Theoretical "Target Audience" size of Less Wrong

I'm doubtful LW will ever become really good at recruiting.

I went to the page with the Recent Posts and crunched some numbers. Of 250 recent posts, 35 were on meetups, 25 were continuous threads like Quotes or Potter Commentary, 28 were things that require you believe in our particular formulation of transhuman singularitarianism before the premise even makes sense, and 13 were meta about the site itself. That leaves a hundred fifty that could realistically draw new people in. Of those, 55 had <15 karma; ie we couldn't even find fifteen people on this site who were willing to say they were any good and so newbies are unlikely to like them much. That leaves 95. Of those, about 25 were about specialized math-y topics that most IQ 130+ rationalists don't even realize exist and have no background in, like decision theory. So that leaves maybe 70 posts since May that really in the running for attracting newbies. Many of these posts are in my opinion either so soft and vague as to be boring, or else filled with jargon.

Honestly, I'm surprised we're getting new people at the rate we are.

Honestly, whenever I read through Omega-related posts, I feel like we might be trying to re-invent Calvinist predestination theology. These sort of paradoxes of free will have been hashed out in monastaries and seminaries for almost two millenia, by intelligent people who were as rational as their understanding of the universe allowed. I wonder if even a theology student has something to contribute here.

It's an interesting idea, but we might need more emphasis on becoming more rational to improve your life (rather than on FAI) to attract them.

This relates to something else I was thinking about-- at this point, LW is a pretty small social group. If there were 100,000 active members, which I think is theoretically possible, then LW would develop substructures of some sort.

Less Wrong doesn't seem to be on Face Book. Should it be?

As SIAI volunteer coordinator, I would love to help you do translation of the sequences to other languages!

I'm currently supervising the translation of HP:MoR to Chinese and Korean with some positive feedback from readers so far. http://www.fanfiction.net/u/2558248/WingChen

And on the other end, we could use more translations of "Artificial Intelligence as a Positive and Negative Factor in Global Risk" on http://singinst.org/research/publications .. currently only in English and Portuguese (took the translator 3 weeks to complete). I have my Harry Potter translators taking a break to translate this doc into Chinese and Korean and also other volunteers working on Russian and Spanish. But any other languages would be amazing.

But yeah, translating HP: MoR is motivated by the hope that it will draw more folks to LessWrong (or at least prepare them to think rationally). And LessWrong is a potential feeder for SIAI although admittedly a valuable resource in it's own right as well which I respect as being different and separate. But that said, translating the core rationality documents would be great. Even people who can read English often tell me that they enjoy being able to "relax" and read something in their native language. Usually they can read things much quicker and as you point out, trivial inconveniences are a killer! Also, most people at least START OUT reading LW partially because they find it enjoyable or entertaining and only later fully take on wanting to improve and get stronger... so it least having some of the beginning articles of the sequences in other languages would be worlds better. Drop me an email with your plans for helping with this when you get a chance.

I second that.

Done.

A more plausible argument would be that there are other preconditions such as values, spare time, peculiarities in processing social signalling, ect. that are in conjunction with an appropriately high IQ met by a group on the same scale of magnitude as LW.

Also getting the real number of people with nearly any IQ level is tricky. The global IQ distribution is badly non-Gaussian due to many factors.

BTW I think LW would be more awesome with more pirates.

I'm not sure if this kind of debate is precisely what Louie had in mind, my interpretation differs.

Awesomeness of LW has been discussed in many ways. Recall the "lets do something with our rationality to become stronger!" debates? The "are there enough arbitrarily designated minorities" debate? The "what is LW actually about" debate? The "do you come here for fun too?" Discussions about poster expectations. Top posts about pacifism. ect.

The very fact that you are posting here in a topic in the discussion section is partially a result of the debate about post quality and the role of keeping our garden free of weeds.

