Here is my take: since there's so much AI content, it's not really feasible to read all of it, so in practice I read almost none of it (and consequently visit LW less frequently).

The main issue I run into is that for most posts, on a brief skim it seems like basically a thing I have thought about before. Unlike academic papers, most LW posts do not cite previous related work nor explain how what they are talking about relates to this past work. As a result, if I start to skim a post and I think it's talking about something I've seen before, I have no easy way of telling if they're (1) aware of this fact and have something new to say, (2) aware of this fact but trying to provide a better exposition, or (3) unaware of this fact and reinventing the wheel. Since I can't tell, I normally just bounce off.

I think a solution could be to have a stronger norm that posts about AI should say, and cite, what they are building on and how it relates / what is new. This would decrease the amount of content while improving its quality, and also make it easier to choose what to read. I view this as a win-win-win.

AI discourse triggers severe anxiety in me, and as a non-technical person in a rural area I don't feel I have anything to offer the field. I personally went so far as to fully hide the AI tag from my front page and frankly I've been on the threshold of blocking the site altogether for the amount of content that still gets through by passing reference and untagged posts. I like most non-AI content on the site, been checking regularly since the big LW2.0 launch, and I would consider it a loss of good reading material to stop browsing, but since DWD I'm taking my fate in my hands every time I browse here.

I don't know how many readers out there are like me, but I think it at least warrants consideration that the AI doomtide acts as a barrier to entry for readers who would benefit from rationality content but can't stomach the volume and tone of alignment discourse.

I'm here pretty much just for the AI related content and discussion, and only occasionally click on other posts randomly: so I guess I'm part of the problem ;). I'm not new, I've been here since the beginning, and this debate is not old. I spend time here specifically because I like the LW format/interface/support much better than reddit, and LW tends to have a high concentration of thoughtful posters with a very different perspective (which I tend to often disagree with, but that's part of the fun). I also read /r/MachineLearning/ of course, but it has different tradeoffs.

You mention filtering for Rationality and World Modeling under More Focused Recommendations - but perhaps LW could go farther in that direction? Not necessarily full subreddits, but it could be useful to have something like per user ranking adjustments based on tags, so that people could more configure/personalize their experience. Folks more interested in Rationality than AI could uprank and then see more of the former rather than the latter, etc.

AI needs Rationality, in particular. Not everyone agrees that rationality is key, here (I know one prominent AI researcher who disagreed).

There is still a significant - and mostly unresolved - disconnect between the LW/Alignment and mainstream ML/DL communities, but the trend is arguably looking promising.

I think in some sense The Sequences are out of date.

I would say "tragically flawed": noble in their aspirations and very well written, but overconfident in some key foundations. The sequences make some strong assumptions about how the brain works and thus the likely nature of AI, assumptions that have not aged well in the era of DL. Fortunately the sequences also instill the value of updating on new evidence.

Meanwhile Rationality A-Z is just super long. I think anyone who's a longterm member of LessWrong or the alignment community should read the whole thing sooner or later – it covers a lot of different subtle errors and philosophical confusions that are likely to come up (both in AI alignment and in other difficult challenges)

My current guess is that the meme "every alignment person needs to read the Sequences / Rationality A-Z" is net harmful.  They seem to have been valuable for some people but I think many people can contribute to reducing AI x-risk without reading them. I think the current AI risk community overrates them because they are selected strongly to have liked them.

Some anecodtal evidence in favor of my view:

1. To the extent you think I'm promising for reducing AI x-risk and have good epistemics, I haven't read most of the Sequences. (I have liked some of Eliezer's other writing, like Intelligence Explosion Microeconomics.)
2. I've been moving some of my most talented friends toward work on reducing AI x-risk and similarly have found that while I think all have great epistemics, there's mixed reception to rationalist-style writing. e.g. one is trialing at a top alignment org and doesn't like HPMOR, while another likes HPMOR, ACX, etc.

I'm a 100% with you. I don't like the current trend of LW becoming a blog about AI, and much less about a blog about how AGI doom is inevitable, (and in my opinion there have been too many blog posts about that, with some exceptions of course). I have found myself lately downvoting AI related posts more easily and upvoting content non related to AI more easily too

I'm in favor of subforums — from these comments it seems to me that a significant fraction of people are coming to LW either for AI content, or for explicitly non-AI content (including some people who sometimes want one and sometimes the other); if those use cases are already so separate, it seems dumb to keep all those posts in the same stream, when most people are unhappy with that. (Yeah maybe I'm projecting because I'm personally unhappy with it, but, I am very unhappy.)

I used to be fine with the amount of AI content. Maybe a year ago I set a karma penalty on AI, and then earlier this year I increased that penalty to maximum and it still wasn't enough, so a few months ago I hid all things tagged AI, and now even that is insufficient, because there are so many AI posts and not all of them are tagged correctly. I often go to Latest and see AI-related posts, and then go tag those posts with 'AI' and refresh, but this is a frustrating experience. The whole thing has made me feel annoyed and ugh-y about using LW, even though I think there are still a lot of posts here I want to see. 

I also worry that the AI stuff — which has a semi-professionalized flavor — discourages more playful and exploratory content on the rest of the site. I miss what LW2.0 was like before this :(

Feature proposal: when a new user joins the forum, they get a list of the most popular tags and a chance to choose which of these topics especially interest/disinterest them. This addresses the problem of new users being unaware of the filtering/sorting by tags feature.

Re: "Content I'd like to see more of":

Naturally paying people to write essays on specific topics is very expensive, but one can imagine more subtle ways in which LW could incentivize people to write on specific topics. To brainstorm a few ideas:

• Some kind of feature where prospective writers can make public lists of things they could write about (in the form of Post Title + 1-paragraph summary), and a corresponding way for LW users to indicate which posts they're interested in. (E.g. I liked this post [LW · GW] of blog post ideas by lsusr, but for our purposes that's insufficient context for prospective readers.) Maybe by voting on stuff that sounds interesting, or by doing the equivalent of subscribing to a newsletter. (In fact, there's already a LW feature to subscribe to all comments by a user, as well as all comments on a post, so this would be like subscribing to a draft post so you'd get a notification if and when it's released.) Of course one could even offer bounties here, but that might not be worth the complexity and the adverse incentives. Anyway, the main benefit here would be for prolific writers to gauge interest on their ideas and prioritize what to write about. I don't know to which extent that's typically a bottleneck, however.
  • Or maybe writers aren't bottlenecked by or don't care about audience interest, but would love a way to publically request specific support resources for their post ideas. Maybe to write a specific post they need money, or a Roam license, or a substack subscription, or access to a tool like DALL-E, or information from some domain experts, or support from a programmer, or help with finding some datasets or papers, etc. LW already has a fantastic feature where you can request proofreaders and editors for your posts, but those are 1-to-1 requests to the LW team, not public requests which e.g. a domain expert or programmer could see and respond to themselves.
• Anyway, that's a perspective from the supply side. The equivalent from the demand side would be features that indicate to prospective writers what readers would like to see. There have been posts on this in the past (e.g. here [LW · GW] or here [LW · GW] or here [LW · GW]), but I'm imagining something more like a banner on the New Post page à la "Don't know what to write about? Here's what readers would love to read". This could again be a list of topics plus 1-paragraph summaries (this time suggested by readers), which could be upvoted by LW users or otherwise incentivized.
• This was already suggested by others in the past, but a feature for users to nominate great comments to be written up as posts. Could again include an option of offering a bounty or other incentives.
• Removing friction for writers, e.g. by making the editor better. Personally I'd love it if we could borrow the feature from Notion where you paste a link over selected text to turn that text into a link (rather than replacing the text with the link); and I've also seen a request for better citation support.
• A social accountability feature where you commit to write a post on X by deadline Y and ask to be held accountable by LW users. Could once again be combined with users offering incentives or bounties if the post idea seems promising enough.

Finally, to speak a bit from personal experience: I've been meaning to write a LW sequence on Health for a year now (here's [LW(p) · GW(p)] how that might look like). Things that have stopped me so far include: mostly akrasia and perfectionism; uncertainty of whether the idea would produce enough value to warrant spending my limited energy on; the daunting scale of the project; the question to which extent what I'll actually produce can live up to my envisioned ideal; lack of monetary reward for what sounds like a lot of work; lack of clarity or experience on how to manage the gazillion citations and sources (both when posting on LW, and in my personal draft notes); some confusion regarding how to keep this LW sequence up-to-date over time (do I update an existing essay? or repost it as a "2023 edition"?); and more besides.

