Engaging Intellectual Elites at Less Wrong

At the risk of sounding ridiculous, I will self-identify as a member of the intellectual elite since no one else seems to want to.

I'm occasionally engaged in LW and I'm interested in rationality and applied psychology and the idea of FAI.

I don't think LW is necessarily the best venue for discussing big important ideas. Making a post on the internet is something I might spend 4-5 working hours on. It might even be something I'll spend a couple days on, but that's an inconsequential amount of my time. And the vast majority of the people who read whatever post I generate will spend generously 15-20 minutes thinking about it. I'm actively working on reading and checking the math in a 300 page textbook in order to make a post on LW six months from now that maybe 100 people will read and almost no one will take seriously. If my day job weren't writing academic papers with similarly dim readership prospects this would surely be overwhelmingly demoralizing. There's a commitment issue here where it doesn't make sense to invest a lot of time in impressing/convincing LW readers. I have no guarantee that anyone is seriously engaged with whatever idea I present here as opposed to just being entertained, and most of the people reading this forum are not looking for things to seriously engage with. There's a limit to how many, how big, and how strange the ideas you encounter once a week in a blog can be. They might be entertaining, they might be interesting, but they can't all change the way you see the world. It takes a lot of time (for my mind at least) to process new ideas and work through all the implications.

LW is set up in such a way that it's a constant stream of updates, and any given post can expect a week or two of attention, at which point it fades into the background with all the other detritus. But big ideas are hard to grapple with in a week, and so most LW responses are the sort of off the cuff suggestions that you get when you expose people to a new idea they don't fully understand. I've been reading LW for 9 months now and I'm still on the fence about FAI. The internet makes publishing much easier, but it doesn't make thinking any easier. This is I think one of the reasons that science hasn't abandoned publishing in journals and why there aren't many elites on the web. Accessing content is already much much easier than digesting that content. I have whole binders full of papers I need to read and digest that I don't have time for. And so does everyone else probably. LW posts are primarily entertainment and most of the people who post here are doing it for a brief applause or to float an idea they haven't seriously worked on yet.

I'm also less clear as to what sort of content you want that you don't have. What's your end goal?

If I had to make code suggestions, I would say that discussions on a single post get too long before anything is resolved. There seems to be no point in commenting once there's a certain number of comments, and so discussion tends to sort of stall out. I'd be interested to see what the distribution of # of comments on high karma posts looks like and whether there's a specific number of comments which seems to function as a sort of glass ceiling. I also think that as time goes on things get pushed down the queue and become invisible. The fact that no matter how brilliant your idea is it's basically got a week in the limelight and then will be forgotten forever isn't super conducive to using LW to seriously discuss difficult problems.

And this is all off the top of my head, because of course I haven't seriously thought about this.

Hm. Let me throw out several points in random order:

-- I don't think LW is a "general-interest" forum. Not even "relatively". However that's fine -- there are really no such things as general-interest forums because their lack of focus kills them. What you have, actually, is online communities some of which spend their time chatting about whatever in the general section of their forums. But that general section is just for overflow, the community itself is formed and kept together by something that binds much tighter than general interest.

-- If I rephrase your post along the lines of "LW is a web-based club for smart people. How do we get more smart people to join our club?" -- would you object?

-- Size matters. In particular, online communities have certain optimal size for cohesiveness -- be too small and it's just a few old-timers making inside jokes; grow too big and you drown in a cacophony of noise. I've seen online communities mutate into something quite different from the original through massive growth. That may be fine in the grand scheme of things, but the original character is lost.

-- While attracting "elite" how are you going to get rid of hoi polloi? If people arrive, set up camp in LW, and start discussing Jennifer Anniston's butt and what a horrible hangover did they have today after being gloriously trashed yesterday, what are you going to do about it?

-- There is correlation between "being highly successful in real life" and "being able to avoid wasting time chattering away on the 'net".

-- I think I would support some additional granularity to this site (subreddit style), especially if we get some population growth. Nothing like Reddit itself, of course, but the existence of two parts and two parts only seems to be an artifact from the olden days (when you went to school up the hill both ways).

-- And finally, the important question: what do you want to achieve? Is it just having more smart people around to talk to, or there's more? In particular, with Pinky and the Brain flavour?

Part of the problem is that a lot of LW cultural dynamics are built around status competition but we don't really have a lot of "rationality lessons" in the canon for redirecting such things very well as a group. The entire "rationality dojo" framing (with implications of pretend conflict and tournaments and ranking and so on) has always seems like it was strategically designed to appeal to people who are male and under 30. From a world saving perspective there's a lot to say for the framing in terms of inspiring young men to do positive things with their passion and personal energy, but it also carries with it some of the problems I see in the existing comments...

With the dojo framing, you'll tend to appeal to people who haven't leveled up yet, but who want to, and some people who haven't leveled up have a chip on their shoulder when they start out. This chip is visible in the sort of reaction that runs "How dare you you use word 'elite' without irony, as though to suggest there are people who are objectively more awesome than I am!" (And generally, I suspect there is at least sequence's worth of content on the issues that were touched upon when The Level Above Mine was written but its complicated to talk about too much and I'm afraid to do much more than gently point in that direction for now.)

For what it is worth, when I read the title I was thinking you meant the goal was to find "people who are more awesome than even our highest status posters". Like, how would we get Christof Koch to make an account and hang out for a bit? How do we get congress people to make accounts and hang out for a bit? And so on...

When Kaj reviewed their book I took the opportunity to help set up the Q&A with Harpending and Cochran. That seemed to work pretty well. Hanson even stooped to commenting on his sister blog, I think maybe because we had someone who it was profitable for him to interact with, and we were dealing in more empirical way than normal with moderately controversial and high impact questions. (Also, this suggests another optimization strategy: look at Hanson's comments and figure out what made it worth his time to make the comment and then try to encourage more of that.)

The book Q&A could potentially work as a formula rather than a one time event: find new and interesting and somewhat controversial books. Have someone with a good mind and high karma write a solid intellectual review and then if the book is good enough for the review to be positive invite the author to come for a Q&A. Either highly managed "the top N comments will be answered at the author's leisure later" or else by having the author create an account and get their hands dirty. Personally, I'd respect the dirty hands approach, but I could see how some authors might be intimidated by the prospect and maybe not think the payoff was worth the risk... it would be tricky to balance things I suspect...

Part of the problem with this strategy is that it would take non-trivial elbow grease applied to social networking, and social networking with strategic overtones is often exhausting... people generally don't do bizdev for fun, but rather for a real salary. Maybe if some interaction with the authors was part of the role then a few volunteers could be found who were willing and able to do it?

• Subtopics, so that FAI, personal efficency, and effective altruism, for example, could be tracked separately by people who are interested in each.
• Different functionality for different types of posts: meetup planning, casual discussion, quotes repositories, welcome threads, advice repositories, etc. You might also add a method for adding and voting on excellent articles from outside LW. As-is, all functions are handled by the same post/nested-thread format, which is not necessarily the best suited for each one.
• Better layout design. It's best to get a design expert on this, but my sense is that the front page, and also other pages, are not laid out in a clear and appealing way.
• Social-networking integration. People use Facebook, blogs, etc. to connect nowadays, so make it easy for LW members to do this. E.g., users could optionally add links to FB and other social networks in their profiles, and you could make it easy to share/like/+1 a post.
• Rework the Discussion/Main distinction. As-is, this is very unclear. Best as I can tell, those who are supposed to post to Main know it, and everyone else is supposed to post to Discussion, after which the mysterious Lords of LessWrong promote a few posts. Is that how it is? In any case, a better way can be found.

To minimize the burden on someone you really want to participate you could conduct an audio interview with him and then post the transcript and link to the audio.

College professors who have just published a book will be especially open to writing a post that will generate publicity for their book. Tell them the post will go live on the day that Amazon starts selling their book and you will urge readers who like the book to write an honest review of it for Amazon. LW could develop a reputation as a place where if you participate and write a high quality book, lots of people will write online reviews of the book.

suppose it's true that Less Wrong is the highest-quality relatively-general-interest forum on the web. In that case, we're sitting on a big opportunity to grow Less Wrong into the "standard" general-interest discussion hub for people with high intelligence and high metacognition (shorthand: "intellectual elites").

