LessWrong's UX may not be living up to its ideas

neo

The issue:

I love LessWrong, and largely credit the information I've found on it with shaping the way I think and view the world.
At the same time, I think it's quite unfriendly to newcomers - I for one found it difficult to develop a coherent picture of the AI safety problem in all of its dimensions - taking several months of reading through old threads to realize why certain people held certain beliefs, for example.
- I think this is the case because much of the discussion here is happening "on the cutting edge" so to speak; most users are actively exploring different lines of thought with new ideas built on complex world models, and are not necessarily revisiting or referencing the years of prior knowledge and belief that underpin their thinking.
I'm interested in seeing how this process could be made more efficient; I think a more streamlined "onboarding" process for newcomers could save a lot of valuable time and help people become more impactful quicker.
A potential solution is to develop a curated "101 curriculum" for AI safety (I'm sure many exist), but I think interfacing with the forum directly is better because:
- A) It feels like you are part of an active discussion between experts, rather than a student in a class. This personally enhanced my sense of agency around AI safety and big problems more generally.
- B) Reading especially prescient discussions from years before the AI boom greatly boosted my respect for particular thinkers and the broader community.

What features could improve the UX? I have a few rough ideas:

Encourage and facilitate creation of "current beliefs" pages for each user, where they can detail their present-day positions on certain subjects (AI timelines are a relatively simple example), recount their intellectual journey / past updates, reference particularly impactful posts and threads, etc.
- This would have been, and will be, super useful for me - there are many thinkers I respect transitively, without necessarily understanding how they arrived at their current views.
- Perhaps this can be expanded into a community-wide analysis of viewpoints that could help inform strategic decision making or signal clear consensus with additional context/detail.
Better search: the current search function is very hard to use for finding specific posts - I often struggle to find articles that I vaguely remember even if I feel like I have enough detail. Not sure if this is because the info here is unusually conceptually dense – but I'm guessing there are improvements that can be made to the architecture.
Other organizational tools: content tags are nice, but they are a little too broad to be very helpful IMO. Maybe a more sophisticated tagging scheme, or some way for users to individually tag/curate articles (and maybe comments) in a publicly visible way? It would be nice to accurately situate individual posts within the larger discussion they are a part of and I don't think the current "mentioned in" section does a good enough job at that.

I think improving the interfaces we use for navigating information can be hugely impactful if implemented at scale, by improving coordination and group agency.

I am interested in hearing feedback!

Do any of these feature additions seem potentially good? Have any of them been attempted in the past? Do they exist elsewhere?
Have I missed any similar, previous discussions about this?
Are there people actively working on these issues? I know Forethought has published some very useful adjacent content but I'm not sure what it has led to.
Are there any prototypes/projects/ideas you would be interested in seeing explored/built?

Thanks.

Quick thoughts. Note that I'm not that into AI safety problems and am speaking in general about LW.

I think this is the case because much of the discussion here is happening "on the cutting edge" so to speak; most users are actively exploring different lines of thought with new ideas built on complex world models, and are not necessarily revisiting or referencing the years of prior knowledge and belief that underpin their thinking.

I agree. This seems downstream of the poor search in LW and wikitags. Better search is good, but absent that we should tell people to google with query site:lesswrong.com. The UI also could link posts to related posts automatically, this is somewhat hard but definitely doable.

I'm interested in seeing how this process could be made more efficient; I think a more streamlined "onboarding" process for newcomers could save a lot of valuable time and help people become more impactful quicker.

(This is not a confident statement I'm thinking out loud) I'm not sure if a significant portion of the time from newcomers to contributors is spent on things that would benefit from better onboarding, like even with perfect onboarding someone would still need to motivate themselves to read quite a large chunk of text to reach the pareto frontier.

Encourage and facilitate creation of "current beliefs" pages for each user, where they can detail their present-day positions on certain subjects (AI timelines are a relatively simple example), recount their intellectual journey / past updates, reference particularly impactful posts and threads, etc.

This seems like it will just create a bunch of stale pages that are also hard to find what you want because each person's belief page will contain too many different topics. Also, although I'm sure with official site-level support more people will do this, the fact that I basically never seen someone do this makes me think that people just don't like to spend so much time organizing their intellectual journey such that it is clear enough to other people; it seems genuinely time-consuming to put in this effort.

Other organizational tools: content tags are nice, but they are a little too broad to be very helpful IMO. Maybe a more sophisticated tagging scheme, or some way for users to individually tag/curate articles (and maybe comments) in a publicly visible way?

Similar to the "current beliefs" pages, I think the main bottleneck isn't tooling, it is how much time people are spending to make things legible for other people/newcomers. I don't think sophisticate tagging scheme is a good idea, I have never seen extremely fine grain tags work out. Also, with fine-grained tags the problem shifts to the discoverability of tags, how would you know you have found all the tags that are somewhat related? Also tags are time-consuming to maintain, the LW tagging AI works well currently but I think accuracy would fall with too many tags.

It would be nice to accurately situate individual posts within the larger discussion they are a part of and I don't think the current "mentioned in" section does a good enough job at that.

Someone can just make a post organizing the past discussions! But again ~nobody does that.

Better search is good, but absent that we should tell people to google with query site:lesswrong.com.

In the age of LLMs with thinking mode, asking an LLM to search LessWrong for what you are looking is often going to be more efficient than googling.

even with perfect onboarding someone would still need to motivate themselves to read quite a large chunk of text to reach the pareto frontier.

Sure, I just don't think this is a big issue because people bottlenecked by motivation probably won't be serious contributors, and it's worth improving things for those that will.

I think the main bottleneck isn't tooling, it is how much time people are spending to make things legible for other people/newcomers.

Yep, I'm pretty much in agreement with your broader point here – most of this stuff fails at the user level. It seems like manually organizing content would be a good place to start for me.

At the same time, I want to explore how this can become a self-propelled process in the future. It seems like an obvious use case for LLMs, and presumably not a massive engineering task.

I appreciate the comments – hopefully you can weigh in as I continue looking into it.

Sure, I just don't think this is a big issue because people bottlenecked by motivation probably won't be serious contributors, and it's worth improving things for those that will.

Yeah. I am just thinking, if for example only 1% of the time is wasted on bad onboarding, then it isn't important to optimize onboarding. I don't have good intuition or data on how bad onboarding is right now though.

Quick thoughts. Note that I'm not that into AI safety problems and am speaking in general about LW.

I think this is the case because much of the discussion here is happening "on the cutting edge" so to speak; most users are actively exploring different lines of thought with new ideas built on complex world models, and are not necessarily revisiting or referencing the years of prior knowledge and belief that underpin their thinking.

I'm interested in seeing how this process could be made more efficient; I think a more streamlined "onboarding" process for newcomers could save a lot of valuable time and help people become more impactful quicker.

Encourage and facilitate creation of "current beliefs" pages for each user, where they can detail their present-day positions on certain subjects (AI timelines are a relatively simple example), recount their intellectual journey / past updates, reference particularly impactful posts and threads, etc.

Other organizational tools: content tags are nice, but they are a little too broad to be very helpful IMO. Maybe a more sophisticated tagging scheme, or some way for users to individually tag/curate articles (and maybe comments) in a publicly visible way?

It would be nice to accurately situate individual posts within the larger discussion they are a part of and I don't think the current "mentioned in" section does a good enough job at that.

Someone can just make a post organizing the past discussions! But again ~nobody does that.

Better search is good, but absent that we should tell people to google with query site:lesswrong.com.

In the age of LLMs with thinking mode, asking an LLM to search LessWrong for what you are looking is often going to be more efficient than googling.

even with perfect onboarding someone would still need to motivate themselves to read quite a large chunk of text to reach the pareto frontier.

Sure, I just don't think this is a big issue because people bottlenecked by motivation probably won't be serious contributors, and it's worth improving things for those that will.

I think the main bottleneck isn't tooling, it is how much time people are spending to make things legible for other people/newcomers.

Yep, I'm pretty much in agreement with your broader point here – most of this stuff fails at the user level. It seems like manually organizing content would be a good place to start for me.

At the same time, I want to explore how this can become a self-propelled process in the future. It seems like an obvious use case for LLMs, and presumably not a massive engineering task.

I appreciate the comments – hopefully you can weigh in as I continue looking into it.

Sure, I just don't think this is a big issue because people bottlenecked by motivation probably won't be serious contributors, and it's worth improving things for those that will.

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LessWrong's UX may not be living up to its ideas

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