LessWrong is about learning rationality, and applying rationality to interesting problems.

An issue is that solving interesting problems often requires fairly deep technical knowledge of a field. To use rationality to help solving problems (especially as a group), you need both people who have skills in probability/meta-cognition/other-rationality skills, as well as the actual skills directly applicable to whatever problem is under discussion.

But if you show up on LW and post something technical (or even just "specialized") in a field that isn't already well represented on the forum, it'll be hard to have meaningful conversations about it.

Elsewhere on the internet there are probably forums focused on whatever-your-specialization is, but those places won't necessarily have people who know how to integrate evidence and think probabilistically in confusing domains.

So far the LW userbase has a cluster of skills related to AI alignment, some cognitive science, decision theory, etc. If a technical post isn't in one of those fields, you'll probably get better reception if it's somehow "generalist technical" (i.e. in some field that's relevant to a bunch of other fields), or if it somehow starts one inferential unit away from the overall LW userbase.

A plausibly good strategy is to try to recruit a number of people from a given field at once, to try to increase the surface area of "serious" conversations that can happen here.

It might make most sense to recruit from fields that are close enough to the existing vaguely-defined-LW memeplex that they can also get value from existing conversations here.

Anyone have ideas on where to do outreach in this vein? (Separately, perhaps: how to do outreach in this vein?). Or, alternately, anyone have a vague-feeling-of-doom about this entire approach and have alternate suggestions or reasons not to try?

Danny Case

Danny Case