I'm skeptical. Suppose it is true--it doesn't follow that there's a realistic possibility of broadening the appeal, much less making it the "standard" general-interest discussion hub. I think there are dozens of reasons it's unlikely, but off the top of my head: there are many publications and forums already motivated to do so who have deeper pockets, and it is incredibly hard to corral contributors in such a way that they generate high value content for you without wanting to captain their own ships.

But that's supposing it's true. An outside observer might reasonably see a little bit of hubris in the claim that LW is the highest-level discussion forum on the entire internet. And I think it's pretty obvious that it's not general interest. It's a very narrow set of interests: cognitive bias, AI, philosophy, cryogenics, philanthropy, evo psych, economics, lifehacking. And those interests are approached from a very unique ideological perspective--most people just aren't into cryogenics, whether that's rational or not. Even people very interested in one or more of these topics may not be interested in the others, and they're very likely to be interested in other topics, which LW does not have room for. Such as celebrity gossip, or sous-vide cooking, or hip hop.

I don't know what an 'elite' is, but I try to engage here on narrow topics I know something about, and find it a generally frustrating experience.

Well, I'm an intellectual non-elite, but I've got an opinion.

LessWrong is great. But it isn't "general interest". There is some very solid (and entertaining) content on rationality, but transhumanism/friendly AI and all it's manifold implications set the tone for a good portion of everything on here.

To your proposed projects:

1. Isn't that called a magazine?

2. LW's jargon is part of it's charm... and, I think, it's effectiveness in communicating ideas without engaging the previous connotations and biases of it's readers. Of course, it probably does interfere with LW gaining more widespread, mainstream appeal among "intellectual elites" so, to that end, get rid of it.

Generally, I think LW is awesome. But "highest quality on the internet"? Yowza. It's a big internet and that's a big supposition. (Is there a name for a bias where you become a bit too thrilled with your own online forum's greatness?)

I'd say keep doing what ya'll are doing. By their nature, online forums seem to fill relatively narrow-interest niches and I think LW does a great job of that.

LessWrong = Highest-quality-FAI-no-politics-allowed-genius-filled-online-forum. Of 2013.

Forgive me, but the premise of this post seems unbelievably arrogant. You are interested in communicating with "intellectual elites"; these people have their own communities and channels of communication. Instead of asking what those channels are and how you can become part of them, you instead ask how you can lure those people away from their communities, so that they'll devote their limited free time to posting on LW instead.

I'm in academia (not an "intellectual elite", just a lowly grad student), and I've often felt torn between my allegiances to the academic community vs. the LessWrong community. In part, the conflict exists because LessWrong frames itself as an alternative to academia, as better than academia, a place where the true intellectuals can congregate, free from the constraints of the system of academic credibility, which unfairly penalizes autodidacts, or something. Academia has its problems, of course, and I agree with some of the LessWrong criticisms of it. But academia does have higher standards of rigor: peer review, actual empirical investigation of phenomena instead of armchair speculation based on the contents of pop science books, and so on. Real scientific investigation is hard work; the average LW commenter seems too plagued by akrasia to put in the long hours that science requires.

So an academic might look at LW and see a bunch of amateurs and slackers; he might view autodidacts as people who demand that things always be their way and refuse to cooperate productively with a larger system. (Such cooperation is necessary because the scientific problems we face are too vast for any individual to make progress on his own; collaboration is essential.) I'm not making all this up; I once heard a professor say that autodidacts often make poor grad students because they have no discipline, flitting back and forth between whatever topics catch their eye, and lacking the ability to focus on a coherent program of study.

Anyway, I just figured I'd point out what this post looks like from within academia. LessWrong has repeatedly rejected academia; now, finally, you are saying something that could be interpreted as "actually, some academics might be worth talking to". But instead of conceding that academia might have some advantages over LW and thus trying to communicate with academics within their system, you proclaim LessWrong to be "the highest-quality relatively-general-interest form on the web" (which, to me, is obviously false) and then you ask actual accomplished intellectuals to spend their time conversing with a bunch of intelligent-but-undereducated twenty-somethings who nonetheless think they know everything. I say that if members of LW want to communicate with intellectual elites, they should go to a university and do it there. (Though I'm not sure what to recommend for people who have graduated from college already; I'm going into academia so that I don't have to leave the intellectually stimulating university environment.)

