No incentive feedback loop for building up to the expected quality of content | NECI not easy to connect with people. no 'community building' systems | NECI too tolerant of idiots | TMI aintnobodygottime for walls of text. OTOH, I read every word of HPMOR, and then Worm, and those are the only pieces of fiction I've read (outside of school, I guess, but those don't count and aren't/have not been retained) since Harry Potter itself. | TLW Too uncool. | TN Insufficiently Autistic | NNE Meta Contrarianism | TC Would have been keen to go to a meetup here in Wellington, NZ, but I suspect there just wasn't enough critical mass. I hear they had some okay meetups down in Christchurch, which is cool. | NBE I've heard there used to be a lot of talk about PUA techniques about LessWrong. I was interested in that too when I was an autistic teenager who didn't know any better. PUA techniques are intriguing if you're too autistic to understand the difference between social skills and manipulation. Now that I've overcome my autism, I find the insights of the "Authentic Man Program" company to be much more useful, more effective, and less bullshitty. | PA Overfocus on AI, some thought experiment BS. | TMT I think the problem with LessWrong specifically that I found is this tendency to start a discussion somewhere reasonable and then hare off in some random direction and then 1 month later you blink and all conversations are deeply entrenched in this meta-text that you're missing. Sometimes you were so fortunate that it was as simple as checking on what Eliezer spoke about/responded to recently, but other times it just was something that percolated around and a discussion that permeated various threads. You didn't notice if you had been in it the entire time, but otherwise the context loss could be egregious. | II Not enough content | NEC I don't know about "literally a cult" but there was a tendency for ingroupishness I found unappealing | C I get concerned when people look for medical advice on Less Wrong | TMI Stacked. No new ideas. | NEC Not sufficiently worried about having a good image? Maybe, not sure. Or at least, it doesn't have a good image and that's bad. | BAP Too much Contrarianism (focus on nitpicking instead of getting things done) | TC Not focused enough on object level accomplishments | TMT Very immature and lacking in integrity when it comes to disagreement and criticism | DAC No natural process for graduating from 'good regular commenter' to 'novice poster' | NECI Not enough social tech for introverts, ironically | NECI None of the above. | NOA Strongly politically biased and unaware of it | BP Overly intolerant of trolls/cranks | TIC Too fragmented. Although SSC is starting to become the new Shelling point. | D Too male gazey. Presumed audience is male, who may talk ABOUT women, but aren't women. Eg "How to get a (female) date" | ARIM Too much groupthink (but not a cult) | G Too much distrust of instrumental dogma or adherence to agreed-upon shared values. | G Different, and often apparently arbitrary, social norms | BN Too centered around yudkowsky | PC users do not get jokes very well | TS Insufficient encouragement (praise, reward) of participation and contribution. | NECI Unattractive website design, over reliance on huge amounts of text. | BA Not a cult, but looks way too much like one, and too dismissive of arguments countering badly-established beliefs. | C not enough interesting content, love virtualy every slatestarcodex post but completely uninterested in 90% of what was posted on lesswrong | NEC Pretending its particular arbitrary fascinations bore a relationship to 'rationality' other than accidental | NR Too focused on big name posters - tyranny of the vocal minority | SCA Too intolerant of newcomers and beginners. Go read the sequences is a terrible response to a newcomer. | U Too tolerant of societal gender biases masquerading as a rational processing of evolutionary truth. | NPE too many recurring arguments that never seem to get anywhere e.g. basilisk, cryonics, many worlds, are we too liberal, are we too conservative, etc. | RA Too likely to say "read the sequences" or something similar | U harassment of LW critics | DAC Required a level of intellectual rigour that took away time from more productive pursuits. In other words, I needed a break after using it for reasons of mental fatigue similar to that I'd experience after studying or working. | TR Take this with several grains of salt because I'm just a lurker who hasn't been on in months, but I think that one of the problems with LW may have just been that it was too large with no way to partition off smaller communities. Most websites that are capable of supporting a large community have something like subreddits/subforums or a following mechanism, and if I remember right LW didn't. Debate between people with disparate views is valuable and all, but so often it devolves into rehashing the same things over and over again if people have no way of splitting off into communities with some kind of ideological common ground. | NECI No real practical value, mostly entertainment | TMT Too narrow. Everything has to be expressed in the right terminology, putting it in "rationalist" terms, and only certain subjects are "allowed" (ie not banned and not frowned upon) while also not having been pretty much covered by the Sequences. So the forum gets very repetitive very quickly. | NA There's very much a point to having the Sequences as a common body of reference material and letting the community have its own jargon. However, directing people to learn that material in an inviting way is complicated. If the community is going to keep new people (or even some existing people who haven't read the entire Sequences) in quantity without losing the ability to have high-quality discussion, learning the techniques and jargon needs to be presented as a hill that can be climbed slowly (affording a progressively better view of the world) rather than a wall prohibiting participation until it's been scaled all at once. I think this is part of why the diaspora pulled so many people away; on diaspora sites having read the Sequences or otherwise knowing the jargon is helpful but not percieved as necessary. | S Live far away from me >:( | NBE not enough people and high quality people in the community and posting on the website | NBE Much talk about rationality, but few LWers actually use it when confronted by claims they don't already believe plausible. For an interesting experiment, make a troll account that does nothing but randomly link the Twelve Virtues at people and count the karma. | TMT HAving trouble finding any meetups near me. | NEM Karma as a replacement for actual moderation | NECI Allowing a group of hateful fanatics to block-downvote the posts of anyone who was deemed to hold a "wrong" political view. | BP I don't fully endorse this comment, but the use of math to form philosophy can both easily succumb to the problem of induction and be exclusive to those of us who have not yet studied higher math. There is not, as far as I am aware, a good explanation of basic contents that would allow an observer to understand such discussions; I may be wrong, but if so, please see "Can't Find Things Quickly Enough to Maintain Interest." | TMM The Sequences, with their sometimes idiosyncratic writing style and inclusion of unproven premises taken as fact, are not actually that good of an introduction to Rationality, yet were universally recommended to new people for that purpose. | S Defensiveness getting in the way of rationality and success and scaring people off | DA Too many posts by people who didn't seem entirely sane/coherent. | TTC Haven't tried the forum, but if it's the comments, you need more. | NEC Difficult to join in when you feel that every post you make should be both insightful and completely void of errors. The slightest factual error was jumped on instantly. | U Too focused around Eliezer Yudkowsky | PC Chronic community-wide Imposter Syndrome, me included. | IS Insufficiently Autistic. We need FIFTY Stalins! | NNE Not actually lot ra | SI Not kind enough; different/conflicting standards of civility tend to bottom out into incivility | BN I won't say "literally a cult" because it isn't, but LessWrong gives off a vibe of enthusiastically believing in things for its own sake and there is a lot of discussion of minute topics without qualification (for instance, "how to rationally exercise?" when no one involved has any knowledge of exercise science). I think people really forget that "rational" just means free from cognitive error and try to make "rationalism" a way of life. Like wtf, what part of "keep your identity small" don't you get? | RE Not enough opportunities for informal interaction and community-building outside of real-life meetups | NECI I originally left because I found the sex biodeterminist parts of the sequences to be sexist. I also wish the community wasn't as focused around the charismatic writings of a single person or a few people. I also wish there were more irc options for talking to LWD people in a more informal setting. | NPE Can seem intimidating or discouraging to people who believe (rightly or wrongly) that they are not as "smart" (a word which hear tends to mean high-IQ, really really high need for cognition, high STEM aptitude and inclination) enough to be a part of the conversation, even if they are genuinely interested in rationality, cognitive bias, existential risk, effective altruism, or similar topics and would be a good addition to the community. This was partially unintentional, but there were some distinct "High IQ people are the Important People" attitudes going around. | U No opinion | SI The culture in the LW comments was weirdly the combative (not sure how to describe it, but any discussion I got into felt like some kind of fight) | TCOM no real goals to drive anyone, so the posts suck | NG Encourages unhealthy behavior in its members. | BN Too formal/intimidating, and there didn't seem to be a designated way for new people to participate. Maybe that was intentional, but it sure explains why I mostly didn't participate. | U crackpottish dietary theories with poor support | NR Too obsessed/glorifying of fringe parts of itself (like poly) | BAP not enough social skills | SINCOM It's too culturally "I'm a cis-male programmer in SF" | TN Bickering about whether it's OK to tolerate X, for all the different values of X. | RA Too reliant on a few posters | SCA Too focused on epistemic rationality in a vacuum. (Neglect of instrumental rationality.) | TMT Seems fine. No community is perfect. | N Too hostile. | TCOM Too self-reinforcing | C too hard to understand without spending way too much time reading sequences/etc just to understand what's going on | U Insufficient value on conciseness | TLW Confusing to newcomers | U Figuratively a cult. (Not literally, but