LessWrong could grow a lot, but we're doing it wrong.

When I first joined, I barely commented, because I felt it would inexcusably lower the average comment quality. I still refrain on topics which I’m interested, but not competent in; but for the last 18 months or so I’ve felt more comfortable with the vector my comments apply to the site average.

Separately, I generally agree with Will Newsome about the high quality of your contributions.

This was my biggest fear in joining this community; I did not want to be the clueless kid who forced the grown-ups to humor her. I'm quite new, so I don't know how accurate this is, but I must say that the oldest comments on Overcoming Bias (around 2007-2008) were actually of a much lower quality than the 2009-2010 comments on Less Wrong. Maybe it was because OB, being sponsored by Oxford, had a higher rate of drive-by trolling?

As far as I can tell, Less Wrong is still intimidating enough to deter well-meaning newcomers from saying too much, although nothing but boredom kills trolls. Still, anything that increases traffic will pull quality of discourse toward the mean, unless we can somehow accomplish the miraculous task of bringing newcomers up to the LW mean.

Is there a way to quickly bring people up to speed on the spirit of the law, rather than just the letter of the law? Is there a way to make people want to display their curiosity, their ability to admit mistakes, their thick-skinned, careful consideration of criticism? Saying “I was wrong,” “Thanks for explaining my mistake,” “I’m confused,” etc is a sign of status among more established Less Wrong members (admittedly, the mistakes made shouldn’t be too elementary, and it definitely helps if you’re high status already). How do we get newcomers to care about this particular measure of status from the get-go?

Make It Stick gives us a simple heuristic for getting ideas to burrow in people's heads and inspire them to action: Simple, Unexpected, Concrete, Credible, Emotional, Story.

This says to me that we need to distill the spirit of truth-seeking and truth-speaking into something with the emotional resonance of a proverb - while avoiding the creepy cult vibe that the overtly religious phrasing of the Sequences tends to bring about. We then need to display this short credo prominently on the front page.

Our current main page is a flood of information. I think it's quite elegantly designed, but the problem with the word "rationality" is that everyone uses it and everyone thinks they know what it means.

Maybe the front page should have a prominent "New? Start Here" button, which could be used to distill the intellectual culture of this place in an easy-to-swallow nugget. I would have definitely found that helpful.

The pursuit of rationality has to have emotional significance; emotions and values are like hooks onto which ideas can cling. We might be able to reduce the problem of newcomers diluting the culture if we focus on instilling the (honest) emotions we ourselves feel around the subject.

Unfortunately, I see lots of way for this to go wrong in a Dark Arts, manipulative kind of way, but the Sequences, for one, managed to get emotion right for the most part.

Have you adjusted for the likely event that you have become more rational, and what you have actually observed may have been LW becoming at a lower level relative to you, whilst staying relatively flat or even improving?

I was thinking the same, but I don't know how to convince myself that there has been a clear decline or a markedly improved past state. My take is that LW has always had problems with user-generated content measuring up to the blog content core of the site. I don't think I followed the forum that closely during the first year or so after the OB age, and the conversation in the pre-LW OB comment system often seemed pretty dismal to me.

This sounds plausible, but it also sounds like something I'd expect at least one old timer to feel even if it isn't true. Furthermore, I've read many of the comments on the sequences, and they don't seem to support this hypothesis. Can you provide any specific evidence?

And disabling new account creation for the duration of the attention.

(All that said though, HN regulars seem to often complain about the decline of Hacker News, how it is turning in to Reddit. (I'm in no position to judge if these complains are valid.))

Yes, with the caveat that a person who is captivated by the front page eventually deciding that LW is not for them is not as big a deal as a person who would like participating walking away upon seeing the front page: the former just wastes a couple of hours and is disappointed, the latter misses out the chance of finding valuable stuff and becoming a valuable contributor.

We don't have to attract everyone. We should just make sure that the main page does not send away people who would have stayed if they were exposed to some other LW stuff instead.

That's a good point. However, I think there is not much we can do about it by refining the main page. More precisely, I doubt that even a remotely interested in rationality and intelligent person can leave "a community blog devoted to refining the art of human rationality" without at least taking a look at some of the blog posts, irrespective of the contents of the main page itself. We all know examples of internet sites with poor design, but great information content.

So the question of refining the main page, I think, really comes down to selecting the right articles for the Recent Promoted Articles and Featured Articles sections. The rest is already there.

