Try to solve the object-level problem and create content that meets the desiderata that are implicit in the survey results."

I was going to start writing about feelings-as-information theory; Kaj Sotala introduced moods as information in Avoid misinterpreting your emotions, lukeprog mentions it briefly in When Intuitions Are Useful (which Wei Dai thought might be relevant to metaphilosophy), and gwern mentions related work on processing fluency here. There are simple but interesting twists on classic, already-simple heuristics and biases experiments that everyone here's familiar with, debiasing implications, stuff about aesthetics, stuff on how we switch between Type 1 and Type 2 processing, which is relevant to the stuff lukeprog was getting into with Project guide: How IQ predicts metacognition and philosophical success, and what Kaj Sotala was getting into with his summaries of Stanovich's What Intelligence Tests Miss.

I was just about to write another post about how thinking of too many alternative outcomes to historical events can actually make hindsight bias worse, with explanations of the experimental evidence, like my most recent post. I don't know how to do more for the audience than do things like warn them about how debiasing hindsight can backfire.

And there's other stuff I could think to write about after all of that.

There are quite a number of people coordinating to fulfill the goal of revitalizing LW, and I wonder if something like this couldn't have waited. I mean, everyone just told everyone exactly what everyone's doing wrong.

(I've mostly only skimmed.)

It can be hard to find good content in the diaspora. Possible solution: Weekly "diaspora roundup" posts to Less Wrong. I'm too busy to do this, but anyone else is more than welcome to (assuming both people reading LW and people in the diaspora want it).

This is what /r/RationalistDiaspora was intended to do. It never really got traction, and is basically dead now, but it still strikes me as a good solution. If that's not going to revive though, I agree that a weekly thread on LW is worth trying. By default, I'll make one later this week. (I'm not currently sure I'll have anything to post in it myself, I'll be asking people to post links in the comments.)

Go tell Scott Alexander you'll build an online forum to his specification, with SSC community feedback, to provide a better solution for his overflowing open threads.

He tried to move people to /r/SlateStarCodex, but that didn't work. We'd want to understand why. (Some hypotheses: it wasn't actually on SSC, where people go directly; posts there don't pop up in their RSS readers; people have an aversion to comment systems with voting; people have an aversion to reddit specifically.)

As Scott features more and more posts, he gains a moderation team full of people who wrote posts that were good enough to feature.

I'm not sure that "writes good posts" and "would make a good moderator" are sufficiently correlated for this to work. A lot of people like Eliezer's writing but dislike his approach to moderation.

(On the other hand: maybe, if we want Eliezers to stick around, we need them to be able to shape the community? Even if that means upsetting people who don't write much.)

It also creates weird incentives, like: "I liked this post that was highly critical of our community, but I don't want the author to be a mod". (This is the problem that Scott Aa points to of "this system can only improve on ordinary democracy if the trust network has some other purpose" - I worry that voting-for-comment-scores isn't a sufficiently strong purpose to outweigh voting-for-moderators.)

Another system to consider would be to do it based on the way people administer votes, not the way they remove them. If your votes tend to correlate with others', they have more weight in future. If posts you flag tend to get removed, your flags count for more. (I'm not convinced that this works either.)

I'm writing this from Less Wrong 2.0.

If you've got a great idea for a blog post, and you don't already have an online presence, it's a bit hard to reach lots of people, if that's what you want to do.

I don't know what Less Wrong 1.0 was like but I feel like Less Wrong 2.0 accomplishes this.

If we had a good system for incentivizing people to write great stuff (as opposed to merely tolerating great stuff the way LW culture historically has), we'd get more great stuff written.

Once again, I don't know what Less Wrong 1.0 was like, but I think Less Wrong 2.0 does a good job of this without incentivizing too much.

Excellent post. Agree with all major points.

I think Less Wrong experienced the reverse of the evaporative cooling EY feared, where people gradually left the arena as the proportional number of critics in the stands grew ever larger.

I'd think it was primarily not the proportional number of critics, but lower quality of criticism and great users getting tired of replying to/downvoting it. Most of the old crowd of lesswrongers welcomed well thought out criticism, but when people on the other side of an inferential distance gap try to imitate those high-criticism norms it is annoying to deal with, so they end up leaving. Especially if the lower quality users are loud and more willing to use downvotes as punishment for things they don't understand.

Try to solve the same sort of problems Arbital or Metaculus is optimizing for. No reason to step on the toes of other projects in the community.

I don't think that it's bad to have multiple website that gather predictions. It's good to have different websites trying different approaches.

Metaculus has curated questions. Users can suggest new questions but they have to get chosen. Predictionbook allows user suggested questions. GJOpen is completly curated without much ways of users to suggest question (expect a bit, see the recent question for new questions) Metaculus starts by showing the user the average guesses of the community before the user votes.

