At the risk of sounding ridiculous, I will self-identify as a member of the intellectual elite since no one else seems to want to.
I'm occasionally engaged in LW and I'm interested in rationality and applied psychology and the idea of FAI.
I don't think LW is necessarily the best venue for discussing big important ideas. Making a post on the internet is something I might spend 4-5 working hours on. It might even be something I'll spend a couple days on, but that's an inconsequential amount of my time. And the vast majority of the people who read whatever post I generate will spend generously 15-20 minutes thinking about it. I'm actively working on reading and checking the math in a 300 page textbook in order to make a post on LW six months from now that maybe 100 people will read and almost no one will take seriously. If my day job weren't writing academic papers with similarly dim readership prospects this would surely be overwhelmingly demoralizing. There's a commitment issue here where it doesn't make sense to invest a lot of time in impressing/convincing LW readers. I have no guarantee that anyone is seriously engaged with whatever idea I present here as opposed to just being en...
I'm actively working on reading and checking the math in a 300 page textbook in order to make a post on LW six months from now that maybe 100 people will read and almost no one will take seriously.
Thanks! But 100 people is a serious underestimate: far more people read your previous posts on the subject (only a fraction of readers vote, and you got 43 upvotes on your post about nanotechnology). If you wind up with some substantive technical criticisms, I expect Eric Drexler will take time to reply, I for one will be seriously interested, and it will be frequently linked to in discussions about Drexlerian nanotechnology.
The most-viewed LW post has hundreds of thousands of hits, and there are many at 10,000+ (search the link for "pageviews").
Hm. Let me throw out several points in random order:
-- I don't think LW is a "general-interest" forum. Not even "relatively". However that's fine -- there are really no such things as general-interest forums because their lack of focus kills them. What you have, actually, is online communities some of which spend their time chatting about whatever in the general section of their forums. But that general section is just for overflow, the community itself is formed and kept together by something that binds much tighter than general interest.
-- If I rephrase your post along the lines of "LW is a web-based club for smart people. How do we get more smart people to join our club?" -- would you object?
-- Size matters. In particular, online communities have certain optimal size for cohesiveness -- be too small and it's just a few old-timers making inside jokes; grow too big and you drown in a cacophony of noise. I've seen online communities mutate into something quite different from the original through massive growth. That may be fine in the grand scheme of things, but the original character is lost.
-- While attracting "elite" how are you going to g...
There is correlation between "being highly successful in real life" and "being able to avoid wasting time chattering away on the 'net".
Quoting this because IMO it's the most important of the lot. Almost all the people I think of as 'old guard' barely post anymore because they're too busy working at CFAR and/or working on personal projects
As one data point, my father has been retired for 7 years. He got a PhD in physics and then became a software engineer after deciding he didn't really enjoy research. He's interested in LessWrong-y topics like rationality, optimal philanthropy, and some of the areas of philosophy that are often discussed here. He's read and enjoyed some of the articles I've linked him to on LessWrong. He should be a shoe-in, right?
But he didn't grow up in a time when online communities were a thing. They're just not part of his life and he has no interest in joining one.
They're just not part of his life and he has no interest in joining one.
Just curious: do you know he has no interest, or do you assume he has no interest?
Yeah, I realized that while writing it. You're right - I don't know for sure that he has no interest at all. Although it is true that he hasn't made an account here despite reading and enjoying some posts here.
I have also never heard him mention any other online communities, and I talk to him often enough that I'd expect it to come up.
Part of the problem is that a lot of LW cultural dynamics are built around status competition but we don't really have a lot of "rationality lessons" in the canon for redirecting such things very well as a group. The entire "rationality dojo" framing (with implications of pretend conflict and tournaments and ranking and so on) has always seems like it was strategically designed to appeal to people who are male and under 30. From a world saving perspective there's a lot to say for the framing in terms of inspiring young men to do positive things with their passion and personal energy, but it also carries with it some of the problems I see in the existing comments...
With the dojo framing, you'll tend to appeal to people who haven't leveled up yet, but who want to, and some people who haven't leveled up have a chip on their shoulder when they start out. This chip is visible in the sort of reaction that runs "How dare you you use word 'elite' without irony, as though to suggest there are people who are objectively more awesome than I am!" (And generally, I suspect there is at least sequence's worth of content on the issues that were touched upon when T...
To minimize the burden on someone you really want to participate you could conduct an audio interview with him and then post the transcript and link to the audio.
College professors who have just published a book will be especially open to writing a post that will generate publicity for their book. Tell them the post will go live on the day that Amazon starts selling their book and you will urge readers who like the book to write an honest review of it for Amazon. LW could develop a reputation as a place where if you participate and write a high quality book, lots of people will write online reviews of the book.
suppose it's true that Less Wrong is the highest-quality relatively-general-interest forum on the web. In that case, we're sitting on a big opportunity to grow Less Wrong into the "standard" general-interest discussion hub for people with high intelligence and high metacognition (shorthand: "intellectual elites").
