Epistemic status: Broad, well-developed speculation. Preface To my knowledge, this essay contains the most comprehensive list of criticisms of the rationality community to date. Understandably, some people may take this as a rejection of the community as a whole. It is not. In order to fix problems affecting a non-hierarchical...
Is this feature likely to be released in the near future?
I personally have a post sitting in drafts that is far too long to rely on footnotes, as it would break the reading experience. Sidenotes would be ideal for these kinds of posts, but it would be almost as good if you had an option to put them at the end of a paragraph in a little box or something, as that would translate well to the mobile reading experience.
Agree, I am also confused about this as a bystander.
It wasn't announced on the list this year, so I'm not sure what the situation is. If I were to guess, I'd say the person who set things up last year didn't respond to email requests for information about this year's plans.
If you want to take the initiative to organize the Manchester meetup, you are welcome to do so.
Update: At 11:30 we are moving to foundation coffee on Whitworth Street
(Disclaimer: This is a brief low effort reply because I've spent a large amount of time on this topic with very little to show for it, but I also don't want to ignore questions which people have a reasonable expectation of getting a response.)
If you don't write a seperate post about it, you could reply to this comment with the results. (i have nothing further to add at this time.)
I think the question becomes much more social than technical. It's not about how to design the UI, it's about evolving cultural norms. I would say it's both, it's getting users to want to do something and having the UI make it easy for them to do it.
(As a side note, for some reason people have become more reluctant in the past decade to rebel against interfaces and the implicit messages sent by its design choices. Like, until about last year you could not get people to use Discord as a tool for serious work, even though it was better than Slack, simply because it was associated with gamers.)
... (read more)I suppose a good starting
I think those things would be a step in the right direction, but I'd be surprised if they turned out to be sufficient. Remember, LessWrong already notifies the subset of the userbase most likely to reply (i.e. users who have already replied) when there are new comments, but those users choose to ignore them after ~2 weeks.
For things to actually change, I predict that we'd first need a widespread perception that this behaviour is a problem, then have various UI nudges put in place. The only way you'd get the desired behaviour change without that consensus is if the UI went beyond nudging and aggressively pushed it as the default.
I think points 2 and 3 are correct, but the thing I wanted to convey was that without strong explicit preferences for things to be different, it's unlikely that the necessary changes would be made.
I think that while 1 is often true in general, it is not true in this specific case. We already have the positive sum solution (notifications) which allows anyone to continue discussions for as long as they like without having to manually check for new replies, and this clearly isn't enough to unstick the norm of avoiding comment sections once a post is a few weeks old. This implies it would require a more drastic change, which likely involves making tradeoffs that will negatively impact people who are satisfied with the current homepage.
Yesterday I noticed that some of what I'd attributed to cultural differences in communication strength between myself and the LessWrong audience was actually due to differences in when I would choose to verbalise something. I originally thought this was me opting to state my positions clearly instead of couching them in false uncertainty so they would sound less abrasive, but yesterday I left some comments where I found myself wanting to use vocabulary that was a significantly more "nuanced" than it used to be (example) and yet I didn't feel like I was being insincere.
I don't think this is a case of learning from my youthful hubris or assimilating into rationalist culture,... (read more)
Epistemic status: Broad, well-developed speculation.
To my knowledge, this essay contains the most comprehensive list of criticisms of the rationality community to date. Understandably, some people may take this as a rejection of the community as a whole. It is not. In order to fix problems affecting a non-hierarchical group, individuals within the group need to have a shared understanding of them. In order to do this, someone has to look under the hood and report back with their findings.
Most people are aware there is something wrong in a general sense. There is, to some extent, an awareness that things aren’t quite right but little consensus at to whether it's analogous to a... (read 20326 more words →)
Plausible theory.
In the scenario where a breakthrough leads to a coordination takeoff, what implications do you think that would have for alignment/AI safety research?