The Roots of Progress

The Progress Forum

A pre-announcement and a call for help

The Roots of Progress is sponsoring the creation of a Progress Forum: an online discussion forum for the progress community, modeled after LessWrong.

The goal of this forum is to provide a place for long-form discussion of progress studies and the philosophy of progress. So far, there hasn’t been a place for this. The Progress Studies Slack is good for sharing links, organizing local meetups, and general chatting, but it doesn’t serve well for long-form essays and comments. Those essays have only been on blogs—but not everyone has a blog, not every blog has a comment section, and there’s no consistent way for the most interesting and relevant content to be highlighted for attention. A forum will solve this. (See also Kris Gulati’s earlier thoughts on this.)

I expect conversations on the Progress Forum to span a variety of topics, including (for example):

For the past few years, I’ve been active on LessWrong, a forum for the rationalist community. I’ve been impressed with the quality of writing and discussion there, and especially with the way a post on the forum can be an initial exploration of a half-baked idea, or can turn into a resource that people are still reading and linking to over a decade later. The forum helps the best content surface, both through community feedback (upvotes and downvotes) and through moderation (such as “featured” or “curated” posts). It’s an existence proof of the ability to create the kind of intellectual community that I’d like to see. So, we plan to use the same forum software to power the Progress Forum.

We could use help building, launching, and running the Forum. Right now we can use software engineering and especially UI/graphic design, and at launch we will need moderators. If you’d like to get involved in any way, or just to hear when the forum is ready, sign up here.

Comment on Reddit

Social media link image credit: Wikimedia / Marcel Roblin

Get posts by email:

Become a patron

Get posts by email