I think what I like the most is when there is a good summary story with the option to read more details on the parts that interest me, ideally with these complements forming their own coherent article. The structure this suggests is to have two posts:

• One that gives a high level picture focused on the general story, what I need to understand, and what I am expected to understand. With regular (hyperlink) references to parts of the second.
• One that gives a lot of details and can still stand on its own if I want a deep dive.

One great advantage of this is that the first also serves as a primer on the second, making it easier to read it.

I can't think of an example of blogposts doing this, though I think there are some sequences on LW that follow this logic. But some books do this, with detailed chapters following high level summaries. "The mind illuminated" and "Against method" come to mind.

A few others

• Death from the Castlevania series is simply evil
• Death in Supernatural is debatable. He is made sympathetic at some point but in his first appearance he is about to destroy Chicago then changes his mind with the reason "I like the pizza".
• In the Thorgal series it is a complete asshole inventing new ways to put mortals close to being dead without being fully dead, for fun.

Also I think there are various stories and depictions where death is not a character but makes an appearance in some way, maybe purely symbolic, and seems to be evil or to enjoy humans dying. I am sure I have seen many depictions of laughing death as a metaphor of scenes of carnage (the first that comes to mind is a double page in the Darkmoon Chronicles where the burning of cities is illustrated with a laughing/smiling reaper).

So perhaps we could say that when Death is made a real character in stories it is more often than not a "kind hardworking man with a job to do"; but at the same time most depictions of the reaper are not characters but rather use a simple portrayal as a metaphor for evil and slaughter. Somewhat in the spirit of this famous image

If this is correct I think we can see where the friend in the post was coming from

“It’s nice to see a portrayal of Death that doesn’t paint him as some mindless villain, and actually gives him some characterization.”

I second that getting an AI to agree with your ideas proves very little. Also, it is somewhat intuitive to me that academia would always be suffering from various affective death spiral dynamics. You seem to have a specific one in mind, but I am not sure what it is or how it relates to the post.

I am not sure if there were recent changes to the pages, but:

I don't see an instance of the phrase "We suggest submitting links with a short description." on the "About" page.

The "About" page links to the new users guide which is probably what you were looking for, even if that's not quite a charter. Apologies if you already read it.

Granted I see no clear indication on that page that debates are welcome in the comments of all posts (and indeed I think there are some rare exceptions). But it does list a few things about "conversations" on the site, for example "we try to focus on what would change our minds".

I quite like some of your ideas about how to design note-taking software and I think I have a partial answer to the issues you point to:

• Make the repository of notes more semantic than usual, halfway between pure text notes and a structured database. If the notes exist in a graph database then it becomes possible to write database queries (probably with something like SPARQL).
• Allow the user to store queries within notes so the query is run whenever the note is opened. Maybe allow for a graph visualization of the query. This way the semantic structure becomes a part of the normal way to interact with the "hub" notes.
• The ontology used on a topic is defined by the structure of the links. If the user wants a new ontology they just create it on top of the old one and let the old one rot. No need to erase it and it does not distract from the new one (maybe there is some name reuse in the link/attribute names, but that's trivial to fix).
• Use LLMs to correctly annotate notes with the semantic information that populates the database (links, tags, some attributes, ...) This way they don't need taste to know how to edit, they just follow the pattern that comes with a given ontology. Perhaps this requires the user to create templates.
• Provide a good CLI (Command Line Interface) for the software. This way the user can write scripts to update their notes using any language. It becomes easy to apply the new ontology to the old notes, possibly fully automagically but most of the time there is probably a bit of manual work left afterward. That's fine.
• (unrelated to your post) let the GUI be a VScode extension so the user can use whatever other existing extension they like, this way there is no need to also design a good text editor.

I sent you a DM to talk more about this.

Small nitpick: "the if and only if" is false. It is perfectly possible to have an AI that doesn't want any moral rights and is misaligned in some other way.

I think you're right but I also think I can provide examples of "true" scaffolding skills:

1. How to pass an exam: in order to keep learning with the academic system/university/school you need to regularly do good enough at exams. That is a skill in itself (read the exam in its entirety, know when to move on, learn how hard a question is likely to be depending on the phrasing of the following questions, ...) Almost everyone safely forget most of this skill once they are done studying.
2. Learn to understand your teacher's feedback: many teachers, professional or otherwise, suck at communicating their feedback. You often need to develop a skill of understanding that specific individual's feedback. Of course there is a underlying universal skill of "being good at learning how individuals give feedback"; we could think of it as the skill "being good at building a specific kind of scaffolding".
3. Learn to accept humiliating defeat: A martial artist friend told me it is important at first to learn to accept losing all the time because you learn in the company of strictly better martial artists. Once you get better, you presumably lose less often.

This comment made me subscribe to your posts. I hope to read more on your attempts in the future! (no pressure)

I felt like I should share my uninformed two cents.

1. Interpol seems like a promising lead, if you can get the right person at Interpol to understand the situation. I am not saying this is easy, but maybe you can get an email to be sent on your behalf on the right mailing lists (alumnis of some relevant school maybe?).
2. Other comments suggested getting funding from EA and that sounds fitting to me. But there is probably someone in EA that can connect you with Interpol directly. Maybe you can request to send a broad email on top of requesting funding.