I'm skeptical. Suppose it is true--it doesn't follow that there's a realistic possibility of broadening the appeal, much less making it the "standard" general-interest discussion hub. I think there are dozens of reasons it's unlikely, but off the top of my head: there are many publications and forums already motivated to do so who have deeper pockets, and it is incredibly hard to corral contributors in such a way that they generate high value content for you without wanting to captain their own ships.
But that's supposing it's true. An outside observer might reasonably see a little bit of hubris in the claim that LW is the highest-level discussion forum on the entire internet. And I think it's pretty obvious that it's not general interest. It's a very narrow set of interests: cognitive bias, AI, philosophy, cryogenics, philanthropy, evo psyc...
I don't know what an 'elite' is, but I try to engage here on narrow topics I know something about, and find it a generally frustrating experience.
If you are who I think you are, then you have a PhD in computer science, which indicates that you are probably fairly intellectually elite. If you have found engaging on LW to be generally frustrating, then your input on the matter may be helpful.
Ha! Well, I often engage here on broad topics I know little about, and still find it generally frustrating.
I have a similar experience (though I sure comment on different areas) and impressions... I find it that this place is of questionable end-use-value as a general interest forum due to the founder effect of an extremely specific goal and worldview brought by its initial members, homogeneity of culture and goals and life experience on the part of its higher-ups, and a very strong set of shared assumptions about how the world works which is often founded more in pleasing fiction and ideology than actually trying to figure out reality.
In other words, the exact same thing as any web forum made up of humans. With the exception that it is often much much more (annoyingly) self-important than most due to the subset who honestly in seriousness somehow believe their small subset of upright talking monkeys are saving the universe. Can definitely be a fun and occasionally useful place but it sure ain't the most useful thing in the world and I honestly have no idea how anyone could possibly get that thought. Nothing special, move along (unless you happen to enjoy it).
On the other hand my technical explanations of stuff tend to go over with fewer hitches here than in other electronic spots, and when they do have hitches they have a greater tendency to come from extreme familiarity with a technical context vastly different than the context I come from which leads to misleading inferences.
Well, I'm an intellectual non-elite, but I've got an opinion.
LessWrong is great. But it isn't "general interest". There is some very solid (and entertaining) content on rationality, but transhumanism/friendly AI and all it's manifold implications set the tone for a good portion of everything on here.
To your proposed projects:
Isn't that called a magazine?
LW's jargon is part of it's charm... and, I think, it's effectiveness in communicating ideas without engaging the previous connotations and biases of it's readers. Of course, it probably does interfere with LW gaining more widespread, mainstream appeal among "intellectual elites" so, to that end, get rid of it.
Generally, I think LW is awesome. But "highest quality on the internet"? Yowza. It's a big internet and that's a big supposition. (Is there a name for a bias where you become a bit too thrilled with your own online forum's greatness?)
I'd say keep doing what ya'll are doing. By their nature, online forums seem to fill relatively narrow-interest niches and I think LW does a great job of that.
LessWrong = Highest-quality-FAI-no-politics-allowed-genius-filled-online-forum. Of 2013.
Forgive me, but the premise of this post seems unbelievably arrogant. You are interested in communicating with "intellectual elites"; these people have their own communities and channels of communication. Instead of asking what those channels are and how you can become part of them, you instead ask how you can lure those people away from their communities, so that they'll devote their limited free time to posting on LW instead.
I'm in academia (not an "intellectual elite", just a lowly grad student), and I've often felt torn between my allegiances to the academic community vs. the LessWrong community. In part, the conflict exists because LessWrong frames itself as an alternative to academia, as better than academia, a place where the true intellectuals can congregate, free from the constraints of the system of academic credibility, which unfairly penalizes autodidacts, or something. Academia has its problems, of course, and I agree with some of the LessWrong criticisms of it. But academia does have higher standards of rigor: peer review, actual empirical investigation of phenomena instead of armchair speculation based on the contents of pop science books, an...
Increasingly I post my thoughts to Facebook for the following very simple reason: If I don't like a comment on my status thread, I click 'x' on it, and then it's gone without a trace. Intellectual elites who are not teenagers living in Wyoming will often have other mailing lists, or even other live human beings, from whom they can get consistently high-quality conversation with none of the dreck that emerges when all of real life's checks and balances are disengaged.
