Effectively Less Altruistically Wrong Codex

Ultimately I don't think that increased discussion is really the most desirable end state., People who actually want to get shit done gradually move away from posting because they realize it's an incredibly low return activity. People who cared about AI risk started MIRI, people who cared about habits of mind started CFAR, people who cared about altruism started Givewell.

Why would you want to spend your time posting on a forum, probably not changing anyone's mind, when you could be actually working towards something in an organization.

One function of a forum like this is to get the people together who will work on projects like these, but you should HOPE they leave - it means they're doing something far more valuable with their time.

Ultimately, it means that the people who stay by and large AREN'T the people who are going to do things - and doers come to the site, see that, and realize they can't find who they're looking for here.

What I'm saying is - this site has created a number of organizations that actually work towards the values that the forum espouses. Will most of those organizations actually accomplish their goals? Probably not, if you're playing the odds, but it's really to early to say. But the fact that those organizations were created really is the end state. The discussions THEY have actually point towards creating change in the real world. Mission accomplished.

Basically, you are concerned that LW is not what it was once, and you'd like to see it revived or at least supplanted with an equivalent.

Although I've been on LW for while, I've never been that active. However I still noticed the general decline in volume of discussion in the last year. I spend more time on reddit in r/machinelearning, and the various singularity/AGI/AI related subreddits. Basically I'm interested in AI/future studies but not so much x-rationality, for reasons similar to those outlined by Yvain years ago.

From my perspective the exodus isn't so bad, because it seems that the community which remains still contains a core of intelligent readers educated/interested in issues I care about.

From the start the main appeal of LW - from my perspective - was the somewhat higher quality of discussion than what you would find in big public reddits (like /Futurology for example), due in part to the various mechanisms the founders worked out.

To really revive LW, it may need to change significantly. Interests shift over time, online communities form and then disband. I don't claim to know what changes would increase membership/activity volume, but - not being so interested in xrationality - I only follow a particular subset of this site's discussions conversations, and a subset that wouldn't necessarily benefit from increasing general volume.

In a small attempt to help, I cross-post all my high-quality LW-relivant posts to LW.

This post from one year ago discussed a similar problem. Suggestions for returning LessWrong to a position of centrality included:

• Allowing and encouraging more links posts and the discussion of them, on topics of interest to rationalists, such as machine intelligence and transhumanism, as Hacker News does now.

• Allow and encourage posts on more political topics in Discussion, but probably not Main. Dangers here could be mitigated by banning discussion of current politicians, governments, and issues, or banning discussion on specific topics. I personally think this wouldn't work because moderation and banning would need to be strictly enforced, assuming the user base doesn't naturally follow the ban. Considering LessWrong has a history of fatigue among moderators, doing something like this which may effectively lower the sanity waterline here (for a temporary period) might ruin it more.

• Get rid of Open Threads and create a new norm that a discussion post as short as a couple sentences is acceptable.

I think creating new norms is a collective action problem. For whatever reason(s), maybe mostly fear of downvoting, thinking what would be posted isn't "appropriate enough" for LessWrong, and indifference, no single individual(s) are incentivized to take risks in posting more and more novel content. Or something like that. Generating a new norm of encouraging others to give more upvotes to posts which are on the edge of LessWrong's Overtown windown, or "appropriate content" criterion, may again be another collective action problem. Also, that seems risky.

I think some actions were provided in the previous threads, they just weren't made actionable. John Maxwell made some observations, which could be turned into actions.

• Users on Less Wrong could downvote less. I personally use both upvoting and downvoting sparingly on LessWrong, unless a comment or post really stands out as great or awful. This seems like a thing we can't get a whole community to do.

• Instead of merely upvoting a post or comment, leave a comment like "great post" as a comment, or whatever positive feedback, as this is more a motivator. This in turn may incentivize people to post more often over the long-term.

I bolded the last one because it seems actionable. I think another bottleneck is many suggestions to fix this sort of problem revolve around changing site mechanics, level of moderation, and encouragement from popular figures for a change in culture and/or behavior. Nobody seems to think we can fix all these things by contacting Trike Apps (who maintains and bulids LessWrong), and asking them to change the site mechanics. I don't think that would work, anyway. I think if one want to change how LessWrong works, one needs to contact the moderators of the site, its real owners, or whatnot, and bring proposals directly to them.

My comment in your thread suggests a number of actions, all of which I endorse:

• Be less fearful and more excited about posting things to LW. Polls indicate that LW wants to see more content. So recognize that it's normal for people to tear your ideas apart and that good posts can have tremendous value.

• Be less critical and more appreciative when responding to & voting on toplevel LW posts. (Inversion of the above.) Consider sending appreciative private messages for posts you like.

• Experiment with composing your post in a notebook or on Medium.com and only consider sharing your post on LW once you are finished writing it. (If Paul Graham is correct, writing is a good way to clarify your thinking and generate ideas even if you don't share.)

• "Blogging carnivals" for LW with monthly themes, similar to those held on the EA Forum for a while. (Theme suggestions anyone? We could run the first carnival in July.)

• Promote all of the above as cultural norms whenever the opportunity presents itself.

By the way, I attach less significance to the LW/SSC/Tumblr diaspora than you do. I'm weakly in favor of a variety of different discussion models being explored. If you're having trouble keeping track of everything, consider an RSS reader. You can also have a "Distracting Websites" bookmarks folder in your browser that you use Chrome's "Open All Bookmarks in New Window" feature on when you need a break or you're relaxing in the evening.

Equilibrium is overrated. The only stable end-state is heat death of the universe.

Instead of trying to maintain a center, move with the changing desires of your audience. If SSC is more attractive to some than LW, it's ok to be posting/commenting in both places.