Open Thread Summer 2026

habryka

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The Open Thread tag is here. The Open Thread sequence is here.

If it’s worth saying, but not worth its own post, here's a place to put it.

If you're new to the community, you can start reading the Highlights from the Sequences, a collection of posts about the core ideas of LessWrong.

The Open Thread tag is here. The Open Thread sequence is here.

Thomas Kwa responded to my notes on frontpaging Why I Left Google DeepMind. I didn't want to make the comment section about this and it seemed like it might turn into a sprawling metadiscussion, so I put it over here.

It would have been an outrage IMO to not frontpage this, so I'm glad it's frontpaged. It's super timeless and valuable, and the opinions were tactfully conveyed and necessary for the post.
To not express strong opinions about Google Alex would have to self-censor, which is counter to the entire spirit of the post and would make it substantially harder to follow his strategic and moral thinking.

I agree "the post does a good job being frontpage" (like obviously we agree on that). But, you seem worried about some class of problem that's orthogonal to or ignoring why we have a frontpage distinction.

Plenty of good posts are not frontpage.

Sometimes, a good post has hypothetical frontpage version of itself but the "real post" won't be frontpage. In those cases, the standard recommendation is "write the frontpage version, and a separate version that covers the less-frontpagey parts."

In this case that wasn't necessary (In addition to generally being a good, timeless piece, this also does the "social move" part in a minimal, evenhanded, factual way that I liked).

(Alex also made a separate post that was "even more frontpagey", just focusing on the internal governance details).

But, it sounds like you don't like that I was even counting "is a social move" in the "evidence for not frontpaging" column, and, dunno what to tell you other than "yep, there are some costs to having the frontpage policy that might even come up." (Or, maybe seems like think I'm saying it's bad that this was nonzero a social move? I don't think that! Social moves are correct sometimes! "counts somewhat against frontpage" !== "shouldn't have been made")

8Thomas Kwa4mo

Your original comment sounded like the post was close to the bar, whereas I think the social and political opinions were maybe 10x smaller than the timeless value. I also think that the timeless value of this post is higher than any reasonable version that tried to avoid social opinions. Maybe we agree on this too.

Ah, that's fair. I didn't mean it was close to the bar.

I actually hadn't thought that much about exactly how close it was bar (it was sufficiently obviously over-the-bar upon reflection). The motivation for the notice was

a) the considerations were something I hadn't quite thought through and articulated before

b) if you hadn't paid much attention to the content and were just going off initial vibes, it'd be less obvious

c) future people who do similar writeups that are some mix of "somewhat less timeless, somewhat more social-move-y" might get a different decision.

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