I realize that this comment is awfully arrogant, especially for something that's accusing you of arrogance. And I realize that you are trying to engage with the academic system by publishing papers in real academic journals. I just think it's unreasonable to assume that "intellectual elites" (both inside and outside of academia) would care to spend time on LW, or that it would be good for those people if they did.

 LAUNCELOT:  Look, my liege!
 ARTHUR:  Camelot!
 GALAHAD:  Camelot!
 LAUNCELOT:  Camelot!
 PATSY:  It's only a model.
 ARTHUR:  Shhh!  Knights, I bid you welcome to your new home.  Let us
  ride... to Camelot.

  [singing]
  We're knights of the round table
  We dance when e'er we're able
  We do routines and parlour scenes
  With footwork impecc-Able.

  We dine well here in Camelot
  We eat ham and jam and spam a lot

  [dancing]

  We're knights of the Round Table
  Our shows are for-mid-able
  Though many times we're given rhymes
  That are quite unsing-able
  We not so fat in Camelot
  We sing from the diaphragm a lot

  [tap-dancing]

  Oh we're tough and able
  Quite indefatigable
  Between our quests we sequin vests
  And impersonate Clark Gable
  It's a bit too loud in Camelot
  I have to push the pram a lot.

 ARTHUR:  Well, on second thought, let's not go to Camelot -- it is
  a silly place.
  Right.

Increasingly I post my thoughts to Facebook for the following very simple reason: If I don't like a comment on my status thread, I click 'x' on it, and then it's gone without a trace. Intellectual elites who are not teenagers living in Wyoming will often have other mailing lists, or even other live human beings, from whom they can get consistently high-quality conversation with none of the dreck that emerges when all of real life's checks and balances are disengaged.

This isn't to say that to engage intellectual elites you must offer an 'x' button on all comments on their post, just like Facebook does - though that would be a good start at not having them walk away and go someplace where there's only intelligent people to talk to. I've been wondering if it would be possible to design a less democratic karma system which would serve the same function, though more in a context of "What is the successor to Wikipedia?" or "What is the successor to peer review?" with trying it as a successor to Less Wrong just being one possible way of testing out the latter more important functions. One also notes that many academic types have self-contradictory beliefs about 'censorship' which will prevent them from clicking 'x' on comments on their own posts, so that they instead go somewhere else with more heavily selected people or somewhere that Internet folk can't comment at all, so that it is desirable if it is not the academic who has to click 'x', or if the academic is not the only person who can click 'x'.

I finally note that to get people to stick around, you have to offer them a pleasant experience in the short-term and continuing gains to their life in the long term. Facebook offers the former but not the latter.

From an elite perspective, most of LW discussion would consist of trivia, internal affairs, uninformed opinion, and superficial disputation. The community might have curiosity value because of its idiosyncrasies, or more than curiosity value for someone who had an independent reason to be interested in its themes or practices; so a few such people might study it once, and a rarer few might lurk, but hardly anyone of that status is going to become a regular.

The term "intellectual elite" rubs me the wrong way. It makes me think of Mensa and other groups with too much ego for their own good. Isn't there something more neutral? "Elitism" is not a good label to be stuck with.

• Ignore user feature.

This gives most of the benefit of the "give people facebook censorship power" preference of Eliezer without the catastrophic game theoretic implications of doing that in an environment where you cannot choose who you subscribe to. I expect the ability to block users to drastically cut down both on perceived and actual low value content on the site and significantly improve user experience.

Question: Someone(Such as me, but it seems likely others may feel the same) reads this and asks themselves "Am I an intellectual elite?" or "Am I engaging enough on Less Wrong?"

How do you want that person to answer those questions?