This isn't to say that to engage intellectual elites you must offer an 'x' button on all comments on their post, just like Facebook does - though that would be a good start at not having them walk away and go someplace where there's only intelligent people to talk to. I've been wondering if it would be possible to design a less democratic karma system which would serve the same function, though more in a context of "What is the successor to Wikipedia?" or "What is the successor to peer review?" with trying it as a successor to Less Wrong just being one possible way of testing out the latter more important functions. One also notes that many academic types have self-contradictory beliefs about 'ce...
It's easy to cite Knol and Citizendium as failures of scholarly curation, but what of Springer's Encyclopedia of Mathematics? I know at least five of epic-level mathematicians who wouldn't dream of writing an article for any random website, but jumped at the chance to write a section of the EOM.
It's easy to cite Knol and Citizendium as failures of scholarly curation, but what of Springer's Encyclopedia of Mathematics?
Or the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, which tends to be my first resource to visit if there's a new philosophical topic I'm interested in.
Come to think of it, do you happen to know ANY active, vibrant, useful communities which aggressively expel people not only for being trolls or assholes, but just because they aren't good enough?
Yes... but I'm not allowed to talk about them on the wide open internet where random people might hear about them.
I'm not suggesting that removing 70% of commenters would lead to a more vibrant community. I am suggesting that removing (or hiding) 70% of comments would lead to a more vibrant community. Intelligent commentary and discussion drown when articles accumulate more than hundreds of comments, for example.
My grandparent thread was inspired by Eliezer's, but after I pared it down to a couple of sentences it really isn't about attracting elites anymore. I'll flesh the idea of it out on a comment in the Open Thread (and later link to it here), if you'd like to continue discussion.
ETA I've fleshed out the idea on the Open Thread, so lets please move discussion there.
From an elite perspective, most of LW discussion would consist of trivia, internal affairs, uninformed opinion, and superficial disputation. The community might have curiosity value because of its idiosyncrasies, or more than curiosity value for someone who had an independent reason to be interested in its themes or practices; so a few such people might study it once, and a rarer few might lurk, but hardly anyone of that status is going to become a regular.
The term "intellectual elite" rubs me the wrong way. It makes me think of Mensa and other groups with too much ego for their own good. Isn't there something more neutral? "Elitism" is not a good label to be stuck with.
This gives most of the benefit of the "give people facebook censorship power" preference of Eliezer without the catastrophic game theoretic implications of doing that in an environment where you cannot choose who you subscribe to. I expect the ability to block users to drastically cut down both on perceived and actual low value content on the site and significantly improve user experience.
Question: Someone(Such as me, but it seems likely others may feel the same) reads this and asks themselves "Am I an intellectual elite?" or "Am I engaging enough on Less Wrong?"
How do you want that person to answer those questions?
I mean, there are at least a few modes of failure I can think people may have upon seeing that appeal:
A: Someone isn't really all that intellectually elite, and they think "Ah! I'm elite, Luke wants me to post more." Posts More, increases noise, decreases quality of discussion
B: Someone really is that intellectually elite, and they think "Well, I may have coauthored a paper, but I'm no elite like Yudkowsky." Lurks, stays disengaged.
C: Someone really is that intellectually elite, and they really are engaging plenty, and they think "Lukeprog still wants more? I'm spending too much time posting at work as it is!" Disengages from exhaustion.
How do you avoid those problems, bearing in mind that not all of them are necessarily equally problematic or likely, and that it seems likely the list isn't exhaustive?
(Ninja Edit) As an example of the list not being exhaustive, a quick review of comments that had occurred ...
E: Someone who thinks of themselves as intellectually elite, thinks of Eliezer and LW as not intellectually elite (no degree; writes fanfic), and considers the request to be Luke seeking to borrow "elite" credibility for non-credible ideas. Posts yet another blog post demeaning LW.
F: Someone who thinks of the notion of "intellectual elite" as a social problem, an effort to privilege some kinds of mental work (getting rich people to pay you to write philosophy papers) over other mental work (say, organizing religious charities, labor unions, or political movements), and considers the request to be a symptom of LW's lack of spiritual, social, or political consciousness. Posts yet another blog post demeaning LW.
You cite MathOverflow as an excellent community, and I agree. Joel Spolsky (Joel on Software, and later founder of StackOverflow) gave a talk on the The Cultural Anthropology of Stack Exchange and how they attracted and maintain communities. The talk starts off with a criticism of deeply nested replies. I disagreed with that criticism, but found the rest of the talk concrete and lucid.
One issue, and I haven't read the other comments to see whether it's already been brought up, is that it seems hard to justify time expenditure on LessWrong to elites whose time is valuable, or at least to the people that elites need to justify their time expenditure to. For example, time on MathOverflow can be justified to research mathematicians (and/or to grant committees) by the promise that it is a space to ask and answer questions in research mathematics and therefore to advance the cause of mathematics in general. It's less clear to me what the justification for spending time on LessWrong is to, say, a smart business executive. (Or is this not the kind of audience you have in mind by the term "intellectual elite"?)
