[Informal/Colloquial] Open Survey: Ideas for Improving Less Wrong

For whom, reading what?

Someone interested in rationality but not already familiar with the last few decades' research on heuristics and biases, who hasn't spend a long time thinking about the scientific method and how religions spread and so on and so forth, coming to LW in (say) 2008, would have found Eliezer posting his "Sequences", which set out a large quantity of fairly-basic material in friendly form. They'd have got plenty of insight per hour of reading.

Someone in the exact same epistemic situation now could come along to LW and ... read the Sequences. They would get more or less the same amount of insight per hour. (Maybe either a bit more or a bit less, because they wouldn't be interacting with the comments in the same way as when originally posted.)

Or they could come along to LW and read whatever's in Main and Discussion at the time. That will probably give them less insight per hour, because LW isn't now full of systematically presented material for beginning-to-intermediate rationalists, because Eliezer very kindly already did that and it's all in the archives.

The only way to deliver that level of insight-per-hour to that reader is to fill LW with the same sort of material as the Sequences, but there probably just isn't all that much beginning-to-intermediate rationalism tutorial stuff that hasn't mostly been covered in the Sequences and other Sequence-ish articles since then (e.g., Yvain's "Diseased thinking" and "Generalizing from one example").

So, if the "problem" we are trying to solve is that current LW content doesn't deliver as much insight to beginning-to-intermediate rationalists as in 2008, then "solving" that problem probably implies filling LW with material that strongly overlaps stuff that's been posted here long before.

Perhaps we should consider a different audience. Existing LW regulars, for instance. (Many of whom were the first kind of reader, back in 2008.) Those readers have read most of the Sequence-ish material, or familiarized themselves with similar ideas by other means. Rehashing the same stuff won't give them much insight per hour. They're familiar with all the standard stuff. What they need is lots of new ideas.

So, if the the "problem" we are trying to solve is that current LW content doesn't deliver as much insight to advanced rationalists as LW did to beginning-to-intermediate rationalists in 2008, then "solving" that problem implies delivering new ideas at a rate comparable to the rate at which Eliezer delivered the not-all-so-new ideas in the Sequences back in 2008.

There is scope for debate about just how new those ideas were then. (You can find some in this post and its comments.) But even the ideas that were entirely original to Eliezer were, I think, ones he had had some time before; he was mostly not generating them on the fly. I think it's fairly clear that to deliver the same rate of insights-per-hour to someone who's read everything ever posted on LW it would be necessary to generate novelty faster than Eliezer generated summaries -- and to do so working on more difficult material.

To summarize:

• For a beginning-to-intermediate rationalist, willing to read old material: Same insight-per-hour is available now as then: read the same things as they'd have read then, all of which are still in the archives.
• For a beginning-to-intermediate rationalist, reading new material: Same insight-per-hour would require posting a lot of unoriginal material; do we really want that?
• For someone familiar with most existing LW material: Same insight-per-hour would require generating new research at the same rate at which Eliezer generated summaries.

So it seems to me that "less insight per hour of reading" may not be a problem we should be trying to solve. It's either already solved (if you take the first of those interpretations) or not worth solving (if you take the second) or maybe humanly impossible (if you take the third).

That's unavoidable -- once you picked all the low-hanging fruit, diminishing returns kick in.

True, but that's only from a very limited number of sources (~4?); it doesn't include the dozens of smaller blogs. It's also a straight feed--no filtering out of housekeeping, meta posts, etc.--and it only shows 5 links which are quickly pushed aside by newer ones, while a section for links would keep all of them accessible and searchable.

The whole "LW Women" was simply a project to claim LW as another territory for a specific tribe. It used dishonest methods of argumentation, and as soon as it failed the author was no longer interested in rationalist community -- which makes me suspect they were never interested in the community in the first place, other than as another place to conquer for their tribe.

I consider it one of two historical attempts where another tribe tried to conquer Less Wrong for them; the other one was the mass downvoting campaign by Eugine Nier. In both cases, I try not to blame all people from the given tribe, but I do not ignore the fact that those tribes can be dangerous to LW. Whether by public shaming or by secretly exploiting the rules, in both cases the goal was to remove their perceived ideological opponents from LW.

The unfortunate consequence is that both situations made a part of a debate taboo. We didn't debate gender balance since then, if I remember correctly. We tried to have a rational debate on politics a few times, but it was always immediately used as a platform to promote one specific fringe group which tries very hard to associate itself publicly with LW despite being only a tiny minority here.

I could like to have a debate about gender balance on LW -- and let's be honest, it's not just about LW; if you go to any atheist conference, or AI conference, you will find a similar imbalance -- but the debate itself should be rational. By which I mean:

• People speak for themselves, or link to solid evidence, or say "I am not sure, but it seems to me that maybe ...". As opposed to e.g. speaking in the name of all women not participating on LW because obviously they must have exactly the same opinion as you do.

• Avoiding blatantly manipulative techniques, such as using filtered evidence to prove your point; e.g. by asking women about their experience, but not asking men whether they had similar experience; or pressure like "nice website you have here, would be a shame if someone accused you of sexism".

be more careful with spelling next time.

He must seize and desist!

X-)