Why don't long running conversations happen on LessWrong?

I suspect (but am not sure) that the cases in which long-running discussion would be valuable aren't ones where a post-plus-comment system is ideal, even at the start before the discussion has petered out. They're ones where A writes something substantial (of post-length), and then B writes something similarly substantial (also of post-length), and then A writes something similarly substantial, and so forth. In that case, B should be writing a post rather than a comment.

Writing top-level posts can be intimidating, and can be a lot of work. (They can be intimidating because they're a lot of work -- one feels daunted at the prospect. They can be a lot of work because they're intimidating -- fear of writing something unsatisfactory motivates research and polishing. This parenthesis is really just for fun.) Perhaps there's space for something intermediate between a comment and a post, somehow, for exactly this situation? But I'm not sure what it would be, how it would work, or whether it would actually end up feeling like something intermediate.

In the absence of such a mechanism, I suggest: (1) If you have something to say in response to a post, and it feels as if it might turn into a discussion that will run for more than a day or two, consider making your response a post rather than a comment. (2) If a discussion in comments turns out to be substantive and potentially long-running, then (as a participant) consider making a post rather than a comment next. (It should begin with a pointer to the existing discussion and a brief summary, which will also probably help the discussion. And of course you should drop a link to the post into the discussion in comments.)

Having written this, I see that Ericf has said something similar much more briefly and adamzerner says: no, I'm talking about back-and-forth stuff. But it seems to me that quickfire back-and-forth of the sort that's better staying in comments is seldom productive when extended beyond (say) a week, both because purely mechanically it becomes difficult and unpleasant to follow in a nested comment-thread setup and also because quick back-and-forth comments are mostly about what you might call "easy" responses: A says something, B realises that it conflicts with some ideas B already has, B remarks on that, A finds that what B says conflicts with ideas A already has, etc. This can be helpful, but usually there's only so much "on the surface" that's actually productive to say and long back-and-forth discussions tend to end up with everyone feeling that the other party is saying the same thing over and over and not really understanding, as a result of which they have to keep reiterating things that the other party hasn't understood. (The other party, meanwhile, of course feels the same way.)

I think most discussions that are worth continuing at length involve, at some point, more serious engagement than that and deeper thinking, and that's a point at which making a post rather than a comment makes sense.

This is partly why I’ve shifted in my posts on scholarship to just building on my own thoughts over a long time. Having a readership, even if shallow, is motivating. I do occasionally get useful comments, sometimes via PM. I think reaching out to others for zoom or other back and forth goes a long way to establishing the trust needed to generate even a 45 minute conversation.

With commenting, I feel at each stage a concern that I won’t be responded to. I imagine others feel the same way. And this frequently turns out to be the case! Many times I’ve taken a fair bit of time writing up comments for posts where comments were explicitly solicited, only to have them ignored.

Other times, as on SSC/AC10, I notice that the OP has a pattern of posting no more than one reply per comment. So this causes me to develop an even stronger prior for them specifically about the depth to expect. And if they’re clearly not interested enough in what I have to say to read my reply, why should I think they care enough about me to have invested much thought into their comment in the first place?

I do think this is an important and solvable problem. I think part of the problem is lack of credibility and incentives to carry on long running conversation, and Quirrel is right that academia selects for and promotes those traits.

Nevertheless, there’s a real need for capacity to establish such conversations online. Partly because there’s a need for people to be able to have sustained discussions on topics outside their specialty. Partly as a hedge on academia’s incentives. So naive, annoying, or idealistic, it’s worth considering whether this is important and tractable enough to execute.

One problem, I think, is that synthesizing such conversation probably demands a LOT of upfront time and energy with a very low chance of any financial or status reward coming from it. You have to scour the internet for particular debate partners on your mutual topic of interest, invest lots of time trying again and again to start and sustain conversation, and pay for the privilege with your limited time and no promise of any recognition or reward in the end. Not even an academic paper!

Few are willing to pay that cost for so little reward.

Aside from shifting toward PMs and zoom calls (which I do recommend), I think the other solution you suggest is good. Probably it’s not necessary to be heavy handed with Beeminder and such. Just post a comment saying something like “I’m interested in spending at least X hours, with an option for more, having a longer conversation with you on this. Let me know if interested.” Accompanying this with a substantial object level comment would make it more credible.