I think the idea of getting some numbers on how many LW as it is right now can hope to get is a good first step in getting quantitative estimates about how to raise the sanity waterline, which isn't the exact same thing as increased awesomeness.

what makes some individual LWers more awesome than others

Writing skill is a big one.

There has been discussion of this previously, but very little. The comments on the mathoverflow post indicate that there isn't much consensus about the target audience. I haven't reread them all very carefully though, perhaps there is some more tangible result there that I missed.

I've also talked with at least one person about the subject at the meetups and we disagreed and didn't really resolve our disagreement.

So I agree with you that the question of "who should be on Less Wrong" is an open question, and it is a question which really should be addressed.

We need to first establish how likely people in various IQ ranges are to be able to understand the concepts of LW: This is necessarily guestimate but it almost deserves its own debate. We can't just simply say minimum IQ is 120. I think its more accurate way would be to check out literature on what IQ ranges tell us about the likelihood academic success and being good at math (in more quantitative ways that just saying "It helps").

My suspicion is that for a lot of LessWrongers have weirder brains than raw IQ will capture. This is part of why we tend to be underachieving geniuses. I took WAIS III when I was 17 and got a 150 verbal IQ and a 120 performance IQ. That averages to a 135- but that number isn't actually a very helpful predictor of future performance because the two scores are so different. This kind of thing gets labeled a learning disability, they didn't even bother writing down the total on my test results. I suspect a lot of people here also have weird brains with strengths and weaknesses not accurately conveyed by raw IQ.

ETA: Which isn't to say I have a better way of estimating a potential user base.

So we are basically searching for the crude number of people who would join the LW community as it is right now if they where exposed to it?

Yes, that's a much better way to put it. Although I clarify my intended goal a bit more below.

I recommend you check out the threads about LW demographics

My analysis has been heavily influenced by data from Yvain's survey... especially where it matches up with intuition. Atheism (or at least agnosticism) seems to be one of the strongest defining traits of this community (shared by 93.3%). We would expect that.

Perhaps the "crude number of people" I'm looking for is the number of people who would enjoy devoting their time to reading the sequences (for purposes other than to troll them) if they were introduced to them in the right way. I'm assuming that to enjoy the sequences, people would need to be smart enough to mostly understand them and at least be predisposed to caring about having correct beliefs... which unfortunately disqualifies almost everyone. They would also need some free time... and they would have to want to spend that free time reading... which probably disqualifies almost everyone else and reduces the target audience to around the current size of LW. :/ (As an aside, part of my working theory of why this community is so akrasia-filled is that the only people who have the time to read and digest something as long as the LW sequences are people with motivation systems so severely crippled that they prevent their owners from filling their time with things that most people without akrasia have like steady jobs, lovers, and rewarding social interactions. Think about it. Most Americans or other English speakers who have tendencies towards basic rationality (read: our entire target audience) and a somewhat functional motivation system in this world win so hard at life that they quickly become wayyyy too busy to allocate any of their precious time to boring, anti-social & low-prestige* tasks like reading online forums.)

Anyway, my personal theories on LW aside, my goal here is to build more rationalists and stronger rationalists. I assume a number of those people who read the sequences would be "involved in the LW community as it is right now" as well but that's sort of a secondary consideration in my mind. As I've pointed out before, 96% of LW participants are lurkers who only read. So my main goal is to expose interested parties to the sequences and it is my expectation that 3-4% of those folks will naturally stick around and become more involved after that.

the number of nominally religious LW posters learing to be less wrong may indeed be nontrivial

I guess strong to moderately strong theists aren't really in my imagined Less Wrong target audience. Despite a few extraordinary counter-examples, LessWrong isn't really equipped or devoted to the matter of personal de-conversion. And I don't think it's going too far to suggest that being an atheist is pretty much a pre-req to being rational. It's the canonical example of rationality for a reason.

Yes, these are all excellent screens to look into. Do you know any sources for these statistics?

Seconded. Eliezer was aware of this a while ago.