One distinction between criticism and mere insult is that a criticism always has a chance of helping the person criticized, by explaining a specific problem and thereby suggesting an avenue of improvement.

I downvoted your reply, which was not a criticism.

I translated his joke as "Optimizing for minimal bounce rate is an oversimplified goal, which could interfere with more important goals unless they are given more consideration." That seemed helpful and thoughtful enough to me.

I agree that there's a lot of annoyance for both the new user and old users when new people join. A new user orientation is needed. That's why I wrote an outline for a New User Orientation full of suggestions that I personally would like to see included in the new user orientation. Please go and critique it - older members are surely going to have suggestions I wouldn't think of. I have nothing against writing one, but I can't write a good one with no input, I'm too new.

Please distinguish "keeping out the intellectual riff-raff" from elitism. Are you talking about people who really aren't serious about rational though? Maybe you just mean you don't want more trolls? Or do you mean you want to outright make an IQ requirement?

I have an idea for scaring off those who are not serious about rational thought that goes like this:

The culture here is very, very honest, very confrontational when it comes to errors in reasoning. That's one of my top five reasons for joining. But it feels a bit tentative, a bit ambiguous. People also react with hurt feelings. I think, when it comes to that, we have to choose. I know what I choose - If the truth is brutal, hurt my feelings, I want to know. I'll be responsible for cleaning up whatever mess it makes of my emotions. I think that's the only way rationalists can go. I would like to see a description that demands honesty - not just mentions "yeah people are more honest here" but DEMANDS honesty. I'll show you what I mean:

I am not an employee of Amazon but a friend showed me their values page and I thought it was inspiring: It states that their employees (referred to as "leaders") are "...obligated to respectfully challenge decisions when they disagree, even when doing so is uncomfortable..." Amazon Leadership Principles

I want to see something just as bold, just as tough as part of the joining agreement. I'm not talking about hiding it in some website policy or rules page everyone ignores. I want to see it right by the join button:

"By pressing this join button, I agree that I am here to improve myself. I understand that my flawed reasoning will be pointed out. My feelings about that will be my own responsibility. I agree also that I will point out flawed reasoning when I see it, no matter whose it is."

(I also wrote about how LessWrong seems to balance brutal honesty and manners and my favorite technique for that)

From my post New User Orientation

Do you think this would work?

(I think you may have a wrong idea of what "pontificate" means. Either that or you're being gratuitously rude, which I'm going to assume you aren't.)

The following two propositions are different. (1) Growth is not always 100% good. (2) Growth is not always good. #1 is what you stated. #2 is what I'm saying. #2 goes much further than #1 does. The obvious inference from #1 is "make sure you grow, but take some measures to mitigate the possible downsides"; the obvious inference from #2 is "consider carefully whether growth is what you want".

I don't know whether I want LW to grow, or how fast, or when (which is why I said that optimal growth for LW could be any of several things, including "grow very rapidly") so I can't really give you "[my] reasons for not wanting it to grow". What I can do is to give some possible reasons why growth -- especially rapid growth, especially especially rapid growth by the mechanism you're implicitly proposing -- might be the Wrong Thing.

The main reason is this: It may not be possible to grow rapidly by the sort of means you describe without changing the demographics of LW in a way that would lower its quality. I don't just mean "LW might start to attract trolls and spammers and idiots". I mean that maybe only a small fraction of new visitors to LW are people whose presence would enhance LW, and that if that's so then anything we do to encourage a lot more new visitors to stay will make LW worse.

There've been a couple of surveys of LW participants. They suggest that the userbase of LW is very unusual. So, for that matter, does a casual look at the discussions here. LW participants are unusually interested in rationality (of course, since that's the central topic of the site), something like three standard deviations above average in measured intelligence (according to self-reports, so take that with a pinch of salt, but I don't find it hard to believe that something of the kind is true), and willing to read and in many cases write long, well researched, sometimes highly technical material. This combination of characteristics is rare. It's surely a large part of what gives LW the distinctive character it has. I am not optimistic about the prospects of keeping it if LW grows rapidly by keeping a much larger fraction of its new visitors.

(I am aware that the foregoing paragraph sounds as if I'm saying "look at us, we're superior to everyone else". That is not, even slightly, the point. LW regulars, as a population, are unusually good at some things, unusually bad at others, and very average at others, and treating one group of people as "superior" to others is a road to ruin for all sorts of reasons. All I'm saying is that a community with the particular strengths LW has is a very unusual thing, and I think a lot of LW's distinctive merits derive from those strengths.)