Some frames worth considering:

• Strong Prune, weak Babble among LessWrongers
• Conversation failing to evolve past the low-hanging fruit
• People being reluctant to express thoughts that might make their account look stupid in a way that's visible to the entire internet
• Everyone can participate, and as the number of people involved in a conversation increases it becomes more and more difficult to track all positions
• Even lurkers like me can attempt to participate, and it's costly in terms of conversational effort to figure out what background knowledge someone is missing
• Most topics that appear on LessWrong are suited for mental masturbation only, they offer no obvious course of action through which people can decide to care about said topics
• There is way, way too much content (heck, I've only skimmed through the comments under this post)
• Long-running conversations don't tend to happen; therefore there is little incentive in delving deep into one topic, so people (well, me at least) end up engaging with more topics, but in a shallow manner; which in turn creates conditions where long-running conversations are less likely
• Due to the way the platform is designed, the only real way to maintain a long-running conversation between persons A and B is if the pattern of response is ABABABAB..., so anyone not being confident at any point is a single point of failure

I also have a suggestion. After the discussion here inevitably fades, you could write another post in which you summarize the main takeaways and steelman a position or two that look valuable at that time. That might generate further discussion. Repeat. This way you could attempt to keep the flame of the conversation alive. But if you end up doing this, make sure to give the process a name, so that people realize that this is a Thing and that they are able to participate in this-Thing-specific ways.

Pledges for ongoing discussion

As an experiment and because I am interested in a more in depth conversation on this topic, I pledge to respond to every comment on this post for a month. If you want to make a similar pledge, please do so as a response to this comment.

Edit: Some comments don't seem like they're worth responding to, so I won't respond to those. I guess I'm going against my pledge here, but I feel that not responding to literally every comment is still consistent with the spirit of the pledge. If anyone disagrees or would like me to respond to anything in particular, I would be be happy to do so.

The distinction Professor Quirrell makes is a useful one but I think it's a mistake to apply it at the level of people, as if some people were Average Joes who just want to kill time on the internet and some people are Serious Arguers who want to make intellectual progress. Anyone can be both at different times. I suspect most people, even those who are valuable as Serious Arguers, are more often in Average Joe mode, and I am not convinced that that's a problem.

To whatever extent that's right, the way to have more long-running discussions with Serious Arguers is to present things in a way that encourage Serious Arguer mode rather than Average Joe mode. To whatever extent it's wrong, what you need to do is to attract people who are more Serious Arguers than Average Joes.

(This may be stating the obvious, but it seems worth making it explicit.)

Long running conversations are extremely common on old-style bulletin message boards/fora (see here for an example. This is mostly/solely because of the software design where threads are ordered only by the latest reply. Whether or not this leads to qualitative debate is another matter, often the same points get belaboured  ad nauseam and moderators have to close old threads. 

I don't think it's completely to blame, but I suspect that the way the LessWrong homepage is set up encourages this cultural norm. LessWrong 2.0 has paid some attention to the need to revisit content, but the homepage is still much closer to Reddit (where discussions die out quickly) than a forum (where they don't).

My reason for thinking the website is not completely to blame is that it seems to reflect the revealed preferences of the users. If there was a strong (and conscious) preference for long running discussions, people would work around it via the notification system. There would also be frequent calls from users to change the homepage to a forum-first design, rather than making tweaks to the Reddit-based one to nudge people towards long running discussion. That's not what we see, which would indicate that being able to have long running discussions on LessWrong is a minority preference.

If you spend a month composing a contribution, make it a new post, with a link back to the previous. That is how I've seen several longer conversations happen here

I think this already happens sometimes, just in the comments on posts where you don't see it. I've been part of conversations that lasted ~1 month on LW via back and forth on comments on posts. ~1 week is somewhat more common.

Admittedly the audience for this is kinda small, but you can always look at the global stream of comments to jump into it.

As one of the mods, my general recommendation agrees with some of the other commenters: For a long running discussion, make a new top-level post. For every level you go down in the comment tree, my gut says you lose something like half of your readers. And we've had really good long-running conversations of people riffing off of each other, making posts that either directly or indirectly respond to each other. 

For a while I've been thinking about explicitly encouraging this by having a "response-post" feature, but I never figured out a good UI for it, and it never quite made the cut.

