= 27d567bc2d48d9f40e9ccc20ea370b15)
Matt_Simpson comments on Attention Less Wrong: We need an FAQ - Less Wrong
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
= 783df68a0f980790206b9ea87794c5b6)
Loading…= b715d02e85f7b3b4ae65ca3d3e450868)
Subscribe to RSS Feed
Powered by Reddit
= f037147d6e6c911a85753b9abdedda8d)
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
Comments (108)
Lots of lurkers who claim to be intimidated by our site, and lots of non-lurkers seemingly unfamiliar with our standards.
We can now do better than "lots", thanks to Kevin.
Someone with some time on their hands could, for instance, tabulate the top-level comments among the 422 posted to "Attention Lurkers".
I've trialed that on a small sample. Out of the 22 first comments, 11 say something that I interpret as "intimidated", 3 say something to the effect that they're no longer interested by the topics on LW, 8 say that they're lurkers but OK with it (or say nothing beyond "hi"). So that's roughly half of them explicitly saying they're intimidated.
The more salient fact to me is that all 22 did write a comment when encouraged to do so and the barrier to participation was suitably lowered.
Another salient comment: "Anytime anyone wants to discuss prenatal diagnosis and the ethical implications, let me know", that being the commenter's area of expertise. We may be missing out on many opportunities to engage, by failing to deliberately open up discussions on topics where the community has hidden expertise.
I'm thinking I will write up a poll-type post asking people what their area of professional expertise is, and which issue in their domain they think would most benefit from application of the techniques discussed on LW.
...and which techniques of their domain could benefit LW by being discussed, I would add.
Are you definitely going to do that "Ask Less Wrong"? I want to post it now but don't want to take your karma/status for having that idea... so if you don't plan on making it in the next 24 hours, can I make it? It can really just be a question, the post itself should be very short.
I'd prefer to sleep on it. This isn't quite a spur-of-the-moment idea, I've had this idea for a post setting forth a "marketplace" metaphor for such discussions for a while.
But possibly the post asking for expertise info should be separate from that anyway, for housekeeping reasons.
Should probably happen within 24h anyway, but we've had a fair number of posts just today, so it's best to let things calm down a bit.
ETA: it's not quite "Ask LW", more like "Tell LW". ;)