Disincentives for participating on LW/AF

Disincentives for me personally:

The LW/AF audience by and large operates under a set of assumptions about AI safety that I don't really share. I can't easily describe this set, but one bad way to describe it would be "the MIRI viewpoint" on AI safety. This particular disincentive is probably significantly stronger for other "ML-focused AI safety researchers".

More effort needed to write comments than to talk to people IRL

By a lot. As a more extreme example, on the recent pessimism for impact measures post, TurnTrout and I switched to private online messaging at one point, and I'd estimate it was about ~5x faster to get to the level of shared understanding we reached than if we had continued with typical big comment responses on AF/LW.

As someone basically thinking alone (cue George Thoroughgood), I definitely would value more comments / discussion. But if someone has access to research retreats where they're talking face to face as much as they want, I'm not surprised that they don't post much.

Talking is a lot easier than writing, and more immediately rewarding. It can be an activity among friends. It's more high-bandwidth to have a discussion face to face than it is over the internet. You can assume a lot more about your audience which saves a ton of effort. When talking, you are more allowed to bullshit and guess and handwave and collaboratively think with the other person, and still be interesting, wheras when writing your audience usually expects you to be confident in what you've written. Writing is hard, reading is hard, understanding what people have written is harder than understanding what people have said and if you ask for clarification that might get misunderstood in turn. This all applies to comments almost as much as to posts, particularly on technical subjects.

The two advantages writing has for me is that I can communicate in writing with people who I couldn't talk to, and that when you write something out you get a good long chance to make sure it's not stupid. When talking it's very easy to be convincing, including to yourself, even when you're confused. That's a lot harder in writing.

To encourage more discussion in writing one could try to change the format to reduce these barriers as much as possible - trying to foster one-to-one or small group threads rather than one-to-many, forstering/enabling knowledge about other posters, creating a context that allows for more guesswork and collaborative thinking. Maybe one underutilized tool on current LW is the question thread. Question threads are great excuses to let people bullshit on a topic and then engage them in small group threads.

One of the reasons feedback feels unpleasant is when it fails to engage with what actually interests you about the area. When you receive such feedback, there will then be the feeling of needing to respond for the sake of bystanders who might otherwise assume that there aren't good responses to the feedback.

As a datapoint - my reasons for mostly not participating in discussion here:

• The karma system messes up with my S1 motivations and research taste; I do not want to update toward "LW average taste" - I don't think LW average taste is that great. Also IMO on the margin it is better for the field to add ppl who are trying to orient themselves in AI alignment independently, in contrast to people guided by "what's popular on LW"
• Commenting seems costly; feels like comments are expected to be written very clearly and reader-friendly, which is time costly
• Posting seems super-costly; my impression is many readers are calibrated on quality of writing of Eliezer, Scott & likes, not on informal research conversation
• Quality of debate on topics I find interesting is much worse than in person
• Not the top reason, but still... System of AF members vs. hoi polloi, omegas, etc. creates some subtle corruption/distortion field. My overall vague impression is the LW team generally tends to like solutions which look theoretically nice, and tends to not see subtler impacts on the elephants. Where my approach would be to try move much of the elephants-playing-status-game out of the way, what's attempted here sometimes feels a bit like herding elephants with small electric jolts.

I don't comment more because writing comments takes time. I think that in person discussions tend to add more value per minute. (I expect your post is targeted at people who comment less than I do, but the reasons may be similar.)

I can imagine getting more mileage out of quick comments, which would necessarily be short and unplished. I'm less likely to do that because I feel like fast comments will often reflect poorly on me for a variety of reasons: they would have frequent and sometimes consequential errors (that would be excused in a short in-person discussion because of time), in general hastily-written comments send negative signal (better people write better comments, faster comments are worse, full model left as exercise for reader), I'd frequently leave errors uncorrected or threads of conversation dropped, and so on.

My hypothesis: They don't anticipate any benefit.

Personally, I prefer to chat with friends and high-status strangers over internet randos. And I prefer to chat in person, where I can control and anticipate the conversation, rather than asynchronously via text with a bunch of internet randos who can enter and exit the conversation whenever they feel like it.

For me, this is why I rarely post on LessWrong.