they flirted with it too much) | C Too reverent towards EY | PC Too anti-humanities. | NS Not tolerant enough of not-yet-rationalists | U There was a bizarre emphasis on dating advice for a while | PA Badly unclear distinction between endorsed content and open-submission posts. Some of the one-off posts were quite interesting, some were garbage, and voting wasn't really adequate to distinguish them. | MB Emotionally harsh, but not rigorous ("failing to cite sources" does not really cut it) | LR Tendency toward naive rationalism (a la Taleb) | TMT It also did, at times, give me the vibe of a cult, to be honest. But I think the "Literally a cult" option is much too strong to describe anything pertaining to my general impression of the community. | C Lack of new high quality content | NEC Attracted people who put no effort into actually being less wrong but, thinking themselves inherently rational, happily spewed their preexisting opinions, making the community (which didn't start at all like that) unpleasant. (Roughly "too tolerant of cranks", but for political views that wouldn't normally be called cranky.) | TTP Too much New Atheism. | TCOM Standards too low in general | NSE Constantly engaged in warfare over which external groups would be outgroup. | RA Too tolerant of pathetic Dunning-Kruger victims who believe in stupid things like utilitarianism. | UTIL Too many straw vulcans and people who want to think of themselves as more rational than they are. Practice what you preach or GTFO. | TTPOS There could stand to be more people. Sometimes it feels like there are only a few regular content submitters. The actual LessWrong website should have more constant content on it. If I were to suggest a solution, I would say that you should reach out to the current bloggers that have scattered to the wind, or at least request more posts publicly. | NEC Too many straight men, ideology clearly influenced by this negatively | TCSM I would say "too tolerant of NRx" but I don't think this is actually a problem, since there was a consequent stigmatization of the LWsphere. This actually seems an optimal state of affairs since it lets LW be a place for discussing strange ideas and following them to their logical conclusions, but with a social firewall so basilisks don't get out. | NRx smug attitude | A "Too Tolerant of X" isn't the best way to phrase my complaint, but there was definitely too much contrarianism and meta-contrarianism. (This naturally leads to too much "Neoreaction" and too many cranks/trolls, but those are the symptoms not the disease.) | TC I liked Less Wrong at its peak, though I wish the scope of concerns and interests was broader. I guess that qualifies at 'too autistic?' | NS Not too autistic but like, too not fun to read | TB too US-centric | P Many dissimilar types of reader and authors other than EY and SA struggled to appeal to more than one group of at once | TN I don't think I have participated enough in the community to know this. I mostly just lurk. | SI too much veneration of intelligence/IQ | E Too much Eliezer | EY Intellectual arrogance, e.g. dismissive attitude towards a lot of serious academic work, without a thorough understanding of it. | A People were arguing about things that didn't matter and nit picking at details. They seemed more interested in competition than constructive collaboration. | TCOM Most people most of the time don't have anything useful to add about rationality itself, so a lot of navel-gazing | TMT I am unaware of any issues | N Too tolerant of the Thought Police | TTPROG not autistic enough | NNE No meet up in Amherst MA | NEM Periods of terrible sexism, PIUs, not enough women or older people | TCSM I think LessWrong was pretty much exactly what it should have been - a salon for talking about strange ideas, with the only major taboos (with some exception) being tired topics like e.g. traditional political debate. I think a place like this should exist, and as long as there are reputational firewalls that keep it low-status and from having too much of a direct effect on the outside culture, things like neoreactionaries and pickup artists are just the cost of doing business (and of course they sometimes have interesting things to say.) Scott's comment section seems like a good example of what happens when we're allowed to discuss traditional politics. | N Too colored by the demographic it attracted (programmers) | TN Too critical of it's members. | TC obnoxious | A Hubris | A Mostly people seem to be dicks to each other on it. It's why I never delurked. | TC "Literally a cult" is way too strong of a statement. "Too much of an echo chamber" might be closer to the truth. | G Lack of new material. This isn't a community issue, nor is it a "high standards" issue, so much as a topical issue - we're out of "good bits" to post, which means later stuff is going to be more specific and less relevant. This isn't necessarily bad. | NEC Too much hero worshipping/necessity for heroes - everything hinged on <10 individuals | SCA Somewhat creepy worshipping of Eliezer by (a small) part of the community, but maybe I just misinterpreted in-jokes. Regardless, this has made it harder for me to share lw content with people outside of the community. | PC I'm glad you're self-aware about the cult thing | SI Comments section too focused on nitpicking and abstract debates, not focused enough on becoming more awesome and helping others do the same. | TC Not easy to