To be clear, I'm mostly limited by akrasia, but a few of the thing I brainstormed above could help in my case, too.

I read via RSS, and I mostly just skip LW articles because it's almost all AI-related, and I'm not interested in that. It would be very nice if I could get a non-AI RSS feed (or even better - a customizable RSS feed where I can include or exclude certain tags). 

It really does feel to me, though, that LessWrong is not for me because I'm not interested in AI alignment. LW doesn't strike me as a rationality-focused site. It's a site for talking about AI alignment that offers some rationality content as an afterthought. It sounds like you don't really want to change that, though, so it is what it is.

(Ep. vibes: I went to few EA cons, and subscribed to the forum digest.)

I blame EA. They were simply too successful.

There are the following effects at play:

• Bad AI gonna kill us all :(
• Preparing for emergent threats is one of the most effective ways to help others.
• The best way to have good ideas is to have a lot of ideas; and the best way to have a lot of ideas is to have a lot of people.
• Large funnels were built for new AI Safety researchers.
• The largest discussions about the topic happened at LW and rat circles.
• The general advice I heard at EA conferences in late Feb/Mar (notice the spike! it's March, before the big doompost edit: it's really after the doompost, I misread the graphs) is that you should go to LW for AI-specific stuff.

What a coincidence that the AI-on-LW flood and the cries for the drop in EA Forum quality happened at the same time. I think with the EA Movement growing exponentially in numbers, both sites are getting eternal septembered.

I think the solution could be to create a new frontpage for ai related discussions, like "personal blog", "LW frontpage", "AI Safety frontpage" categories. Or go through the whole subforum routes, with childboards and stuff like that.

I really agree that lesswrong derives some of its richness from being a community where people do a few different things all in the same place -- rationality training, curiosity-driven research, searching for novel altruistic interventions, AI research. Providing tools for people to self-segregate into niches will "work" in the sense that people will do it and probably say that they like it, but will probably lose some of that richness.

Has there been an increase in people reading AI content, proportional to the increase in people writing AI content?

I'm fine with everything on LW ultimately being tied to alignment. Hardcore materialism being used as a working assumption seems like a good pragmatic measure as well. But ideally there should also be room for foundational discussions like "how do we know our utility function?" and "what does it mean for something to be aligned?" Having trapped priors on foundational issues seems dangerous to me.

Currently, every AI alignment post gets frontpaged. If there are too many AI alignment posts on the frontpage it's worth thinking about whether that policy should change.

I personally have AI alignment on -25 karma and Rationality on +25. For my purposes, the current system works well, but then I understand how it works and it's likely that there are other people who don't. New users likely won't understand that they have that choice.

I think it would give the wrong impression to a new users when they see that AI alignment is by default on -25 karma, so it's better for new users to give Rationality / Worldbuilding a boost than to set negative values for AI alignment.

I would suspect that most new users to LessWrong are not interested in reading highly technical AI alignment posts and as such find it more likely that they belong when they see fewer of those. On the other hand, winning over the people who would find highly technical AI alignment posts interesting is likely more valuable than winning over the average person. 

I'm one of the new readers and found this forum through a Twitter thread that was critiquing it. psychology background then switched to ML, and I've been following AI ethics for over 15 years and have been hoping for a long time that discussion would leak across industries and academic fields.

Since AI (however you define it) is a permanent fixture in the world, I'm happy to find a forum focused on critical thinking either way and I enjoy seeing these discussions on front page. I hope it's SEO'd well too.

I'd think newcomers and non-technical contributors are awesome. 8 years ago I was so desperate to see that people in the AI space were thinking and critically evaluating their own decisions from a moral perspective, since I had started seeing unquestionable effects of this stuff in my own field with my own clients.

But if it starts attracting a ton of this you might want to consider splitting/starting a secondary forum, since this stuff is needed but may dilute from the original purpose of this forum

my concerns for AI lie firmly in the chasm between "best practices" and what actually occurs in practice.

Optimizing for bottom line with no checks and balances and a learned blindness to common sense (see: rob McNamara), and also blindness towards our own actions. "What we do to get by".

It's not overblown. But instead of philosophizing about AI doomsday I think there are QUITE enough bad practices going on in industry currently that affect tons of people, that deserve attention.

