= 27d567bc2d48d9f40e9ccc20ea370b15)
Leonhart comments on Open Thread: July 2010 - 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 (653)
I can't remember if this has come up before...
Currently the Sequences are mostly as-imported from OB; including all the comments, which are flat and voteless as per the old mechanism.
Given that the Sequences are functioning as our main corpus for teaching newcomers, should we consider doing some comment topiary on at least the most-read articles? Specifically, I wonder if an appropriate thread structure be inferred from context; also we could vote the comments up or down in order to make the useful-in-hindsight stuff more salient. There's a lot of great stuff in there, but IIRC some that is less good as well. Not that we should actually get rid of any of it, of course.
Having said that, I'm already thinking of reasons that this is a bad idea, but I'm throwing it out anyway. Any thoughts? Should we be treating the Sequences as a time capsule or a living textbook? (I think that those phrases have roughly equal vague positive affect :)
Voting is highly recommended - please do, and feel free to reply to comments with additional commentary as well. Otherwise I'd say leave them as be.
Also related: A lot of the Sequences show marks of their origin on Overcoming Bias that could be confusing to someone who lands on that article:
Example: "Since this is an econblog... " in http://lesswrong.com/lw/j3/science_as_curiositystopper/
I think some kind of editorial note is in order here, if not a rewrite.
Alternatively, we could repost/revisit the sequences on a schedule, and let the new posts build fresh comments.
Or even better, try to cover the same topics from a different perspective.
I've suggested in the past that we use the old posts as filler; that is, if X days go by without something new making it to the front page, the next oldest item gets promoted instead.
Even if we collectively have nothing to say that is completely new, we likely have interesting things to say about old stuff - even if only linking it forward to newer stuff.
So, from the 7 upboats, I take it that people in general approve of this idea. What's next? What do we do to make this a reality?
Looking back at an old post from OB (I think), like http://lesswrong.com/lw/od/37_ways_that_words_can_be_wrong/ I don't see any option to promote it to the front page. I thought I had enough karma to promote other peoples' articles, but it looks like I may be wrong about this. Is it even currently technically possible to promote old articles?
Agree on the numerical value of X? LW has slowed down a bit recently, compared to relatively recent periods with frantic paces of posting; I rather appreciate the current rhythm. It would take a long period without new stuff to convince me we needed "filler" at all.
Only editors can promote. (Installing the LW codebase locally is fun: you can play at being an editor.)
Alright. How about a week? If nothing new has shown up for a week, then I don't think people will mind a classic. (And offhand, I'm not sure we've yet had a slack period that long.)
Sounds good to me.