Why I hang out at LessWrong and why you should check-in there every now and then

The first two sections are a background, first a bit on cultural change to set the general context. Then some general information about LessWrong. Now we’re reading for my personal impressions of the place, concluding with a suggestion that you take a look if you haven’t already.

Cultural change over the long haul: Christians and professors

Back in the ancient days Christianity as just another mystery cult on the periphery of the Roman Empire. Then in 380 AD Emperor Theodosius I issued the Edict of Thessalonica and it became the state religion of the Roman Empire. In time it spread out among the many tribes of Europe and those Christian tribespeople began thinking of an entity called Christendom, and that, in time, became Europe and “the West.”

Back in the days when Europe was still Christendom the Catholic Church was the center of intellectual life. That changed during the Sixteenth Century with the advent of the Scientific Revolution and the Reformation. The Catholic remained powerful, of course, but universities supplanted it as the institutional center of intellectual life.

My point is simple and obvious: things change. Cults can become mainstream and new institutions can displace old ones. With that in mind, let’s think about LessWrong.

LessWrong

To be sure do not want to imply that LessWrong, a large and sophisticated online community, and the currents that swirl there (the rationalist movement, effective altruism (EA), dystopian fears of rogue AI) is comparable to Christianity, but it appears cultlike to outsiders, and to some insiders as well. It hosts a great deal of high-wattage intellectual activity on artificial intelligence and AI existential risk, effective altruism, and, more generally, how to live a life. I suspect that for some who post there, it is the intellectual center of their intellectual life.

I was founded in 2009 by Eliezer Yudkowsky, an autodidact with strong interests in AI and, in particular, the destructive potential of advanced AI. That is what he’s best known for and, while I suspect that Nick Bostrom is more widely known on that subject – his 2014 book, Superintelligence, was a best-seller, and he has an academic post at Oxford – Yudkowsky has likely been more influential within the tech community centered on Silicon Valley, where he lives. As an indicator of that influence, consider this pair of recent posts at X, the site formerly known as Twitter, by the president and co-founder of OpenAI, Sam Altman:

it is possible at some point he will deserve the nobel peace prize for this--I continue to think short timelines and slow takeoff is likely the safest quadrant of the short/long timelines and slow/fast takeoff matrix.

— Sam Altman (@sama) February 3, 2023

Color me skeptical about the Peace Prize. But that’s beside that point, which is that Yudkowsky has been and is very influential in Silicon Valley. People who work in those companies post and comment at LessWrong.

Why I’m there

Because it is an interesting place, if a bit strange and off-putting, and because I have so far had some interesting conversation there. Not a lot, but certainly enough to make it worthwhile.

I don’t know when I first took a look at LessWrong, but let’s say it was more than five years ago and perhaps even as long as ten years ago. But I didn’t spend much time there. That began changing, say, two or so years ago, sometime after GPT-3 began rocking the world. I made my first post in June of 2022, and have made a total of 40 posts and 137 comments there so far (now 40 posts as I've cross-posted this there). I generally check in there every day just to see what’s going on. I may take a quick look at a new post or five, look at comments on posts I’m following, and then go on about my business. On a particularly good day I’ll read some comments on one of my own posts and reply.

The thing is, I’m a ronin intellectual, and have been for years. If you’ve ever seen the anime series, Samurai Champloo, I’m the intellectual equivalent of Jin. Yes, I’ve got a PhD – there are a few of those at LessWrong – and once held a faculty post at the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. But I left that a long time ago and have been without an intellectual home ever since. I’ve published a bunch of articles in the academic literature on various topics scattered over literary criticism, cognitive science, and cultural evolution, and two books in the trade press with good publishers, one on music (Beethoven’s Anvil, Basic 2001) and one on computer graphics (Visualization, Harry Abrams 1989). For what it’s worth, and it’s worth a great deal to me, the idea count is higher than the page count would seem to indicate, but my work never really caught on. So I understand what it’s like to be a mammal in a world dominated by dinosaurs.

I strongly suspect that many of the denizens of LessWrong feel that way as well. On that level and in that way, I understand what they’re up to, even if I’m not up to the same thing. While I have a great deal of interest in AI, I’m more interested in the human mind and in human culture and I don’t fear destruction and the virtual hands of a rogue AI. Still, we can and do talk a bit.

Beyond that, who knows? there’s a lot going on in the world. Cultural change, radical change – which is what we need and, whether or not we like it, are in the midst of – is messy. Lots of ideas come forth and are given a spin, but few stick. The problem, alas, is that the good stuff, the really deep stuff, can’t be predicted in advance. The difference between crackpottery and genius only becomes clear in retrospect. For example, about six months ago Cleo Nardo ran up a long post, The Waluigi Effect (meg-post), which has attracted 184 comments so far (every once in a while a new one trickles in). It’s brilliant, and, I think, confused, all over the place, and it’s about the innards and weird behavior of large language models. Given enough of that, something of great value seems likely to happen, though I’m not likely to pick up on it. Perhaps you might.

What I think of the place

It’s very clear to me that there are some very intelligent and creative people who spend a great deal of their time at LessWrong. But, alas, it is very insular, as oppositional counter cultures tend to be. Here, for example, is a short post from March, along with 48 comments, “on why you should try to make your work legible to existing academic communities.” Yes! It goes the other way as well. LessWrongers need to pay more attention to existing work in areas of interest.

My teacher, the late David Hays, used to say that “a great talent requires a great discipline.” (He couldn’t recall where he heard that, but it wasn’t original with him. If you do a web search on the phrase you’ll get a bunch of hits, though in a couple of minutes of looking I didn’t find that exact phrase.) I fear that is true of many of the people who post here, but also of the place as a whole. It’s not enough to know lots of stuff and come up with lots of new(ish) ideas. You need to work with them and refine them over time, and establish links with existing knowledge.

That notwithstanding, discourse here is very civil. There is vigorous discussion, but I’ve not seen any flame wars. You get to vote on comments, a common feature, but the LessWrong interface allows you to distinguish between the quality of the comment and whether or not you agree, a useful and important feature.

Given that the ‘legit’ intellectual world, as embodied in colleges and universities, various think tanks and foundations, and industrial research, has become trapped in recycling old ideas (while watching Star Trek reruns with Kirk’s opening admonition to “boldly go where no man has gone before!”) the world needs new conceptual breeding grounds. LessWrong looks like a promising pilot effort.

Why not go visit?

If you’re not familiar with the place, I suggest you drop by and spend, say, an hour poking around. If you don’t find anything that grabs your attention, leave, but then come back a week later and give it another try. If nothing sticks after a month or so, that’s that.

But if something sticks, you’re on your own. Perhaps you make a comment here and there. Then post something, see what happens. 

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Addendum: Following one commenter over there, I note that the user LessWrong's user interface is superb. It's the best forum-style interface I've seen on the web, and I've been here since the mid-1990s at both CompuServe and AOL.  Then I helped Cuda Brown with his Meanderings newsletter. He eventually coded up a discussion forum in 1995 and boy did we ever have us some fun. Whew! Alas, it's no longer up and the mothballed site. The point is that we knew interaction was the name of the game and we acted on it.