6 replies to this topic

[buckwheats]

I really appreciate the commentaries and perspectives shared on the developments there, and love all the linking and the helpful side bar. Who's responsible for all of it (is it one person or many)?

[brokenportal]

That's a feed from that blog, run by Reason. Reason is a member here and used to be a director here at one point I believe. He left to run that blog there among other things. I always wished he had provided that content through Longecity rather than splintering off, and so I and a few others worked on seeing what we could do to get it to feed into the forum like this. With splintering, I have begun to see the benefits in it these days, because it empowers people to forge forward with their projects, and it can be tied back to a central place in other ways, like the feed.

A lot of us like it, and Im glad to see you posting this and that you like it too, because the fight aging topics are an excellent way to keep Longecity's discussions up to date, and I want to encourage you to help us respond in them to develop more of them into longer discussions. That is the kind of discussion that needs to dominate Longecity, and if we can get it to then we will be able to increase our ability to retain and build on growing crowds of people that come here for indefinite life extension. That is key, we need to inform the world about this cause, and this is one very important way to help do that.

[buckwheats]

Thank you so much for the detailed response! that sort of discussion is very valuable i think we can all agree, but it is hard. But if longecity is to live up to it's name - and succeed in being a forum for advocacy & research for unlimited lifespans - then it would of course be a healthy sign to see more of it (i will try and contribute where i can). The anxiety/brain malfunction threads have been pretty interesting though i have to say, certainly helpful resources for lots of people. Seems like this forum draws substantially from the pool of people looking for brain help.

Edited by buckwheats, 26 March 2012 - 09:03 AM.

[brokenportal]

Are you talking about the Fight Aging site itself, or the site and the feed that comes into the Longecity forum here?

I've never thought about the discussion being hard before. Could you elaborate on that? If it is hard in some way then insight like that would be valuable for us to have. What I mean is to make an insightful comment, ask a question, reference something you know about that is related, on any given fight aging topic (and other indefinite life extension related topics) that you see in the forum here, and contribute only when you feel like it and you can, like your saying.

The supplements and nootropics sections draw most of the traffic at this time. I think thats because Google sees us as the most active place on the internet for supplements discussions because of the momentum that has built over the years. People that talk about supplements also talk about nootropics and so it seems that momentum picked up and Google began to see us as the most active discussion board on the internet for that too, but not because we tried to build those crowds.

The idea now, isn't to lower the amount of supplements and nootropics discussion, as some suspect when discussions of increasing the amount of indefinite life extension come up, but rather to keep those levels of traffic growing, and to surpass them with the traffic from indefinite life extension discussion.

[buckwheats]

the Less Wrong is focused on human rationality. Part of it's success, i think, can be attributed to its sequences - the evolving, user generated reading that members are strongly encouraged to read thoroughly before posting. I noticed fightaging also has something similar, the causes of aging and required reading sections, which i really like.

Providing these foundations are valuable in these cases because human decision making and human aging are not very intuitive processes. Without them dialogue is probably more difficult and less productive. It seems like fightaging has the supportive infrastructure to talk about aging, and imminst has the crowd.

In the end of course what the movement most badly needs is money from what I've read. The vague outlandish notion of ending aging is not enough to turn people into advocates or donors very reliably though. besides having a genuine interest in the future, or the capacity to dream big or whatever, having an idea of where biology is and where it's going probably helps ground the visions. it helps if people perceive some outline of a ladder to indefinite lifespan, if it's not just floating in the sky. discussions certainly contribute to defining that ladder for people.

[brokenportal]

I like the concept of that required reading they post. Currently, the Longecity version of that is the "about" section, the book and the documentary, all linked in the left side bar (book and documentary currently in transition to the new content management system, but also found here, book, and here, documentary). I think the information would all (Longecity's, Less Wrong's, Fight Aging's, and others) work even better if broken down into simple intro, mid length summary, and long list of reading. I think long suggested/required reading and viewing (documentary) can help some people, but that its probably not key for most. Most people it seems learn best through quick summary and discussion.

If we can just get them flowing in here, then we can keep the discussion flowing and direct them all to the places that suit them. If we had something like you are talking about (not as long as a book and a documentary), and summaries of them, then I think it could only make it stronger. We finally got a nice page with a cryonics breakdown recently. Now we, well I, that I know of, have my eye to finding a page like that to break down the aging strategies, and to hopefully get an upgraded version of the about page. Somebody started a nice topic for gathering a draft list of aging strategies that could create indefinite life extension for us to begin pulling apart, filtering, and summarizing for a page. There are a few other pages like that we could use, but those are three of the main ones, and once those pages are put together and done, then some strategic linking will probably be a next step, so that it is front and center to newcomers, like you're saying.

In the mean time, discussion on key topics fills that role for the most part. It allows the growth that brings in the further support and money that is leveraged for growing amounts of research, and more growth of the organization at this time.

In the long run, it is the support and understanding of those strategies we want to put people in support of, and that we want to position information on so it is easy for them to bring out to others.

[reason]

Fight Aging! is a single person thing. Given that it's all creative commons, bar the introductory articles written by other folk, Longecity could do whatever the members here want to with the content.

But it's also important to find your own voice and produce your own content - that diversity is very necessary in the organic process of growing a community.

The thing that grew Fight Aging! and was eventually swallowed by it, the Longevity Meme, was created at roughly the same time as the Immortality Institute; I vaguely recall being very pleased that I didn't have to run a forum because there was another one out there already. Being an Immortality Institute director was always a minority role, in comparison to Bruce Klein, Mind, brokenportal and the other folk here who have done so much to organize and keep things going over the years, and something that happened in parallel with Fight Aging! - there was no leaving going on in either direction.