Beyond the obvious short-term goal of generating valuable discussion and comments, I have a long-term goal for this forum: to build up a body of thought in the form of essays that will have lasting intellectual value.

The forum software supports this in multiple ways:

• Posts can be marked as “curated,” to indicate classics of long-term value
• Related posts can be bundled into sequences
• Posts can be tagged, and each tag has a wiki page, thus creating an encyclopedia of concepts
• Eventually we can create a library of recommended reading

To get a sense of what this looks like, see the LessWrong library and concept list. The library in particular now serves as the canon of rationalist thought, and the starting point for newcomers. In time, we can create the same thing for progress thinking.

This then is extra motivation to post here and to have thoughtful discussions in the comments: we are not just having a conversation; the gems of our back-and-forth will be assembled into a durable intellectual asset.

It is also a good reason to cross-post the full text of essays originally published elsewhere: they will work better as part of sequences or a library. When you do this, just add the original link as the “linkpost URL” (see below) and it will appear at the top of your post as the official original link.