What bothers you about Less Wrong?

I like how this was phrased positively, and suggested a specific way to fix it.

Agreed; how about an open thread "what could you teach us about?" to gauge interest? A bit like this thread, but focusing on supply instead of demand. I'll post one in a few days if nobody else does first.

I wonder if an occasional discussion post where people can make requests or float ideas to gauge interest could help this. The motivation would be greater if you know there is an audience for your expertise.

Agreed. There is lots of 'deep knowledge' in the brains of Less Wrongers, and I would love to see it shared!

After seeing how highly your comment got upvoted, I just wrote an extremely hardcore post :-)

I'd never heard of the Polymath Project. Thanks for the linky.

I agree. In particular, it bothers me when people complain about downvotes, accuse others of downvoting them, or preface with "I know I'll be downvoted for this, but..."

I'll comment to state my agreement with this in addition to voting this up, because this was the first criticism that occurred to me, and might be one of the things that bothers me most.

I'd like to see less discussion about karma.

Has this topic being discussed in detail?

Personally, the reputation system mainly taught me how to play, but not for what reasons, other than maximizing my karma score. It works like a dog-collar, administering electric shocks when the dog approaches a certain barrier. The dog learns where it can go, on grounds of pain.

Humans can often only infer little detail from the change of a number, the little they learn mostly being misinterpreted. People complaining about downvotes are a clear indication for this being the case.

If people write, "I know I'll be downvoted for this, but...", what they mean is, that they learnt, that what they are going to write will be punished, but that they do not know why and are more than superficially interested to learn how they are wrong.

Has it been shown that reputation systems cultivate discourse and teach novel insights rather than turning communities into echo chambers and their members into karma score maximizer's?

If it was my sole intention, I could probably accumulate a lot of karma. Only because I often ignore what I learnt about the reputation system, and write what interests me, I manage to put forth some skepticism. But can a community, that is interested in truth and the refinement of rationality, rely on people to ignore the social pressure and strong incentive being applied by a reputation system, in favor of honesty and diversity?

How much of what is written on Less Wrong, and how it is written, is an effect of the reputation system? How much is left unsaid?

I do not doubt that reputation systems can work, in principle. If everyone involved was perfectly rational, with a clear goal in mind, a reputation system could provide valuable feedback. But once you introduce human nature, it might become practically unfeasible, or have adverse side-effects.

Hear, hear! I get a niggling aversive reaction whenever I see those terms used when not absolutely necessary and one of irritation when I see them used as 'good/bad' qualifies. Even more so when the alleged 'rational' action is a subjective claim that I don't even necessarily agree with!

And if those of us with 10k karma don't constrain our usage to the first two cases (and in the case of rationalist/rationality with reluctance even then) then shame on us/them!

also, I hate getting karma when I'd rather have a reply.

Your own criticism is kind of fuzzy. What exactly does one write about? For example, would http://www.gwern.net/Modafinil#ordering-with-learning be the sort of Bayesian discussion you'd want to see, or is that too elementary and you'd rather something that looks like a later chapter of PT:tLoS?

Ähm, do you know of this introduction by Eliezer?

Here is another one, which I found to very helpful, by komponisto

If that does not suffice read the "Technical explanation" of ( I meant "from", albeit it's not that funny) Eliezer. And if you aspire to become a Jedi Bayesian, just read E.T. Jaynes himself.

Not enough high-status people, especially scientists and philosophers. Do Richard Dawkins and Daniel Dennett know about LW? If not, why not?

Well, to be blunt, arguing on public internet forums is not an effective way to accomplish anything much in practice. The only people who do it are those for whom the opportunity cost in time is low (and are thus necessarily underachievers) and those who find it enjoying enough to be worth the cost (but this is clearly negatively correlated with achievement and high status).

Also, arguing on the internet under one's real identity is a bad idea for anyone who isn't in one of these four categories: (1) those who already have absolute financial security and don't care what others will think of them, (2) those who instinctively converge towards respectable high-status opinions on all subjects, (3) those who can reliably exercise constant caution and iron self-discipline and censor themselves before writing anything unseemly, and (4) those who absolutely lack interest in any controversial topics whatsoever.

Not enough high-status people, especially scientists and philosophers.

High status people tend to be those whose actions are optimized to maximize status. Participating on Internet forums is not an optimal way to gain status in general. (Of course it can be a good way to gain status within particular forums, but by high-status people you clearly meant more widely-recognized status.)

(I disagree with Vladimir_M that "arguing on public internet forums is not an effective way to accomplish anything much in practice". In my experience it is a good way to get people interested in your ideas, further develop them and/or check them for correctness.)

Do Richard Dawkins and Daniel Dennett know about LW? If not, why not? Why aren't they here? What can we do about it? Why aren't a serious-looking design and the logo of an Oxford institute enough to gain credibility?