Now, I know that you said things like "We'd better choose what audience to target". But I think you underestimate what an ... odd ... audience it is that LW might need to target, and the general shape of your proposals -- make it so people are immediately grabbed without having to read all that text; base the design on general "web marketing" principles -- seems like it's implicitly aimed at exactly the people who don't have the peculiar characteristics that make LW what it currently is.

I think this lies behind your perception that people here "seem to be totally unaware of the field of web marketing". Probably many are, but please consider the possibility that in some cases the issue isn't others' obtuseness but that they simply aren't interested in the "web marketing" goals you have in mind, and for a possibly-good reason.

A large increase in LW's audience could have big benefits; I'm not denying that. They might outweigh the likely loss in quality of discussion that (I think) would go along with it. Or maybe there's a way to increase the audience a lot without a big growth in the population of active participants. Or maybe "basic web marketing principles" can in fact be applied in a way that pulls in a huge new population of people with the extremely unusual characteristics LW's current regulars have. So I'm not (to repeat myself) saying that LW should not aim to grow a lot. I don't know whether it should. It just makes me really uneasy to see growth being treated as axiomatically good and important (which, repeating myself again, is not the same as saying that it has no downsides, and which I know you weren't saying).

Why is it attracting the wrong ones, yli? I have a vague sense that you might be right, so I'm very curious about your reasoning.

A/B testing is useless without variations to test. If you want to create a variation, go for it.

Right now there is a lot of commentary in this thread but not much action.

DON'T FORGET A/B TESTING!!!!!

I would like to see more diversity. Not just in terms of demographics (though that too), but in terms of fields and specialties. There is nothing inherent in rationality that should limit it to computer/ math/ physics/ philosophy types. There are highly intelligent people in other fields also, and I feel like people from other disciplines could introduce an influx of new ideas.

Also, I think recruiting new members is a positive goal, and fully support it. I would like to see the community grow.

I want to know what sort of people they want to attract.

My answers: smart people, people who already have a strong technical background in something, people who already have a strong interest in rationality.

Whether we do a good job of marketing this site or not, we could one day find ourselves so overrun with new users such that the old users are out numbered. That could happen so fast that the entire place seems to change in just a few months - that's how the exponential curve at another forum was experienced.

This sounds like a good problem to have to me. If we later decide we don't like it, it should be easy to just change the about page back to the way it was before.

There seem to be a lot of lurkers on LW, so a surge of new lurkers might be more likely than a surge of new contributors, with lurkers gradually moving to contributor status.

Maybe a new thread should be made "Who do you want to meet? Choose a target audience." - Do you want to do this one or should I?

IMO it isn't worth a new post, for the time being at least.

I am asking because I don't want to step on your toes - and there might be questions about the culture that only an older member would think to ask. Not sure.

I think the principle of be bold applies to this sort of collaborative writing process. In other words, throw something at us and we'll give you feedback on it.

I second daenerys and John's user requirements, but will add a few more restrictive ones of my own. I want people who are good at taking and giving constructive criticism. I also want people who are willing to read a fairly large back log of posts (at least a decent chunk of the sequences), and read more if people give them links indicating that we've already covered whatever it is they are talking about.

As a (typical?) user of gwern.net I'll point out that I had was already familiar with your work from other sources. Also, if many of your new users com from LW there is likely a pre-screening effect.

That usually works for me, but the quotes just seem to mess things up. Specifically quotes with bullet points after a quote without a bullet point seem to cause troubles.

• Bullet point

  • Quote with bullet point

    Quote

    • Quote but no bullet point

Edit: After testing, it seems that the first item on the list controls whether anything can be a bullet point within a quote. Odd, but at least I understand it now.

Editx2, Ah shoot. Now I can't figure out how to escape quotes properly. I think I'll quit while I'm ahead.

> Begin quote
>
>  * Try bullet point…

* Bullet point
    > * Bullet point inside quote inside bullet point
    > > Quote inside quote inside bullet point.
    > >
    > > * Aaand the bullet point!
    > >
    > > [non-breakable space (the actual one, not '&nbsp')]
    >
    > Looks like it works.

Hopefully!

Either.

More specifically, our worldview includes:

Atheism
Physicalism
Transhumanism, including radical life extension (or at least the belief that it would be a good idea)
Empiricism
Ethical naturalism
and some other things, including rejection of most of the kind of nonsense the Skeptic movement complains about