What's up with Arbital?

Yes, many students would benefit from a math explanation platform. But it was hard for us to find writers, and we weren't getting as much traction with them as we wanted. We reached out to some forums and to many individuals. That version of Arbital was also promoted by Eliezer on FB. When we switched away from math, it wasn't because we thought it was hopeless. We had a lot of ideas left to try out. But when it's not going well, you have to call it quits at some point, and so we did. There was also the consideration that if we built a platform for (math) explanations, it would be hard to eventually transition to a platform that solved debates (which always seemed like the more important part).

I think if someone wanted to give it a shot with another explanation platform and had a good strategy for getting writers, I'd feel pretty optimistic about their chance of success.

how much should I use this as an outside view for other activities of MIRI?

I'm unsure whether you should think of it as a MIRI activity, but to the extent you should, then it seems like moderate evidence that MIRI will try many uncertain approaches, and be somewhat sensible about abandoning the ones that reach a dead end.

Don't use the outside view. Use your brain. If Arbital was confusing, but you didn't look closer at it, then you didn't use your brain. If MIRI seems confusing and you don't look closer at it, then you aren't using your brain. The whole concept of "smart people" whom you can trust with anything is just wrong. There are only niche experts.

My two cents: Arbital had very little to do with MIRI, aside from Arbital being Eliezer's idea. But this was definitely out of his realm of expertise. MIRI/AI stuff is not.

The fact that a startup pivots doesn't automatically mean that it's founders are bad at what they are doing. Most startups fail or pivot from the outside view.

Here is my person take on why it's complicated:

When you ask someone if they would like a debate platform and describe all the features and content it'll have, they go: "Hell yeah I'd love that!" And it took me a while to realize that what they are imagining is someone else writing all the content and doing all the heavy lifting. Then they would come along, read some of it, and may be leave a comment or two. And basically everyone is like that: they want it, but they are not willing to put in the work. And I don't blame them, because I'm not willing to put in the work (of writing) either. There are just a handful of people who are.

So the problem is definitely not on the technical side. It's a problem with the community / society in general. Except I'm hesitant to even call it a "problem," because that feels like calling gravity a "problem." This is just the way humans are. They want to do things they want to do.

Yes. There is already a pretty large demand for blogging platforms, and Arbital 2.0 will have features which will make it a much better option for some users. I'll also be personally reaching out to a lot of bloggers to interview them about their experience / wishes. I'll also be testing the key value propositions with a graphic that's being created right now.

But also sometimes you just have to go ahead and build the thing to really test it.

Why?

Eliezer said he wanted all of those features. (And he is using basically all of them.) But also we worked on it for 2 years, so a lot of features accumulated as we were trying different approaches.

Resources required for each application would tend to be useful to the others

• The debate system settles disputes over encyclopedia maintenance

• Monitoring activity in the encyclopedia can potentially feed the debate system with user qualification metrics for use in filtering comments

• A sufficiently well structured debate effectively is an outline of an explanation

• Systems for presenting articles and displaying structured debates are blog-complete: Blogs and articles are basically the same kind of information, and the debating stuff could presumably be simplified into a comment section.

I'm thinking of it as a completely new, unrelated platform. Whether or not it will live at arbital.com and be called Arbital is not yet decided, though currently I'm leaning towards yes. (But if, for example, some people are using the old Arbital, then it would probably be easier for me to put the new platform under a different domain & name.)

We don't have Arbital history anywhere, although I guess there is the blog, which captures a fraction of it.

"The Stacks Project, but for everything" was a decent description for part of our first approach. However, it's relatively easy for people to answer questions: doesn't take much time and you get instant credit. It's much harder to get people to write wiki pages / explanations: it takes a long time and you don't get that much credit.

That's one approach we ruled out pretty much from the start because that kind of structure is hard to read and laborious to create and maintain. However that mechanic on the blog level makes sense and that's basically how debates work right now in the wild.

Our main approach was creating "claims". Blogs would reuse claims and the discussion around each claim. I'd say that part was actually moderately successful.

One idea we played around with but didn't get to implement was allowing comments to easily leverage double-crux structure.

Hmm, I had that feeling too, but wasn't sure what else to add. I'm happy to answer specific/vague questions.

Hmm, I'm skeptical a barter system would work. I don't think I've seen a successful implementation of it anywhere, though I do hear about people trying.

Yes, we've considered paying people, but that's not scalable. (A good 3-5 page explanation might take 10 hours to write.)

I can imagine a neural-activation-like effect coming out of that, where frequently co-active posts naturally rise to the top of each other's links and become threads or topics.

Not sure what you mean by this.

It'd be interesting to work out why projects like Wikipedia and StackOveflow succeeded, while Arbital didn't, to such an extent.

I had some experience being involved in Citizendium which failed. To me it feels like the key difference is openness to contribution.

Both Wikipedia and StackOverflow make it easy for anybody to get involved.

Eric recently shared a link to a post he wrote on Arbital on Facebook. I could either answer on Facebook or an Arbital. Given that Arbital didn't gave me a text field in which I could write my comment it was easier to answer on facebook and that's what I did.

Arbital also might be too slow. It's a general pattern that page loading time matters a great deal and I'm not aware of any successful website that is that slow in 2017.

My guess for Wikipedia's success is that they were one of the first; and there was more of a sense of an online community back then. Also it's easier to create Wikipedia content than, say, a good explanation. StackOverflow succeeded because asking and answering questions is pretty easy, you get instant feedback, and they got community management right. (They solved exactly one problem well!) The founders were also really well known so it was easy for them to seed the platform.

I can't open-source the platform as long as I'm doing the for-profit venture, since the platforms are too similar. However, if at some point I have to stop, then I'll be happy to open source everything at that point.

See my reply to michaelkeenan: http://lesswrong.com/r/discussion/lw/otq/whats_up_with_arbital/dq91

See MIRI's recent post under "Going Forward": https://intelligence.org/2017/03/28/2016-in-review/

1. AGI alignment overviews: “Eliezer Yudkowsky and I will be splitting our time between working on these problems and doing expository writing. Eliezer is writing about alignment theory, while I’ll be writing about MIRI strategy and forecasting questions.”

Basically explaining why people still don't get AI safety is a very important task and Eliezer is particularly well suited for it.

It's not open sourced.

The pages might take a while to load (up to 30 seconds).