Probably not much we can do unless LW somehow gains widespread recognition among the public (but then we probably won't care so much about "not enough high status people"). I note that even the philosophers at FHI rarely participate here.

Too much emphasis on "altruism" and treatment of "altruists" as a special class. (As opposed to the rest of us who "merely" enjoy doing cool things like theoretical research and art, but also need the world to keep existing for that to continue happening.) No one should have to feel bad about continuing to live in the world while they marginally help to save it.

Are people doing specific things to make you feel bad about "continuing to live in the world", or does mere discussion of altruist-relevant topics among LW altruists make you feel that way?

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There is a category of religiously inspired posts that creep me out and set of cult alarms. It contains that post about staring from Scientology and that Transcendental meditation stuff that while I found it interesting and perhaps useful doesn't seem to belong on LW and now recently these Mormon posts abut growing organizations. shudder

What I'm about to say has been said before, but it bears repeating. What exactly about all this stuff is setting off cult alarms for you? I had a similar problem with those posts as well, until I actually went and questioned the cult alarm in my head (which was a gut reaction) and realized that it might not be a rational reaction. Just because some scary group does something does not make it a bad thing, even if they're the only people that do it -- reversed stupidity is not intelligence. And a number of those things suggested sound like good, self-improvement suggestions, which are free of religious baggage.

In general, when you're creeped out by something, you should try to figure out why you're being creeped out instead of merely accepting what the feeling suggests. Otherwise you could end up doing something bad that you wouldn't have done if you'd thought it through. Which is of course the basic purpose of the teachings on this site.

There is a category of religiously inspired posts that creep me out and set of cult alarms. It contains that post about staring from Scientology and that Transcendental meditation stuff that while I found it interesting and perhaps useful doesn't seem to belong on LW and now recently these Mormon posts abut growing organizations. shudder

I actually agree with this statement.

I think meetups and discussions about community belong on LW, but occasionally these seem to presume "we've figured all these things out, now we just have to spread them". Even the usage of "we" can be dangerously setting LW readers apart from others. If there is an overarching goal to a LW-based community, it would be better framed as how to be a capable and informative group that others would be interested in than how to attract people per se.

The meditation post wasn't about Transcendental meditation.

To much discussion about things like meetups and growing the community and converting people. Those things are important but they dosn't belong on LW and should probably have their own site.

New meetup groups mostly draw on the site, so exiling them to a different site will probably kill them off. If you had them just post on the site when they're new, you'd wind up with pretty much exactly what we have right now -- the established groups don't regularly post meetup notices.

Am I wrong about X? As a community, we should not punish questioning, and yet my own experience suggests we do.

Yup, I personally had a post downvoted to -11 where I honestly asked "the Less Wrong community to help me resolve potential fallacies and biases in my framing of the above ideas."

If you try to do moral philosophy, you inevitably end up thinking a lot about people getting run over by trolleys and such. Also if you want to design good chairs, you need to understand people's butts really well. Though of course you're allowed to say it's a creepy job but still enjoy the results of that job :-)

Creepily heavy reliance on torture-based what-if scenarios.

I agree. I wrote the article you're citing. I was hoping that by mocking it properly it would go away.

One of the major goals of Less Wrong is to analyze our cognitive algorithms. When analyzing algorithms, it's very important to consider corner cases. Torture is an example of extreme disutility, so it naturally comes up as a test case for moral algorithms.

Little thing like references to the 'Bayesian conspiracy' or the paperclip AI turn up frequently without explanation, and are difficult to follow up.

References & Resources for LessWrong. Maybe it helps a little bit, although there is still a lot to do. Once I got more time again I'll overhaul it, add some missing references and remove unnecessary items.

This is what the wiki was intended to address. Has the wiki been helpful or how could it be improved? Is it just a matter of being aware it's a resource?

More Anglo prevalence than I would have expected for a site like this.

Are there any English-language discussion sites that aren't very Anglo-centric? The more troubling thing for me is the feel that we're just bouncing around ideas that flow out of Silicon Valley instead of having multiple cultural centers generating new ideas with their own slant on stuff and having a back-and-forth. There could be interesting communities that are in Russian, Chinese, German, French or Spanish which are producing interesting ideas and could be aligned with LW if someone would bother to translate stuff, or then we could just be in a situation where the interesting new stuff that's roughly compatible with the LW meme cluster just happens to emerge mostly from the Anglosphere.

The split between analytic philosophy done in English and continental philosophy done in French and German is a bit similar. And that seems to have led into mutual unintelligibility at some conceptual level, not because of language. As far as I can tell, the two schools of philosophy don't have much use or appreciation for each others' stuff even when it gets translated. There seems to be some weird deep intertwining going on with language, culture and the sort of philosophy that gets produced, and LW stuff might be subject to it as well.

It's odd in general that I feel like I have a much better idea about what's going on in the US than in most of Europe since the primary language of most Americans is one I can understand and the primary language of most Europeans is one I can't.

