LessWrong (Curated & Popular)

“Arbital has been imported to LessWrong” by RobertM, jimrandomh, Ben Pace, Ruby

Feb 20, 2025

The podcast dives into the migration of Arbital's content to a new platform, showcasing how valuable writings on AI alignment and mathematics were preserved. Listeners discover exciting updates, including revamped wiki pages, innovative tagging features, and a new voting system for user engagement. The introduction of interactive tools like custom summaries and inline reactions enhances the experience, while the discussion on integrating Arbital's unique features adds to the depth of the conversation. It's a fascinating look at improving online knowledge sharing!

08:52

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Podcast summary created with Snipd AI

Quick takeaways

The migration of Arbital's content to LessWrong preserves essential writings on AI alignment and mathematics while enhancing community engagement.

New features, like 'lenses' and user interaction tools, improve content discovery and foster collaboration within the LessWrong platform.

Deep dives

Migration of Arbital Content

The migration of content from Arbital to LessWrong aimed to preserve valuable information related to AI alignment and mathematics, which was a significant focus of the Arbital project prior to its discontinuation. Many features from Arbital were integrated into LessWrong, including an upgraded structure for the wiki's tag pages and concepts page. The collaboration involved ensuring that users can access a wide range of curated writings, especially those authored by Eliezer, one of Arbital's most prolific contributors. This initiative not only helps retain the knowledge previously hosted on Arbital but also encourages community participation in enhancing the available content.

Intro

2min

Enhancements to Wiki Pages and User Interaction Features

3min

Enhancing User Experience with Custom Summaries and Red Links

2min

Integrating Arbital Features into LessWrong

2min

Arbital was envisioned as a successor to Wikipedia. The project was discontinued in 2017, but not before many new features had been built and a substantial amount of writing about AI alignment and mathematics had been published on the website.

If you've tried using Arbital.com the last few years, you might have noticed that it was on its last legs - no ability to register new accounts or log in to existing ones, slow load times (when it loaded at all), etc. Rather than try to keep it afloat, the LessWrong team worked with MIRI to migrate the public Arbital content to LessWrong, as well as a decent chunk of its features. Part of this effort involved a substantial revamp of our wiki/tag pages, as well as the Concepts page. After sign-off[1] from Eliezer, we'll also redirect arbital.com links to the corresponding pages on LessWrong.

As always, you are [...]

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Outline:

(01:13) New content

(01:43) New (and updated) features

(01:48) The new concepts page

(02:03) The new wiki/tag page design

(02:31) Non-tag wiki pages

(02:59) Lenses

(03:30) Voting

(04:45) Inline Reacts

(05:08) Summaries

(06:20) Redlinks

(06:59) Claims

(07:25) The edit history page

(07:40) Misc.

The original text contained 3 footnotes which were omitted from this narration.

The original text contained 10 images which were described by AI.

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First published:
February 20th, 2025

Source:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/fwSnz5oNnq8HxQjTL/arbital-has-been-imported-to-lesswrong

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

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Images from the article: