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Eliezer_Yudkowsky comments on Open Thread: February 2010, part 2 - Less Wrong
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An inquiry regarding my posting frequency:
While I'm at the SIAI house, I'm trying to orient towards the local priorities so as to be useful. Among the priorities is building community via Less Wrong, specifically by writing posts. Historically, the limiting factor on how much I post has been a desire not to flood the place - if I started posting as fast as I can write up my ideas, I'd get three or four posts out a week with (I think) no discernible decrease in quality. I have the following questions about this course of action:
Will it annoy people? Building community by being annoying seems very unlikely to work.
Will it affect voting behavior noticeably? I rely on my post's karma scores to determine what to do and not do in the future, and SIAI people who decide whether I'm useful enough to keep use it as a rough metric too. I'd rather post one post that gets 40 karma in a week than two that get 20, and so on.
I'd say damn the torpedoes, full speed ahead. If people are annoyed, let them downvote. If posts start getting downvoted, slow down.
Your posts have generally been voted up. If now is the golden moment of time where you can get everything said, then for the love of Cthulhu, say it now!
I don't anticipate being so obnoxiously prolific that people collectively start voting my posts negative such that they stay that way. But people already sometimes register individual downvotes on posts that I make, and I don't want that to happen on a larger fraction of posts due to increased frequency, because I can't reliably distinguish between "you must have had an off day, this post is not up to scratch" and "please, please, please shut up".
Post away.
The best signal to anticipate from the audience in this case is "how many votes in total do I expect if I post at full speed vs how many votes I expect if I posted less frequently and so ended up writing less posts overall". Increased frequency may give you less votes per post. Frequent posts from the same author may be less desired and if you post less you may only be giving the best posts. But if the net expectation is higher for more prolific posting then that can be interpreted as "the lesswrong.com community would prefer you to post faster than a spambot".
Even if you expected a total of less karma for more posts I wouldn't say that means you ought not post more. So long as your posts are still breaking the 10 mark we clearly don't mind your contribution. There are probably other benefits to you from posting than maximising the benefit to lesswrong. I find writing helps clarify my thinking for example. So as long as you are still being received somewhat positively you are free to type away.
Post as much as you like, if you think it's good quality; I promise to say if I start to think slowing down would be a good idea.
I don't mean "downvoted negative" just "downvoted relative to other posters".