Focusing on preventing a theoretical AI takeover is not entirely a conspiracy thing, I'm sure it could happen. But it is not as helpful as:

• getting involved with policy
• education initiatives for the general public
• diversity initiatives in tech and leadership
• business/startup initiatives in underprivileged communities
• formal research on common sense things that are leading to shitty outcomes for underprivileged people
• encouraging collaboration, communication, and transfer of knowledge between different fields and across economic lines
• teaching people who care about this stuff good marketing and business practices.
• commitment to seeing beyond bullshit in general and to stop pretending, push towards understanding power dynamics
• cybersecurity as it relates to human psychology, propaganda, and national security. (Hope some people in that space are worried)

Also consider how delving into the depths of humanity affects your own mental health and perspective, I've found myself to be much more effective when focusing on grassroots hands on stuff

Stuff from academia trickles down to reality far too slowly to keep up with the progression of tech, which is why I removed myself from it, but still love the concept here and glad that people outside of AI are thinking critically about AI

I agree this is rather a thing, and I kinda feel like the times I look at LessWrong specifically to read up on what people are saying about their latest AI thoughts feel different to me from the times I am just in a reflective / learning mood and want to read about rationality and worldview building. For me personally, I'm using LessWrong for AI content daily, and would prefer to just have a setting in my account which by-default showed nothing but that. Other stuff for me is a distracting akrasia-temptation at this point. I also agree that for a novice / default user, it doesn't make sense to flood them with a bunch of highly technical AI posts, often midway through a multi-part series that's hard to understand if you haven't been following along. So maybe, a default mode and an AI researcher mode available in settings? Maybe also a ,"I'm not an AI researcher, just show me rationality stuff" mode?

One major reason why there is so much AI content on LessWrong is that very few people are allowed to post on the Alignment Forum.

I analyzed some recent AI posts on LessWrong and found that only about 15% of the authors were also members of the Alignment Forum. I'm personally very interested in AI but I post all of my AI content on LessWrong and not the Alignment Forum because I'm not a member.

Anecdotally, I several people working full-time on AI safety who are still not members of the Alignment Forum and consequently post all their work on LessWrong.

My recommendation is to increase the number of people who are allowed to post on the Alignment Forum because the bar seems too high. And instead of having just a single class of members, there could be more members but different grades of members.

There are other reasons why AI has become more popular relative to rationality. Rationality isn't really a field that progresses as fast as AI and consequently, writing on topics such as cognitive biases is already covered in The Sequences.

On the other hand, breakthroughs are made every week in the field of AI which prompts people to write about it.

I'm trying to shift my focus more toward AI, due to the likelihood that it will have big impacts over the next decade.

I'd like newbies to see some encouragement to attend a CFAR workshop. But there's not much new to say on that topic, so it's hard to direct people's attention there.

I'm one of those LW readers who is less interested in AI-related stuff (in spite of having a CS degree with an AI concentration; that's just not what I come here for). I would really like to be able to filter "AI Alignment Forum" cross-posts, but the current filter setup does not allow for that so far as I can see.

I'm confused by the sudden upsurge in AI content. People in technical AI alignment are there because they already had strong priors that AI capabilities are growing fast. They're aware of major projects. I doubt DALL-E threw a brick through Paul Christiano's window, Eliezer Yudkowsky's window, or John Wentworth's window. Their window was shattered years ago.

Here are some possible explanations for the proliferation of AI safety content. As a note, I have no competency in AI safety and haven't read the posts. These are questions, not comments on the quality of these posts!

• Is this largely amateur work by novice researchers who did have their windows shattered just recently, and are writing frantically as a result?
• Are we seeing the fruits of investments in training a cohort of new AI safety researchers that happened to ripen just when DALL-E dropped, but weren't directly caused by DALL-E?
• Is this the result of current AI safety researchers working extra hard?
• Are technical researchers posting things here that they'd normally keep on the AI alignment forum because they see the increased interest?
• Is this a positive feedback loop where increased AI safety posts lead to people posting more AI safety posts?
• Is it inhibition, where the proliferation of AI safety posts make potential writers feel crowded out? Or do AI safety posts bury the non-AI safety posts, lowering their clickthrough rate, so authors get unexpectedly low karma and engagement and therefore post less? 