One issue, and I haven't read the other comments to see whether it's already been brought up, is that it seems hard to justify time expenditure on LessWrong to elites whose time is valuable
For example, neither Luke himself nor Anna Salamon spend much time posting on lesswrong, despite their affiliations and relevant interests. The same reasoning likely applies to others.
One thing which might be useful is alt tags for the links throughout the sequences. The cross-references can be overwhelming - it'd be nice to hover over a link and see a quick summary of what's being linked to and why it's relevant.
As I see it the question isn't so much about elites and non-elites, but about problem solvers and storytellers. Storytellers give you a reason to want to cross the ocean, problem solvers make sure that you have boat that doesn't sink. Much of the internet is populated by storytellers - someone might do a lot of problem solving in their day job, and then write stories about it in a blog.
MathOverflow, the top site cited as what Less Wrong should be aiming for, is very much about problem solving - you post a problem and can hope to get an answer from some ...
When I saw the title, "Engaging Intellectual Elites at Less Wrong" I thought -- woohoo, they're interested in being interesting again!
I return to Less Wrong very frequently but the topics don't seem to interest me as much as they did years ago. Most articles seem to be about meet-ups, and with some thought I could identify why some of the other topics (such as the ones about optimal charity) are less interesting to me.
I thought the topics on metaphysics were really fascinating. I'm not sure that's the correct term but metaphysical what-is-the-st...
If one thinks of LW not as the final destination to which intellectual elites should be attracted, but a useful and productive entry point for LW-associated organisations (whether formally affiliated or loosely linked) also including LW itself, it seems to me that things are largely on the right track. Judging from the welcome threads there seems to have been a great deal of success in recruiting young members especially, but not only, through HPMoR. And often there is a youthful feel to discussions here, quite appropriately as many young members are di...
I initially had an extremely negative emotional response to this post. Then I realized you actually point out exactly why I had such a response with point number 2.
Less Wrong has a language problem.
To someone first coming to read the discussion forum with only a vague idea of what Less Wrong represents (maybe even slightly biased towards thinking of the community as an elitist cultish ivory tower exercise in intellectual masturbation), this post, to be short, doesn't help.
What makes this sort of funny is that your actual message is just, "We want mor...
My webpages sometimes are linked on the SA forums (usually relating to either nootropics or Neon Genesis Evangelion; I've poked around the relevant threads looking for useful points or citations or criticism). Nothing about them ever made me think that the SA forums were unusually insightful or intelligent.
I can't believe that no-one has mentioned Ask Metafilter (http://ask.metafilter.com/). There seem to be a large number of people there capable of intelligent discussion (not quite at the level of Less Wrong), but they covered a far broader range of topics.
high intelligence and high metacognition
How do you measure or assess a person's "metacognition"?
For that matter, how do you measure or assess your own metacognition?
I think LW would profit immensely from a team of professional moderators who
take a thread with lots of comments and turn it into a structured overview of arguments and counterarguments (and give an evaluation of how open or complete the discussion is)
rate comments in a way that is more informative than mere up/downvotes, possibly in more than one dimension ( Relevance / logical structure of the comment / Quality of the central argument)
promote high q
Is Less Wrong, despite its flaws, the highest-quality relatively-general-interest forum on the web? It seems to me that, to find reliably higher-quality discussion, I must turn to more narrowly focused sites, e.g. MathOverflow and the GiveWell blog.
Many people smarter than myself have reported the same impression. But if you know of any comparably high-quality relatively-general-interest forums, please link me to them!
In the meantime: suppose it's true that Less Wrong is the highest-quality relatively-general-interest forum on the web. In that case, we're sitting on a big opportunity to grow Less Wrong into the "standard" general-interest discussion hub for people with high intelligence and high metacognition (shorthand: "intellectual elites").
Earlier, Jonah Sinick lamented the scarcity of elites on the web. How can we get more intellectual elites to engage on the web, and in particular at Less Wrong?
Some projects to improve the situation are extremely costly:
Code changes, however, could be significantly less costly. New features or site structure elements could increase engagement by intellectual elites. (To avoid priming and contamination, I'll hold back from naming specific examples here.)
To help us figure out which code changes are most likely to increase engagement on Less Wrong by intellectual elites, specific MIRI volunteers will be interviewing intellectual elites who (1) are familiar enough with Less Wrong to be able to simulate which code changes might cause them to engage more, but who (2) mostly just lurk, currently.
In the meantime, I figured I'd throw these ideas to the community for feedback and suggestions.