Open Problems in Archipelago

In a broader sense, I do kind of feel like from a UI and culture perspective, we never really gave the Archipelago stuff a real shot. I do think we should make a small update that the problem can't just be solved by giving a bunch of people moderation power and allowing them to set their own guidelines, but I think I already modeled the problem as pretty difficult and so this isn't a major update.

We did end up implementing the AI Alignment Forum, which I do actually think is working pretty well and is a pretty good example of how I imagine Archipelago-like stuff to play out. We now also have both the EA Forum and LessWrong creating some more archipelago-like diversity in the online-forum space.

That said, I don't actually think this should be our top priority, though the last few weeks have updated me more towards a bunch of problems in this space being things we need to start tackling again soon. My current model is that the top priority should be more about establishing the latter stages of the intellectual progress funnel with stuff like Q&A, and that some of those things are actually more likely to solve a lot of the things that the Archipelago was trying to solve (as an example, I expect spaces oriented around a question to generate less conflict-heavy discussions, which I expect will make people more interested in writing up their ideas publicly. I also expect questions to more naturally give rise to conversations oriented around some concrete outcome, which I also expect to create a more focused atmosphere and support more archipelago-like conversations)

As someone who was inspired by your post from a year ago, and who was thinking of contributing to LessWrong as a public archipelago, here are some things that stopped me from contributing much. Maybe other people have these things in common with me and why they wanted to but failed to contribute in the last year.

1. There is less interest in the rationality community for the things I would be interested in writing about on LessWrong, or the rationality community is actively disinterested in things I am interested in writing about. This demotivates me to post on LW. I am in private group chats and closed Facebook groups largely populated by members of the rationalist diaspora. These discussions don't take place on LessWrong, not only because there might be relatively few people who would participate in LessWrong, but because they're discussions of subjects the rationality community is seen as hostile, indifferent, or disinterested in, such as many branches of philosophy. This discourages these discussions on the public archipelago. I expect there is a lot of people who don't post on LessWrong because they share this kind of perception. It's possible to find people with whom to have private discussions, but having them be on a public archipelago on LW, it if was possible to satisfy people, would make it easier and better from my viewpoint.

2. One particular worry I and others have is that, as in mainstream culture more and more things become politicized, more and more types of conversations on LW would be discouraged as 'politically mindkilling.' I personally wouldn't know what to expect as what the norms are here, though I am not as worried as others because I don't see it as much of a loss for there to be fewer half-baked speculations on political subjects online. A fear that the list of subjects discouraged as being too overtly 'political' could endlessly grow is discouraging.

3. The number of people who are interested in the subjects I am interested in on LessWrong is too small to motivate me to write more. I haven't explored this as much, and I think I have been too lazy in not trying. Yet a decent quantity of feedback, of sufficiently engaging and deep quality, seems like to me what would motivate I know to participate more on LW. One possibility is getting people I find who are not currently part of the rationality community, or a typical LW user, to read my posts on LW, and build something new out of it. I think this is fine to talk about, and I really agree with the shift since LW2.0 to develop LW as its own thing, still working with but distinct and independent from MIRI and AI alignment, CFAR, and the rationality community. So cleaving new online spaces on LW, which maybe can be especially tailored due to how much control I have over my own posts as a user, is something I am still open to trying.

We give authors with 2000 karma the ability to delete comments and ban users, but this is rarely used, because it requires someone who is both willing to moderator and who can write well.

Well… there’s also the fact that the UI gives absolutely no indication of any this.

In fact, after I read this line in your post (and vaguely remembered hearing about this before), I went over to LW, logged in, and tried to figure out how I would delete a comment. I… did not have any success. I haven’t the faintest idea how I’d delete someone’s comment, or how I’d know if I can, or… anything.

I think I figured out how to ban a user: by entering their name into the “Banned Users (All)” field on my account settings page. Is that right? (There was no tooltip or explanatory label or anything, so I can’t be sure…) If so, that’s extremely counterintuitive.

(By the way, I couldn’t even figure out how to delete one of my own comments. What am I missing…?)

There is still the whole off-topic/on-topic thing that lots of people were excited about in the Archipelago thread. That still seems like plausibly a good idea to me.

I'm very optimistic about sub-reddits - there are many examples such as AskPhilosophy, ChangeMyView and Slatestarcodex that demonstrate how powerful they can be. One major advantage of LW vs. Reddit is that it draws users from a different demographic. LW users are much less likely to stir up trouble or post low quality comment, so there'll probably be minimal work policing boundaries.