A varying degree of belief in utilitarianism (ranging from a confused arithmetic altruism to hardcore Benthamism) seems to be often taken for granted, and rarely challenged.

This simply isn't true. See, for example, the reception of this post.

A varying degree of belief in utilitarianism (ranging from a confused arithmetic altruism to hardcore Benthamism) seems to be often taken for granted, and rarely challenged. The feeling I get when reading posts and comments that assume the above is very similar to what an atheist feels when frequenting a community of religious people. The fix is obvious, though: I should take the time to write a coherent, organised post outlining my issues with that.

Please do. @#%@#$ utilitarianism.

I like being notified of valuable new content via email, it makes me sad LW doesn't offer this.

I don't share that preference but it seems solvable in 2 seconds. The time it takes to type "cntrl-T rss to email". http://www.feedmyinbox.com/.

Defining and implementing a 'valuable' metric could be slightly more difficult. An RSS feed for any comments that reach +5 could be worth implementing!

Content seems quite light and of low value at the moment.

It's good to hear a relatively new user say this. Just because it makes me feel less like the old guy reminiscing about the (selectively remembered) glory days and complaining about 'kids these days'. ;)

I don't like the heavily blog inspired structure - I want something more like a book of core ideas

The 'sequences' link seems to cover this. The difficulty seems to be that reading the book-like format is not nearly as easy to motivate oneself to do.

In the last week I have gone through and converted all of the hundreds of core Eliezer posts into audio format and have them running nearly constantly on my ipod for the purpose of revision. It's going to take days to get through them all even at that constant rate of consumption! I highly recommend this as a way to 'work your way in'. It is not quite the same as reading all of the text but the cost is far, far lower.

PS: For obvious reasons I just had to upvote your other comment!

BTW, you should pop along to a London meetup, even if only to boggle slightly. A nice bunch.

I think that one should be posted once per month, but not necessarily in the main LW section. My main reason for this is aesthetics, that I don't really think that such a meta post really 'belongs' on the main page. However, I'd reverse this opinion if a substantially greater number of users saw new main page posts than saw discussion posts.

Does checking http://lesswrong.com/r/all/new solve the problem of checking two places?

Doesn't the choice of top-level post vs open thread comment have the same problems?

(Also, people like me can break the implicit rules about what to post where for not-obviously-prosocial reasons, like me posting the thing about meta-ethics to Main for experimental reasons despite it being Discussion material.)

The "Top Articles" list has a multitude of great articles and relatively little Eliezer, for lots of pages.

I agree, I will make that post in a few days and also link back to this post in order to maximize the number of different viewers and avoid accidentally covering things simultaneously. If anyone thinks those reasons are dumb then they can just go ahead and make a "What do you like about Less Wrong?" post right now and save me the trouble. :)

Combining the positive and negative posts into a single post didn't actually occur to me (embarrassingly). I'm not sure if combining them next time would be better...?

I think LW has a lot of low-quality critics, which in turn may be causing it to underestimate the potential for criticism in the kinds of areas that tend not to attract low-quality critics.

I personally wish that people would more often gather their thoughts into coherent arguments and then made into posts, instead of spreading them over many comments. I've tried to encourage people to do this on individual occasions, but mostly without success.

I think this ultimately comes down to whether and to what degree we want to encourage quality over volume in top-level posts. On the whole I'm pretty happy with the current balance, but several of the recurring complaints about this site (i.e. meetup post density) do seem to stem from a lack of top-level volume, so I can see an argument for changing the weighting.

One thing that bothers me about LW is that comments and discussion posts had their karma divided by ten (rather than some more moderate number

I'm not entirely sure what you are trying to say here. To be clear: All comments and discussion posts get one karma per vote. Posts on the main page get a times 10 multiplier. Which part of this do you object to?

Keep your friends close...

But if it comes down to Us or Them, I'm with Them. You have been warned.

That's from the document where Yudkowsky described his "transfer of allegence".

What puzzles me is how the outfit gets any support. I mean, they are a secretive, closed-source machine intelligence outfit who makes no secret of their plan to take over the world. To me, that is like writing BAD GUY in big, black letters on your forehead.

The "He-he - let's construct machine intelligence in our basement" is like something out of Tin-Tin.

Maybe the way to understand the phenomenon is as a personality cult.

The issue is people who found it comprehensible yet slightly novel are the least likely to comment. There isn't that much they can add. So, here is a retroactive response from me: Thanks! I've been vaguely aware of this, but it's nice to see it laid out explicitly.

There seemed to be very few people in the targeted intermediate group, where I myself would have been a year before: those for whom the main idea was a comprehensible yet slightly novel insight.

OK. (FWIW, I upvoted that when you posted it and thought it was a very nifty post that drew out the implications of something I thought I understood already.)

So what does this imply? Are said implications a problem? How would one fix said problems?