Metaculus let's the user pick probabilities with a sliding scale. Predictionbook lets the user input a number. GJOpen let's the user click two times (you click first on 10-19 and then on 14).

All three try to score users differently.

I would welcome more experimentation.

Hey, everyone! Author of rationalfiction.io here.

I am actively building and improving our website, and I would be happy to offer it as a new platform for LW community, if there's interest.

I can take care of the hosting, and build all the necessary features.

I've been thinking about creating a LW-like website for a while now, but I wasn't sure that it will work. After reading this post I have decided that I'm going launch and see where it goes.

If there's any ideas or suggestions about how such platform can be improved or what features we'll need - let's discuss them.

By the way, the platform is open source(though I will probably fork it as a separate project and develop it in a new repo).

It's hard to know for sure, since previous surveys were only advertised on the LessWrong.com domain, but it doesn't seem like the diaspora thing has slowed the growth of the community a ton and it may have dramatically accelerated it.

My impression is that a big part of the increase in survey responses was that this was explicitly advertised as a diaspora survey, with a number of people saying things like "if you're reading this, it's for you."

Nice ideas! I think you highlighted well the fundamental problem of lack of social rewards for writing content for LW, and having strong criticism for doing so.

Regarding changing things, I think it makes sense to work with people like Scott who have a lot of credibility, and figure out what would work for them.

However, it also seems that LW itself has a certain brand, and attracts a sizable community. I would like to see a version of the voting system you described implemented here, with people who have more karma having votes that weigh more. I'd also like to see some cross-posting of content from Scott and others on LW itself.

So not doing away with LW as it exists, but expanding it in collaboration with others who would be interested in revitalizing a different form of LW. One where authors get appropriate credit for posting, with credible people - those who have lots of karma - being able to upvote them more.

I am honored that my survey writeup produced this level of quality discussion and endorse this post.

(Though not necessarily its proposed upvote scheme, sounds kind of flaky to me. I'm personally very skeptical of upvotes and community curation as cure-alls.)

The incentives are currently a major problem. Looking at my posting history, my most upvoted posts are all light and fluffy things.

Try to tackle a difficult and controversial problem and you'll find it very hard to get upvotes, because these will mostly be balanced out by downvotes from people who strongly believe in the opposite.

How about just reposting the sequences? One a week. Plenty of quality material.

I don't know if it was in the comments of here or an SSC post, but when talking about the rationalist diaspora and where the community goes from here, Scott has said he would welcome blog posts from guest authors, and mentioned several people he'd be willing to have on the site, or had already invited to make a guest post. Naturally, the guest authors he mentioned were already once-prominent LW bloggers--I forget who he mentioned besides Eliezer, who declined, but there were almost a dozen others. Scott's writing is so impressive I wouldn't be surprised if even some of his close friends, our friends, who hundreds of us think are often writers just as good or sometimes better than Scott, are personally too intimidated to post on SSC.

Well, that's one hypothesis. Sometimes posts are so top-notch on SSC guest authors might feel they're not up to snuff. Another hypothesis is that, for prominent authors, LW was a forum which exhausted all the low-hanging fruit, and wasn't receptive to juicier, edgier, topics, like the culture and politics Scott writes about. However, with that level of exposure on a personal blog, writing on more controversial topics, earns a lot more scrutiny. SSC isn't without its share of contentious posts. Maybe all that politicking, having the patience to grit your teeth and exercise the principle of charity in the face of hundreds of commentators, is a skill Scott has that's harder for the rest of us to hack. Maybe other diaspora authors know this, and don't think they can thrust themselves into the spotlight without getting burned out.

I think if the LW/rationalist community made an effort to publicly laud the authors of various blogs we like, they'd feel like it's more worth the effort if respected readers want more. I don't know if that'll work. However, I know that if there was a thread were dozens of people were commenting that they liked my blog, even though they usually didn't speak up about it, and that each of those comments had dozens of upvotes or whatnot, I'd be more inclined to write.

Where can I find the CFAR mailing list you mentioned?

Two questions:

1. Can anyone who is a user for a significant amount of time give links to anything that wasn't deemed worhy of the sequences but is a worthy read? I have no idea when the sequences were collected but if LW was really great in the past, there would've been a bunch of other high-quality posts that are easily missed. This could also double as proof that LW was, indeed, as great as advertised.

2. What do other places have that LW doesn't? If LW is dedicated to human rationality, is it truly doing that?

3. Am I a complete dumbass for typing this? In hindsight, it doesn't take a special variation of Godwin's law to think 'someone probably posted a similar question before'.