I am not in AI safety research and have no aptitude or interest in following the technical arguments. I know these articles have other outlets. So for me, these articles are strictly an inconvenience on the website, ignoring the pressingness of the issue for the world at large. I don't resent that. But I do experience the "inhibition" effect, where I feel skittish about posting non-AI safety content because I don't see others doing it.

I recently analyzed the past 6 months of LessWrong posts about found that about 25% were related to AI.

I liked this writeup about container logistics [LW · GW], which was relevant to .

Think you have a missing link here. :)

In my experience, LW and AI safety gain a big chunk of legitimacy from being the best at Rationality and among the best places on earth for self-improvement. That legitimacy goes a long way, but only in systems that are externalities to the alignment ecosystem (i.e. the externality is invisible to the 300 AI safety researchers [EA · GW] who are already being AI safety researchers).

I don't see the need to retool rationality for alignment. If it helps directly, it helps directly. If it doesn't help much directly, then it clearly helps indirectly. No need to get territorial for resources, not everyone is super good at math (but you yourself might be super good at math, even if you think you aren't [LW(p) · GW(p)]).

we urgently need to distill huge amounts of educational content. I don't know with what weapons sequences 2 will be fought, but sequences 3 will be fought with knowledge tracing, machine teaching, online courses like brilliant, inline exercises, play money prediction markets, etc.

the first time around, it was limited to eliezer's knowledge - and he made severe mistakes because he didn't see neural networks coming. now it almost seems like we need to write an intro to epistemics for a wide variety of audiences, including AIs - it's time to actually write clearly enough to raise the sanity waterline.

I think that current ai aided clarification tools are approaching maturity levels necessary to do this. compressing human knowledge enough that it results in coherent, concise description that a wide variety of people will intuitively understand is a very tall order, and inevitably some of the material will need to be presented in a different order; it's very hard to learn the shapes of mathematical objects without grounding them in the physical reality they're derived from with geometry and then showing how everything turns into linear algebra, causal epistemics, predictive grounding, category theory. etc. the task of building a brain in your brain requires a manual for how to be the best kind of intelligence we know how to build, and it has been my view for years that what we need to do is distill these difficult topics into tools for interactively exploring the mathematical space of implications.

Could lesswrong have online MOOC participation groups? I'd certainly join one if it was designed to be adhd goofball friendly.

I don't know what you should build next, but I know we should be looking for to a future where the process is managed by ai.

AI is eating the world, fast. many of us think the rate-of-idea-generation physical limit will be hit any year now. I don't think it makes sense to focus less on ai, but it would help a lot to build tools for clarifying thoughts. What if the editor had an abstractive summarizer button, that would help you write more concisely? a common complaint I hear about this site is that people write too much, and as a person who writes too much, I sure would love if I could get a machine's help deciding which words are unnecessary.

Ultimately, there is no path to rationality that does not walk through the structure of intelligent systems.

the content I'm most interested in is from people who've done a lot of serious thinking that's resulted in serious accomplishment.

Raemon, do you selectively read posts by people you know to be seriously accomplished? Or are you saying that you think that a background of serious accomplishment by the writer just makes their writing more likely to be worthwhile?

We're currently filtered the randomized "from the archives" posts to show Rationality and World Modeling posts. I'm not sure whether this makes sense as a longterm solution, but it still seems useful as a counterbalancing force for the deluge of AI content, and helping users orient to the underlying culture that generated that AI content.

I would suggest having this filter applied 2/3rds of the time, but to function as it did previously, showing from all posts, the other 1/3rd of the time. That way, it is still biased towards Rationality and World Modelling, but not exclusively focused on it.

First some background on me, then some thoughts.

I am an alignment researcher and I read LW and AF occasionally. I tend to focus more on reading academic papers, not the alignment blogosphere. I read LW and AF mostly to find links to academic papers I might otherwise overlook, and for the occasional long-from analysis blogpost that the writer(s) put several months in to write. I am not a rationalist.

What I am seeing on LW is that numerically, many of the AI posts are from from newcomers to the alignment field, or from people who are just thinking about getting in. This is perfectly is fine, because they need some place to post and potentially get their questions answered. I do not think that the cause of alignment would be improved by moving all of these AI newcomer posts out of LW and onto AF,

So if there is a concern that high-quality long-form rationalist content is being drowned out by all the AI talk, I suggest you create an AF-like sub-forum dedicated to rationalist thought.