Seeding and cultivating a community of high value conversations is difficult. I think the best way to attract high quality contributors is to already have high quality contributors (and perhaps having mechanisms to disincentivize the low quality contributors). It's a bit of a bootstrapping problem. LessWrong is doing well, but no doubt it could do better.

That's my initial reaction, at least. Hope it doesn't offend or come off as too negative. Best wishes to you all.

The expectation of small numbers of long comments instead of large numbers of short comments doesn't fit with my experience of how productive/efficient discourse happens. LW culture expects posts to be referenced forever and it's hard to write for the ages. It's also hard to write for a general audience of unknown composition and hard to trust such an audience not to vote and comment badly in a way that will tax your future attention.

An interesting pattern I see in the comments and have picked out from other conversations but that no one has called out, is that many people seem to have a preference for a style of communication that doesn't naturally fit "I sit alone and write up my thoughts clearly and then post them as a comment/post". My personal preference is very much to do exactly that, as talking to me in person about a technical subject is maybe interesting but actually requires more of my time and energy than it does for me to write about it. This suggests to me that the missing engagement is all folks who don't prefer to write out their thoughts carefully, and the existing engagement is largely from people who do prefer this.

I have some kind of pet theory here about different internet cultures (I grew up with Usenet and listservs; younger/other folks grew up with chat and texting), but I think the cause of this difference in preferences is not especially relevant.

There's a common view that a researcher's output should look like a bunch of results: "A, B, C therefore X, Y, Z". But we also feel, subconsciously and correctly, that such output has an air of finality and won't attract many comments. Look at musical subreddits for example - people posting their music get few comments, people asking for help get more. So when I post a finished result on LW and get few comments, the problem is on me. There must be a better way to write posts, less focused on answering questions and more on making questions as interesting as possible. But that's easier said than done - I don't think I have that skill.

I continue to be concerned with issues around downvotes and upvotes being used as "boos" and "yays" rather than saying something about the worthiness of a thing to be engaged with (I've been thinking about this for a while and just posted a comment about it over on EA forum [EA(p) · GW(p)]). The result is that to me votes a very low in information value, which is unfortunate because they are the primary feedback mechanism on LW. I would love to see a move towards something that made voting costlier, although I realize that might impact engagement. There are probably other solutions that overcome these issues by not directly tweaking voting but instead pulling sideways at voting to come up with something that would work better for what I consider the import thing you want votes for: to identify the stuff worth engaging with.

Personally, here are two things that prevent me from participating as much as I'd like that I suspect might apply to others:

1) Internet addiction

Whenever I post or comment, I can't help but start checking in to see if I get any responses rather obsessively. But I don't want to be in that state, so sometimes I withhold from posting or commenting. And more generally, being on LW means being on the internet, and for me, being on the internet tempts me to procrastinate and do things I don't actually want to be doing.

2. Relatively high bar for participation

If I'm going to comment or post, I want to say something useful. Which often means spending time and effort. a) I have a limited capacity for this, and b) if I'm going to be spending time and effort, I find that I often see it as more useful to apply it elsewhere, like reading a textbook.

With (b), not always though. There's a lot of other times where I do feel that applying my time/effort here on LW is the most useful place to apply it.

I definitely expect there to be lot of room for improvement here – each of the areas you point to is something we've talked about.

One quick check (too late in this case, but fairly high priority to figure out IMO) is "do they even think of LW as a place they should have considered reading?"

A thing I'd been considering for awhile is "make an actual alignment subforum on LessWrong", which includes both the high signal official AlignmentForum posts, as well as other random posts about alignment, so that if you've come to LessWrong explicitly for AI you can see everything relevant.

Meanwhile my guess is at least some of those people showed up on LessWrong, saw a bunch of random posts irrelevant to them, and then bounced off. (And meanwhile showed up on AlignmentForum.org and saw less commenting activity, although I'm not sure how big a deal that'd be)

(there's a question of what you'd want such a subforum to include – there's a carving that looks more like "math stuff" and there's a carving that includes things like AI policy or whatever. Also it's sort of awkward to have the two places to hang out be "The AlignmentForum" and "The Alignment Subforum [of LessWrong]")