I think that this might be likely if people who wrote on similar topics were to have conversations and record them as writing an article takes a lot more time than just having a discussion.

It's not that long conversations never happen here. I had a pretty long conversation with valentinslepukhin under I would like to try double crux. [LW · GW] The threads got so deep that the boxes started rotating. Neither of us managed to change the other's mind, so I'm not sure if I would call it a success. I think I did slip into soldier mode a few times. valentinslepukhin finally stopped responding. I'm not sure if he simply gave up, or got distracted and forgot to come back, or got banned without me noticing.

Is this kind of thing something you'd like to see more of on LessWrong?

I think one issue is that comment trees are just not the ideal format for conversation. It's pretty common that someone will make a comment with four different claims, and then ten different comments of which two make similar objections to one, and then a couple other objections, and those will be responded to, and it's all very ad-hoc. Structure doesn't spontaneously emerge, and having to scan through a whole disordered tree to understand the current state of the argument makes it hard for bystanders to join.

Having a section for posts-for-the-month (or "Ongoing Discussions"?) would help people that want long-running discussions so they would all be in the same place, over only a few threads. But the comment thread discussion format is not great. 

This would be a large engineering effort, but support for argument maps could help record the structure of an argument, and also help discussion continue, as each new node could be a new post, and having a visual of the state of an argument could help keep things organized, compared to comment trees?

I am only speaking for myself, but on LW I'd be afraid of growing a reputation of "always wants the last word". So I just stop commenting when I find it convenient. (I know it's not always the right thing to do, but it's better to be talked to, like, at all.)

(without reading other comments) Academia does have its share of failed-to-ignites and should-have-stopped-alreadies. Maybe we can zoom in on the successful cases instead of looking at the whole.

My wild guess is that, yes, "instant gratification" is important to engage people better. There was a recent discussion on how to do that, but it fizzled.  A built-in chat window, a live comment scroll window, a temporary discord channel for select posts where the author commits to being around at announced times... there are many ways to engage the audience better.

The key question of what comments are for and where you might create a new post. The bar to creating new posts on LessWrong is lower then the bar to publishing academic articles. 

When the amount of effort to engage in an intellectual conversation reaches a certain level, it's worth creating a new post in LessWrong and have a pingback. 

The design of LessWrong is generally more optimized for getting people to write posts then it is for getting people to write comments.

As far as my own commenting experience goes I don't feel like it's central whether or not a post is on the frontpage. Writing a comment the day after a post is posted gets significantly more reponses then a week afterwards even when the post is still on the frontpage. Many people read a post once and then go to the comments and engage with them. On the other hand they don't go that often again to the comment section.

Instead of using the frontpage I think it would be better to use notifactions more. Currently, "subscribe to comments" is hidden behind a hamburger menu and thus seldomly used. If more people would use "subscribe to comments" we likely would get more long-running discussions in the comments. 

We could have a setting where strongly upvoting a post automatically activates comment subscriptions. We could also simply show the buttons directly instead of behind a hamburger menu. 

DID NO ONE HERE USE RENEGADE OR TELEGARD?!? 

Sorry for shouting... I'm an old man. But Renegade and Telegard had this feature called "newscan" (or for the more pedantic "new scan") where you could scan for all new posts or replies to threads you were engaged in since the last time you visited and quickly preview them and respond if desired. 

It was one of the ways that a a keystroke-driven text-based menu system was superior to a website, because I've never seen a successful implementation of this on the web. You can have a similar feature, but you don't have the speed, ease, and quick prompting... I don't know how to describe it. 

Like one of those^. I was hoping someone would have demoed this on YouTube, but this is as close as I got. 

Anyway... on the default menu 'M' for new messages, yes to scan. Or 'S' to scan for new messages when you get to the messages menu. 

It's this super simple feature that put the response right in front of you, previewed it, and was like "reply?" And you're like "Y" and it's that easy. On the web you get a notification, click, preview, go to a new page screen, scroll to comment, and lose all hope and then don't respond.

It would be a lot of javascript to do something like it on the web. 

Maybe LessWrong could do like The WELL/picoscan and make an version we could SSH in to.

(Oh and I will pledge to respond to this thread for like two weeks, with an option to renew when I'm done).