follow threads | II Too hard to filter content (tolerating is fine as long as you can filter for the best content), bad at forming consensus | II It became a hive of pedantry and one-upsmanship. A culture which values finding flaws in others' works makes utility monsters of us all. | TC See 59. | SI NOT a cult but with many social issues that exist in that general area (barrier-to-entry and attitude-towards-outsiders things primarily) | C Too insular. | C Not enough interaction in general. It was mostly high ranking people posting, _not_ discussing. | NECI Some of these answers you made sound too extreme and I was reluctant to choose them. I'd say your weakness is a difficult distinguishing between a conventional opinion held by someone because they "don't get it" versus someone who understands the lw position/s on this issue, agrees with lw position/s on many issues, but after earnest consideration came to the conclusion that "the mainstream" happens to be right on this particular one | DAC Bad for social life when I wasn't in Bay Area (similar to "Literally a Cult") | NEM Although I think these are the "biggest" community problems, I don't consider them particularly large. They're the least small of our small problems. | N Too Intolerant of Politics | TIP Too many taboo topics eg race, feminism. Too much social signaling. | TIP too much reverence of Eliezer Yudkowsky (I mean this in a social way, not saying anything about the correctness of his ideas) | PC People on Less Wrong argue about a lot of stuff. Sometimes I think a "LessWronger" is actually someone who criticizes LessWrong all the time. LessWrong is fine! It doesn't really have problems other than the tendency to attach problems to itself. | N Good ideas that aren't in sequences get forgotten | II Strong and unusual stylistic preferences discouraged (many) academics/researchers from participating | RE Not exactly sure when the peak was; in 2010-2011 I read the sequences but didn't find much else of interest and so I stop going to the website | SI Too derisive / condescending of "wrong people," e.g. religious; doesn't seem to acknowledge that it usually isn't their fault | TC Too many young nerds having their first social experiences; nice for those young nerds but bad as a community | SINCOM Too unfriendly | U Can't find a general RSS feed for new posts | II Specific issues for my geography - not enough LW'ers in meatspace. Probably wasn't an issue in the bay area or London. While I state the 'high standards' as an issue, it was just a trade-off which worked in some cases but not others. | NEM This is the first time I have heard about the org. so cant really comment. | SI a bit culty--not a cult exactly, but culty | C With the proviso that I was not around for the LW peak - I nevertheless never participated in an active way on the forums when I did discover it and this is probably because there is no obvious way to Start doing this. Most posts are a bunch of familiar people discussing issues they are more familiar with than you. You wonder how to make a new contribution that has value. Basically high knowledge barriers to entry in the top levels (which are the most visible) | U too tolerant of unoriginal/irrelevant content, probably due to reddit's terrible voting/filtering system | NSE Too colored by the demographic that joined, i.e. programmers | TN Bad public relations. An idea being true is not sufficient reason to bring it up. | BAP Not enough feminists and other Blue Tribe people. | NPE Not enough good writers. Lots of comments, few ideas. Not enough ideas for an entire website, at least -- certainly enough for a Reddit forum. Also, not quite fun enough -- needed more thought experiments, constructive criticism of strategies, etc. | SCA not enough new content / inability to quickly browse interesting stuff (ergonomy) | II Too much fussing over what is or isn't on-topic and what section things should be in | II Not enough members in the part of the world I currently live in. | NEM overly contrarian. the culture is very narcissistic. discussions aren't generally discussions, more people going down precisely the line of discussion they want, then other people respond with derails, nitpicking, and attempts are sounding smart through obfuscation. prompt-->listen-->response-->counter response is rare. | BN people on the forum seemed pretty mean and hostile or overly critical. I didn't ever feel comfortable posting. Everyone seemed to busy trying to sound smart and impress everyone to have an interesting discussion | TC Not friendly enough online (As simplistic as it sounds) | U Perhaps upvotes by better members should have counted for more. | SFI Selects for the sort of person who spends all day on the internet (less true in person, of course) | TMT Not attracting enough people actually getting stuff done. | TMT Lack of relevancy | NR Insular | U I've had no interaction with the community. | SI It seemed to work fine for the people and purposes it existed for, I just never felt like I was part of the core target group/fit in that well. Unwelcoming, possibly, or elitist. | E Groupthink is a thing. | G Don't know when it was best. | SI LessWrong looks like one person's blog to me and not a forum sonit may be just me but having found it in 2015 it's hard to lurke around and become part of community | II Too tolerant of people espousing dysfunctional ideologies that they would never dare implement in real life. | TTP