I mean, there are at least a few modes of failure I can think people may have upon seeing that appeal:

A: Someone isn't really all that intellectually elite, and they think "Ah! I'm elite, Luke wants me to post more." Posts More, increases noise, decreases quality of discussion

B: Someone really is that intellectually elite, and they think "Well, I may have coauthored a paper, but I'm no elite like Yudkowsky." Lurks, stays disengaged.

C: Someone really is that intellectually elite, and they really are engaging plenty, and they think "Lukeprog still wants more? I'm spending too much time posting at work as it is!" Disengages from exhaustion.

How do you avoid those problems, bearing in mind that not all of them are necessarily equally problematic or likely, and that it seems likely the list isn't exhaustive?

(Ninja Edit) As an example of the list not being exhaustive, a quick review of comments that had occurred after I typed most of this but before I submitted implies I should add the following:

D: Those questions are ill formed, and the premise behind them needs to be rejected all together.

Note, personally, D is actually one of the reasons I comment less often on a thorough level. It can be fairly time consuming to cover all of the bases for a comment and make sure I'm not assuming things that aren't in evidence before I even start talking. But as per the above, I'm not even sure if me trying to check my comments for unwarranted assumptions to that level is desired.

Is the "engaging" in the title a verb or an adjective?

You cite MathOverflow as an excellent community, and I agree. Joel Spolsky (Joel on Software, and later founder of StackOverflow) gave a talk on the The Cultural Anthropology of Stack Exchange and how they attracted and maintain communities. The talk starts off with a criticism of deeply nested replies. I disagreed with that criticism, but found the rest of the talk concrete and lucid.

One issue, and I haven't read the other comments to see whether it's already been brought up, is that it seems hard to justify time expenditure on LessWrong to elites whose time is valuable, or at least to the people that elites need to justify their time expenditure to. For example, time on MathOverflow can be justified to research mathematicians (and/or to grant committees) by the promise that it is a space to ask and answer questions in research mathematics and therefore to advance the cause of mathematics in general. It's less clear to me what the justification for spending time on LessWrong is to, say, a smart business executive. (Or is this not the kind of audience you have in mind by the term "intellectual elite"?)

One thing which might be useful is alt tags for the links throughout the sequences. The cross-references can be overwhelming - it'd be nice to hover over a link and see a quick summary of what's being linked to and why it's relevant.

As I see it the question isn't so much about elites and non-elites, but about problem solvers and storytellers. Storytellers give you a reason to want to cross the ocean, problem solvers make sure that you have boat that doesn't sink. Much of the internet is populated by storytellers - someone might do a lot of problem solving in their day job, and then write stories about it in a blog.

MathOverflow, the top site cited as what Less Wrong should be aiming for, is very much about problem solving - you post a problem and can hope to get an answer from some really bright people within a couple of hours. But Jonah Sinick asked why more winners of mathematical prizes don't post their thoughts for all to see - well maybe that isn't the way to win prizes.

It's hard to see where Less Wrong fits into this division. One would think that rationality would be about getting away from the stories that we have been told and getting down to problem solving - new ways to deal with akrasia, poverty or death. Less Wrong looks like it ought to be the public (i.e. storytelling) face of an enterprise which goes in for such problem solving - that is what internet forums often are. But when you dig deeper, you just tend to find more storytelling. I would guess that Elizier has excellent problem solving skills, but the Elizier we see is very much a storyteller.

In the end it's hard to see what Less Wrong is about. Informal discussion is all very well, but to get more interest from elsewhere it needs more of a sense of focus - what sort of problems should we be looking at and what is being done to tackle them.

When I saw the title, "Engaging Intellectual Elites at Less Wrong" I thought -- woohoo, they're interested in being interesting again!

I return to Less Wrong very frequently but the topics don't seem to interest me as much as they did years ago. Most articles seem to be about meet-ups, and with some thought I could identify why some of the other topics (such as the ones about optimal charity) are less interesting to me.

I thought the topics on metaphysics were really fascinating. I'm not sure that's the correct term but metaphysical what-is-the-structure-of-the-universe-possibly-like and what are different ways I can imagine my role in the system in ways that stretch my brain? This seemed something very unique about the content here at Less Wrong when I started spending time here.