The AF versions of posts are primarily meant to be a thing you can link to professionally without having to explain the context of a lot of weird, not-obviously-related topics that show up on LessWrong.

From were I am standing, professionally speaking, AF has plenty of way-to-weird AI alignment content on it. Any policy maker or card-carrying AI/ML researcher browsing AF will quickly conclude that it is a place where posters can venture far outside of their political or main stream science Overton windows, without ever being shouted down or even frowned upon by the rest of the posters. It is also the most up-voted and commented-on posts that are often the least inside any Overton window. This is just a thing that has grown historically, there is definitely beauty and value in it, and it is definitely is too late to change now. Too late also given that that EY has now gone full prophet-of-doom.

What I am hearing is that some alignment newcomers who have spent a few months doing original research, and writing a paper on it, have trouble getting their post on their results promoted from LW to AF. This is a de-motivator which I feel limits the growth of the field, so I would not mind if the moderators of this site start using (and advertising that they are using) an automatic rule where, if it is clear that the post publishes alignment research results that took moths of honest effort to produce, any author request to promote it to AF will be almost automatically granted, no matter what the moderators think about the quality of the work inside.

How do I find more 'fact posts'? That's probably my favourite type of content here, and I clicked on the hyperlink hoping that it was a content tag and I could spend a few hours gorging!

Randomise karma-boosts for each topic every day. Or let there be an "AI day", "Rationality day", "Practical day", etc. where the topic gets relatively promoted to the frontpage, but have it be luck of the draw rather than specific days. Just so writers have less of an incentive to withhold posting something to wait for the perfect day.

If readers visit the forum and see 90% AI every day, they'll probably have more of an impression that this is an AI forum, compared to if they see the same proportion of AI posts over a week, but not every day is an AI day.

I agree that I would like to see LessWrong be a place for rationality, not just for AI. A concern: The listed ways you try to encourage rationality discussion seem to be too little dakka to me.

People are busy and writing up ideas takes a lot of time. If you want to encourage people to post, you'll probably have to provide a lot of value for posting to LessWrong. Commissioning is the straightforward approach, but as you mention it is expensive. I like the proofreading service and it's probably one of the main things that's made me post to LessWrong.

I'm not sure if there are other good opportunities; perhaps some sort of advertising/pairing system where you go out of your way to find the rationalists most interested in the relevant topics for new posts, to ensure it generates discussion, as it's generally nice to have people discuss your ideas with you. But people might be pretty good at finding posts for themselves, so that might not make much of a difference.

Perhaps one potential related low-hanging fruit is, people seem to be spending a lot of time in various other spaces, like Discords. Maybe tighter integration with some of those, such that e.g. LessWrong posts automatically got linked in the relevant rationalist discords, would be a good option?

Perhaps a cheap potential source of posts would be question-type posts. People probably have lots of questions; maybe LessWrong could be a place where people go to get answers for such questions. It might be easier to encourage, though I'm not sure about the extent to which you want to focus on question posts, as they are not the highest quality possible.

As a new member and hardcore rationalist/mental optimizer who knows little about AI, I've certainly noticed the same thing in the couple weeks I've been around. The most I'd say of it is that it's a little tougher to find the content I'm really looking for, but it's not like the site has lost its way in terms of what is still being posted. It doesn't make me feel less welcome in the community, the site just seems slightly unfocused.

I don’t know, but sounds like an obvious use case for a sub forum? The solutions listed above seem hackish.

I'm personally rather annoyed by all the AI discussion here and have been a lot less engaged recently. I would like to see much more rationality-type content.

Is AI not itself rationality?

Every AI system is trying to minimize error in some way, regardless of the method. While systems have biases and get stuck in local minima, the algorithms used to develop ML models are rational. The machine doesn't believe in things that it has no evidence for, it doesn't develop policies that don't improve reward if RL, training systems stop once the model starts getting better, the machine doesn't age or ask it's friends for faulty input data it gets the same data it always gets.

AI systems can be wrong and suboptimal but don't refuse to learn and can be ever made less wrong.

AI is rationality. Also in practice as humans our meatware is full of hacks. We can't ever really be rational in the same way we can't ever be good calculators.