Standards for content submission might not have been high enough. Like a math student who has just been exposed to the notion of rigor for the first time, I recall seeing LWers get into the "motions" of LW-style rationality and go overboard with the "gadgetry" of rationality without stating much of substance. This also possibly gets into the "literally a cult" thing: LWers who haven't reached a stage of "maturity" with the tools may be more likely to wield them with untempered zeal. | NSE Too self-referential. | NS Broad but shallow knowledge base. Common weakness of autodidacts. Relatedly, propensity to overrate own knowledge & abilities (Dunning-Kruger). | A Not enough new interesting stuff being written. Regression towards the mean is not unexpected. | SCA A bit cliquey | G focus on content instead of community | NECI The community consists almost entirely of white young men. I don't know if tolerance of neoreactionaries is a problem, per se. The problem is that neoreactionaries, creeps and pick-up artists are overrepresented in this community, and this is not the sort of people I'd like to associate with, IRL or online. | TCSM The LessWrong community was overwhelmingly comprised of young white men. Neoreactionaries and pick-up artists were either overrepresented in this community, or at least this was my impression. I wouldn't want to associate with this sort of people either IRL or online. | TCSM Too centered on white male experience | TCSM This seems contradictory, so I thought I should explain: I think the vast majority of people were holding themselves to too high a standard, and the vast majority of posts were by people holding themselves to too low a standard. | DK The meta-contrarian plague | TC Too little real world action. | TMT Idiots making dumb comments | TMI The internet is probably structurally skewed against the sorts of people who can create a *useful* community, for reasons which I hope are obvious. | IM Simultaneously too tolerant of /the correct kind of cranks/ and intolerant of /the incorrect kind/; there are definitely in group effects at play here. | G Too tolerant of rhetoricians. | TTP No mechanism to robustly distinguish cargo cultists from actually competent people and serve as feedback for becoming the latter | J Insufficiently tolerant of laziness, creepy people, and neoreaction | TTPROG Rampant Status-seeking Behavior | BN Not enough risk-taking among LWers in terms of investing tentatively in different worldviews (ie, too afraid of appearing 'wrong' for the sake of contributing possible insights later on), perhaps creating conditions ripe for group-think. | G Focus on EY | PC Another pilosophical issue: The Sequences being such a verbose text and typically reliant on many metaphors to convince the reader of their correctness exacerbates the problems with correctness in bridging those long inferential gaps. Its reliance on referencing itself makes it even worse. | NS Voting cliques. voting based on community reputation instead of content | G Nerd culture is terribe | TN Some parts of the Sequences put off people who would make excellent community members because those posts show Eliezer being a jerk (as defined by most currently living humans). Links to the originals are still all over the place, and people who do try to read the Sequences in order start running into them rather fast ("Bayesian Judo" immediately comes to mind as an example). Stop filtering for jerks! | EY Poor at managing issues. When LW was it it's peak, tolerance of neoreaction was not bad in itself, but LW was not capable of managing its image before the eyes a hostile and non-rationalist socieity | BAP Overly reverential attitude to Yudkowsky resulting in alienation of people interested in Rationality who didn't like his work, attitude or writing style, or who were just put off by the 'fanclub' feel of it. | PC If you aren't one of the top voices, it's easy to fall through the cracks and not be noticed by anyone or bond with others on an equal level. | CT Inaccessibility of many of the social sides of itself (like poly) | TW Too intolerant of people not possessing the same ideas or intelligence. | E We need something to collectively fight for; without this we're bound to break off into a continual diaspora. | NG Generally a culture of who could use the most less wrongy jargon to talk about obvious things. N.b. A comment on the Facebook page once where someone wrote something like "you seem to believe this thing while I believe something else, and since we're both rational agents, by Aumann's agreement theorem there must be some information you have that I don't, so what would that be?" And they could have just asked "Why?" | TTPOS Too much hostility/arrogance. | A The AI charity and rationality workshops seems like expensive scams | C Perceived as a cult | BAP too insular | G Hard to find most interesting posts. | II A bit too collectively self-satisfied, but that might just be the cost of enough solidarity to support friendly conversation. | A Too intolerant of people who are inbetween LessWrong and the mainstream | G Can't get anything done. | TMT Perhaps not cult-like enough, in retrospect. | NEAC Unapproachable for most human beings | TW Jargon-ridden | J Too self-important. Tendency to make up ridiculous proper nouns where other terms already exist & pretend new concepts have been created. | R Not enough empirical testing of ideas. | TMT Too intolerant of everything else. | G