Summary of survey conversation with Carl

[John Salvatier]

Hi Guys, 

The following is a summary of the conversation I had about our survey over skype: 

Might consider tying together projects such that two people are working on two different projects at the same time but the results of neither project are released until both projects are complete. this way both projects have added necessity and importance. (both of us were somewhat skeptical) 

Eliezer says he gets much better volunteer work from HP:MOR than he does for LW things.

Carl thinks that the lowest hanging fruit are things in a  "guide + example" format. For example, an example book review along with an explanation of the process that constructed it, or an example lit review + an explanation of how to build a similar one, or how to post something without wrecking the formatting. Kaj Sotola may be a good person to ask for a book review guide. Also the quant community has successfully established a norm of backing up claims about american society with easy statistics from the GSS (see here for a teaching post in the that format, this would be good to link to anyway).

Carl also supported the idea of providing research help in the discussion section as opposed to a separate mailing list.

We also talked about "the popularization bias", and Carl expressed a desire for new subjects previously unexplored on lesswrong to be popularized.

Carl expressed concern that the quantity and quality of lesswrong posts has diminished significantly in the last long while.