Seeking Interview Participants – Research on LessWrong’s Community Design
Hi! My name is Noah, and I'm a graduate student at Georgia Tech studying Computer Science with a concentration in Human-Computer Interaction (HCI). For a research project, I'm examining how how the design of online communities shapes user behavior and discussion. I’m using LessWrong as a case study and would love to interview a few community members (30–60 min) about their experiences here.
If you’re open to chatting, please comment or DM me! Happy to provide university/IRB details if helpful.
Really interesting to visit this post in 2025. Many of your early points about multimodal models, hype cycles, and chip competition turned out to be stunningly accurate. I think that the trajectory around diplomacy and bureaucracy architectures feels a little less central compared to how things actually unfolded, with agent frameworks, RAG pipelines, etc, taking the spotlight. I still feel that the propaganda concerns resonate; the information environment continually feels warped by AI-assisted persuasion.
If we were to extend this trajectory today, do you envision future AI progress having to do more with scaling architecture (agents, tool use) or more as a story of governance and incentives (who is deploying + regulating these systems)? Or perhaps a combination of both?