Two notes on things going on behind the scenes:

1. Instead of Less Wrong being a project that's no org's top focus, we're creating an org focused on rationality community building, which will have Less Wrong as its primary project (until Less Wrong doesn't look like the best place to have the rationality community).

2. We decided a few weeks ago that the LW codebase was bad enough that it would be easier to migrate to a new codebase and then make the necessary changes. My optimistic estimate is that it'll be about 2 weeks until we're ready to migrate the database over, which seems like it might take a week. It's unclear what multiplier should be applied to my optimism to get a realistic estimate.

I started blogging recently. Some rationalists have apparently found it good. I would like to make these posts I'm writing contributions to the LessWrong project. I would like to cross-post instead of link my posts. But am only comfortable doing so under a pseudonym because of options I want to leave open for things to discuss on my blog.

I have therefore recently created this new account. I think I need 10 karma or something to post though. So, soon (TM). When I get around to posting some helpful comments to earn it.

agreed on link posts. I wish posters had to write a sentence or two explaining why I should follow the link, and to jumpstart the comment thread.

One general suggestion to everyone: upvote more.

It feels a lot more fun to be involved in this kind of community when participating is rewarded. I think we'd benefit by upvoting good posts and comments a lot more often (based on the "do I want this around?" metric, not the "do I agree with this poster" metric). I know that personally, if I got 10-20 upvotes on a decent post or comment, I'd be a lot more motivated to put more time in to make a good one.

I think the appropriate behavior is, when reading a comment thread, to upvote almost every comment unless you're not sure it's positive keeping it around - then downvote if you're sure it's bad, or don't touch it if you're ambivalent. Or, alternatively: upvote comments you think someone else would be glad to have read (most of them), don't touch comments that are just "I agree" without meat, and downvote comments that don't belong or are poorly crafted.

This has the useful property of being an almost zero effort expenditure for the users that (I suspect) would have a larger effect if implemented collectively.

I wonder if we could find a scalable way of crossposting facebook and g+ comments? The way Jeff Kaufmann does on his blog (see the comments: https://www.jefftk.com/p/leaving-google-joining-wave)

That would lower the frictions substantially.

I think a serious issue with posting content on Less Wrong, and why I don't do it beyond link posts, is that Less Wrong feels like a ghetto, in that it's a place only for an outcast subset of the population. I don't feel like I can just share Less Wrong articles to many places because Less Wrong lacks respectability in wider society and is only respectable with those who are part of the LW ghetto's culture.

This doesn't mean the ghetto needs to be destroyed, but it does suggest that many of our brightest folks will seek other venues for expression that are more respectable, even if it's dropping (rising) to the neutral level of respectability offered by an anonymous blog. We might come home and prefer to live in LW (the discussions), but an important part of our public selves is oriented towards participating with the larger world.

Maybe as a reader you'd like Less Wrong to be a better place to read things again, just as the average person living in a ghetto may prefer for its luminaries to continue to focus their efforts inward and thus make the ghetto better on average, but as a writer Less Wrong doesn't feel to me like a place I want to work unless I don't think I can make myself respectable to a wider audience.

I badly miss downvotes. There's a lot of stuff I think just needs to be downvoted into oblivion and things aren't going to be good until we can do that again.

Okay, I think I know why I don't like link posts. It's because I can't perform a single click that gets me to both the content and the comments. Instead I need to click twice: once to see the content and once to access the comments on the content. I feel slightly betrayed by the interface when I click on the title of the post and my usual expectations about getting to see both a post and its comments aren't satisfied.

As a data point, I definitely experienced a "loss of locus" on Less Wrong a couple years ago when it seemed that the quality of the central themes had been dying down. There was less abuzz about progress being made on what seemed like fundamental topics, and that lack of excitement drove away the high quality participants.

I tend to think that the thing that can bring back LW would be similar sets of insights. While marginal improvements to moderation structure and visibility are great, people want to come back to LW for the same reasons that brought them here in the first place. The creation of other loci doesn't need to be either encouraged our discouraged; LW can just be one particular kind of locus for LW-type things.

I personally have been excited by the recent attempts of bringing it back, and I'm hungry for better and newer content and discussion. I think a huge topic that hasn't adequately been hashed out in a LW-type way are the spat of new writings roughly encompassing the "post" or "meta" rationalist sphere, with Keganism at the root. I've only seen a few brief, almost confused mentions of these writings in and around rationalist Facebook, but no longer-form, well-written serious explorations in LW form. But what's been fascinating about these mentions is the level of intrigue that rationalists seem to have for these ideas, without necessarily buying into them directly. There's an entire diaspora of rationalists almost afraid to identify as Keganites/Chapmanites/Metarationalists, for fear it contravenes their rationalist principles. Seems at least good fodder for creating some more broken-down mathematical and philosophical explorations of where that intrigue comes from, how it relates to The Way, and possibly a more complete critique of the rationalist program without all the negativity.

Edit: And yes, this is a new account! I'm rebranding with my personal identity in the EA sphere, since I've begun to meet many people in real life and have continued plans to contribute and collaborate!

Do you feel the "link post ugh"?

[pollid:1179]

The things most people are interested in discussing are frowned upon/banned from discussion on LW. That's why they go to SSC. The world has changed in the past 10 years, and the conversational rules and restrictions of 2009 no longer make sense today.

The rationalsphere, if you expand it to include blogs like Marginal Revolution, is one of the few intellectual mechanisms left to disentangle complex information from the clusterf* of modern politics. Not talking about it here through a clear rationalist framework is a tragedy.

Well, I've been here two weeks now and it's been good. Interesting. Learned some things, had some decent discussions.

I don't mind the links, I just don't think they should be posted one by one, and I don't think the post title should be the link. Put the link in the body of the post. And users who like to contribute lots of links to random articles rather than their own blogs - that's fine, good even, but maybe consider collating a week's worth into one post. So you might have a few different conversations going on in the comments, so what? Better than half the links posted being a "miss" and sitting there with no comments.

Comment quality. Now look, it's awful cheek from a newbie like me, I know, but I'll give my honest opinion because it might be useful to see the perspective of a new member - not a returning old member or a long-time lurker but a really new member. After all, if you want the place to thrive to you need to attract and retain new members, right?

It's not just the number of comments, or even their level of engagement with the main post, it's the whole tone. There's this sort of... malaise, for want of a better word, that seems to hang over the place. I sometimes get the sense that people aren't really enjoying being here. There's this sort of dry, formal detachment in a lot of the comments and it's hard to separate out personalities and characters (with several notable exceptions - gjm, for one). Basically, it feels like people either aren't having fun or don't want to look like they're having fun. (Not Lumifer, obviously. Lumifer definitely has fun.) Point is, I came here all enthusiasm, ready to enjoy myself having interesting debates with interesting people - which I have had, but the atmosphere is like, totally harshing my buzz, man.

That's my two cents, I'll shut up now.