I find interesting stuff on the 'Recent on Rationality Blogs' section often and enjoy watching TED talks.

...I've been wondering for a while if this disconnect in interest means I'm belonging to a different subset than the typical target of this blog.

(The last sentence the most sincere and subtle way I could think of to distance myself from the immodesty of self-identifying as an intellectual elite. In contrast, I appreciate leplen's cavalier approach in the opening sentence.)

Fascinating topics include:

• considering death and exploring ways that can be felt about it at different emotional/cognitive distances

• the simulation hypothesis, levels of reality, layers of maps verses territory, etc

• understanding values, stability of values, subjective verses extrinsic morality, wire-heading

If one thinks of LW not as the final destination to which intellectual elites should be attracted, but a useful and productive entry point for LW-associated organisations (whether formally affiliated or loosely linked) also including LW itself, it seems to me that things are largely on the right track. Judging from the welcome threads there seems to have been a great deal of success in recruiting young members especially, but not only, through HPMoR. And often there is a youthful feel to discussions here, quite appropriately as many young members are discovering a like-minded community for the first time and learning how one can move beyond Spock-rationality to something deeper -- and establishing a reputation in the community at the same time.

But at the same time others seem to be slowly becoming more engaged in LW, or at least aware of it, thanks to the greater engagement of LW and LW-associated organisations with the more "mainstream". From a different perspective the question might be, what does it gain an academic researcher with an existing reputation in the "mainstream" to participate here? And, is this something most LW members would want? After all LW has long had a strongly-defended reputation as an outsider organisation -- would more involvement by "mainstream elite" take away those aspects of LW that make it what it is? As a "mainstream" academic myself I think this would be highly likely.

There also seems to be some kind of tension here - LW would like to attract more intellectual elites while at the same time MIRI is reducing efforts in the same direction MIRI 2013 strategy due to developments in the academic mainstream. Does this indirectly speak to the same issue?

I initially had an extremely negative emotional response to this post. Then I realized you actually point out exactly why I had such a response with point number 2.

Less Wrong has a language problem.

To someone first coming to read the discussion forum with only a vague idea of what Less Wrong represents (maybe even slightly biased towards thinking of the community as an elitist cultish ivory tower exercise in intellectual masturbation), this post, to be short, doesn't help.

What makes this sort of funny is that your actual message is just, "We want more high quality content producers." which is completely harmless and the implicit goal of any fledgling online community aiming to grow. But you wrap this message in the exclusionary, "We want more smart people."

I'd argue that you achieve both goals by just attracting more people to the community. Consider something like the sprawling Somethingawful forums. The only barrier to entry is $10.00, and there's a thriving science and academics subforum.

Definitely remove the jargon. This would help on the cult side of things. And for pete's sake, don't go fishing for "Intellectual Elites", just try and grow the community--elites will come in due time.

I can't believe that no-one has mentioned Ask Metafilter (http://ask.metafilter.com/). There seem to be a large number of people there capable of intelligent discussion (not quite at the level of Less Wrong), but they covered a far broader range of topics.

high intelligence and high metacognition

How do you measure or assess a person's "metacognition"?

For that matter, how do you measure or assess your own metacognition?

I think LW would profit immensely from a team of professional moderators who

• take a thread with lots of comments and turn it into a structured overview of arguments and counterarguments (and give an evaluation of how open or complete the discussion is)

  • and mark open discussion points and important aspects that haven't gotten propper attention yet

• rate comments in a way that is more informative than mere up/downvotes, possibly in more than one dimension ( Relevance / logical structure of the comment / Quality of the central argument)

• promote high quality comments, especially if they put a new perspective on a topic that had seemed to be closed

• take interesting spin-off discussions and promote them as a thread on its own

Of course, funding these moderators might run into this problem:

http://lesswrong.com/lw/3h/why_our_kind_cant_cooperate/

But if we don't get funding organized, we really suck as rationalists.

How exactly are you measuring "quality" ? Is it an objective metric that we can apply to any blog or forum ? If so, why don't you write a piece of code that will scrape any blog or forum, and output its quality score ? That would be a good place to start, IMO.