Some reflections on the LW community after several months of active engagement

Given that LW was almost dead a few years back, and is now a vibrant community against the odds, without losing its uniqueness, including Eliezer and sometimes Scott Alexander posting again, kudos go to the LW 2.0 team (and to the GW mirror).

LW does seem slightly more insular in some respects than SSC, Overcoming Bias, HN, etc., though that is understandable given the unique origins of the community and the developments that have taken place since.

I think other groups (e.g., EAs / the EA Forum) should try to be emulate LW and become more insular, in at least a few respects:

• Be more willing to develop your own culture, and enforce your own norms, that are very different from the culture and norms of society-at-large. Do more things based on what makes sense, rather than what's conventional.
• Care less about your reputation in the eyes of people outside the community. (E.g., I think a lot of what's good about LW comes from the fact that we're more trying to impress each other, and being at least somewhat deliberate about which things we want to count as 'impressive', rather than parroting whatever's conventional in some non-LW group that we want to win over.)
• Be more willing to disagree with with a mainstream view (once you think you understand the view and have a counter-argument you think is strong), and to build edifices of knowledge that are predicated on 'mainstream view X is false'.
  • This doesn't mean 'ignore all arguments from people outside the community'; but it means something like 'use those arguments more like a convenient tool for actually learning things, testing things, and narrowing your uncertainty', which is a different mindset than 'listen to outsiders as a sign of respect / as a way to signal virtuous humility / as a way to signal virtuous deference / etc.'.

For me, as someone who's lurked off and on for a few years and only started regularly commenting recently, I find this whole place terribly intimidating. Everyone else is far smarter than me and I am used to being the smartest person in every room, and it's quite painful and makes it hard to interact. It's some of the best writing I've ever read on the internet... but that may be a bad thing, as it's an impossible threshold to climb over as a newbie.

Curious what essays make your top 10 list?

You mention that the essays here aren't in your top most persuasive. I will just note that an explicit goal of this forum is that we are asked to write to inform, not to persuade. I think that's really critical in maintaining a rationalist and a pleasant environment.

Just a random note. Thanks for the comparative analysis.

I do agree that there is a slight ‘creepiness vibe’ with the way the Sequences . . . are written.

IIRC back when he was writing the sequences, Eliezer said that he was psychologically incapable of writing in the typical dry academic manner. I.e., he wouldn't be able to bring himself to do so even if he knew doing so would improve the reception of his writing.

Maybe he used the word "stuffy".

Thanks for the write-up.

A few lines I didn't quite get.

a distinctive writing style that does, in extreme cases, seem to be satire compared to the academic norm

I don't know what you're referring to here, an example would be helpful.

I do agree that there is a slight 'creepiness vibe' with the way the Sequences are presented by default on the home page

I don't know who you're agreeing with or why showing some of the best writing on the site seems creepy to you.

In practical terms I've found the average quality of writings on LW to match the best subreddits but worse than the best private forums.

I'd be somewhat more interested in you comparing the top 1-5% of the best subreddits and of LW? The average doesn't seem as interesting to me, because it falls off the frontpage much faster than the peak content.

The information environment is also more adversarial nowadays than what it was before, so the apparent deficiencies of LW need to be adjusted to the new environmental baseline to allow for a fair comparison. None of the critics, or opponents, seems to have done this, though this is almost never done for any type of criticism. Perhaps that says more about criticism, and critics themselves, than what they critique. 

So it may very well be that, relative to its environment, 2022 LW is actually superior to that of 2012 LW. Especially as the moderators have done a good job with maintaining the publicly accessible focus.

This is actually a very serious problem that will most likely get worse regardless of what galaxy-brained [LW(p) · GW(p)] solutions are thought up and implemented. It's the sort of thing where no matter how deep you burrow down, someone will always be able to dig out your hole until they ferret you out, because digging a hole leaves a trail by default (the tunnel). It really begs the question of whether accepting continued decline on lesswrong.com is worth it to avoid the risk of making the issue even worse.

But I'm happy to work on solutions nonetheless, and I'm sure a lot of others are too. It's just that it has to be via direct messages instead of public posts, and it really ought to involve in-person communication taking the place of online communication. And we have to know that others exist who also care, instead of being emotionally filled with vague doubt that anyone is out there and that anything is worth doing [LW · GW].

Hello M.Y.Zuo,

[...evaporative cooling effect...] This isn't very surprising as this is the common trajectory of every community that rapidly grows in size.

It would have taken a super-human effort to retain the same level of quality going from 100 to 1000 users, let alone from 1000 to 10000, and so on. So I don't think that would have been a fair expectation to place on the moderators, or anyone else involved, of a decade ago.

I agree that it must be a massive undertaking to go from 100 to 10000 users. However, I question why it should be a good thing, in and by itself. The question that would determine if growth is good or not, should be related to the goals and purpose of LW. (wrote more about it in my post [LW · GW]) 
That would be akin to growth for growth's sake, which sounds weird to me as a metric of success.

If quality is even a tiny bit diluted, isn't that a net loss, regardless of the quantifiable gain in members? 

What I wish for is a conscious and intentional decision regarding what kind of 'temperature' one wants LW to have, and then strive to achieve that temperature.

Consequently, to talk about the evaporative cooling effect not as some force of nature, but the result of choices. The goal being not only to make the choices conscious, but also to make them coherent with a precise purpose and relevant sub-goals.

So far, I haven't seen any good answers to this, but I am new, so might be a lot I haven't read. However, the FAQ for LW is way too vague regarding where the site is headed. With this kind of growth, however, it can head in many different directions. So, which is it going to be?

I would also like to see the community keep going, but I would also like to see the issue of specifying purpose and aligning sub-goals with purpose be taken seriously. If the parameters of the community change, it is not longer the same community, even when it is bearing the same name. And from the birth of LW till now, there seems to have been a lot of changes, some of which I assume meant that LW fundamentally changed Identity. 

And instead of that just happening, isn't it better to actually say: This is what we want to achieve, this is how we will do it and what we will select when adding new members, and then work towards it? Then 'success' would be a measurable metric, instead of a vague and unknown one.


Kindly, but firmly,
Caerulea-Lawrence