In the end if you want to know what actions to take in the real world, or you want a robotic system to directly take those actions, you need to build an AI system to be rational for you. For all but toy problems you (and all humans alive) are just too stupid.

I just want to register the less wrong team seems like they're doing a great job here! I didn't even notice Whispering rationality in my ear as a deliberate thing, very subtle :)

Has there also been an upsurge in posting on the alignment forum? If so, given that AF content is automatically cross posted here, that would explain the upsurge in LW AI posts.

Concerning the Sequences:

I believe the main thing they lack is structure. They address lots of topics from lots of angles and I [? · GW] don't see the "map", I often fail to see them in context. Introducing a tree structure^[1] would not only help to orient yourself while reading, but could also make maintaining easier. A (non restricting) progression system with prerequesits could also be implemented for better guidance. However, I am very aware of the time cost and very unsure of the efficiency. 

1. ^{^}

   eg. epistemic/operative could be the first layer categories.

Thank you for writing this.

It felt to me like there's too much for my taste. My impression was that you guys were optimizing for it being about AI content, somewhat related to the % of people involved at Lightcone coworking being AI researchers vs other subjects.

My sense of what happened was that in April, Eliezer posted MIRI announces new "Death With Dignity" strategy, and a little while later AGI Ruin: A List of Lethalities. At the same time, PaLM and DALL-E 2 came out. My impression is that this threw a brick through the overton window and got a lot of people going "holy christ AGI ruin is real and scary". Everyone started thinking a lot about it, and writing up their thoughts as they oriented.

Around the same time, a lot of alignment research recruitment projects (such as SERI MATS or Refine) started paying dividends, and resulting in a new wave of people working fulltime on AGI safety.

It seems that the latter explains the former? 

i.e. the more potential money, prestige, status, etc., there is associated with a topic, the more people will be willing to write. Averaged over a large group the results seem to follow expectations.

( It does feel a bit worrying in that the higher the proportion of empty signalling, zero-sum status competition, etc., within a community, the less valuable the community will be as a whole.

What exact percentage of the recent posts and comments fall into that category is difficult to say but it's clearly more noticeable then a year prior. 

I'm quite lenient towards giving weirdly worded comments and posts the benefit of the doubt, so I would give a 1% to 30% range. Compared to a year prior where it might have been 0.5% to 20%. 

In fact I've personally only experienced one blatant trolling attempt from a high karma user over my few dozen posts and comments, so it might be a distant concern.

On the other hand, even those with possibly untoward intentions may still inadvertently end up contributing something positive, via drawing attention to a general area, or overlooked point.

And those genuinely interested in the topic may find more diamonds in the rough due to the increase.)

For my part, I often find myself annoyingly scrolling past all the non-AI posts. Most of the value I get from LW is AI Safety discussion from a wider audience (e.g. I don't have AF access and many good alignment posts are from AF nonmembers).

I don't really like trying to suppress LW's AI flavour.

AI content is boring, if you're not in that field. I'd like a button to quickly filter out all AI-tagged posts.

I see only one clean solution to this problem: Let anyone post at the AI Alignment Forum, do no longer automatically crosspost to Less Wrong, and (somehow) nudge people who post AI content to Less Wrong to instead post it to the AI Alignment Forum. There should be three separate platforms:

• Less Wrong, for rationality
• AI Alignment Forum, for AI
• EA Forum, for effective altruism

Currently, only effective altruism has its own platform, while Less Wrong and the AI Alignment Forum are insufficiently separated.

This way people interested in rationality don't have to pick it out in midst of AI content, and people interested in AI don't have to find it in midst of rationality content.

To be clear, I think voluntary crossposts should be still allowed, just as it is allowed to crosspost stuff between EA Forum and Less Wrong.

One problem with this approach is, I think, the difficulty of nudging AI types, who are used to posting on Less Wrong, over to the AI Alignment Forum. Maybe some sort of info box near the post editor could help.

I enjoyed a lot of the other content and hence am now much more inclined to read the EA forums rather than lesswrong. These changes could mean that people like me, who are primarily interested in progress studies and applying science and reasoning to better humanity and themselves, may miss out on relevant AI content when they move to another site. Then again perhaps the EA forums are more relevant to me anyway and I should spend more time reading these.

Love this post! What attracted me to Lesswrong was Rationality/World Modeling content, and AI safety content has mostly been secondary for me.