jimmy comments on Playing Video Games In Shuffle Mode - Less Wrong
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From a poster's perspective: it is very hard to tell which ideas your audience considers beginner-level and which they consider advanced-level. Especially when the audience is as diverse and self-selected as at LW. I've posted a few times asking "Hey, does everyone here already know X or not?" and I've rarely gotten the answer I expected.
Responses to my post last night ranged from "this is obvious" to "this is wrong" to "this acronym could be useful" to "this was one of my favorite posts yet". I don't quite know what to do with that. Right now I am erring on the side of caution; I'd rather write something obvious to everyone than skip an inferential distance somewhere.
Upvoting ought to be the main feedback mechanism here, but right now I worry that a well-written true (but obvious) article will get voted up just because it's well-written and true, and everyone figures it will probably help someone else. Maybe make a rule that you should not upvote a post unless it teaches you something? Or maybe end a post whose difficulty level you're not sure of with "Please rate this as too obvious, okay, or too hard"?
EDIT: It's also hard to remember if something has already been covered on Overcoming Bias (see: source confusion). There's not any nice list of Robin or the other writers' posts like there is of Eliezer's, is there?
One problem is that it's not always easy to tell which ones you learn from.
It seems that my impression of most of EY's (and your) posts was that they were "well-written and true (but obvious)", but that doesn't mean I didn't learn anything. Once I started thinking about it, I started catching myself mistakes that I normally wouldn't have caught.
It's not that I read about mind projection fallacy and thought "Oh! I guess it doesn't actually work like that after all". If you asked me, I would have always told you that mind projection was a common fallacy. It was more like "Oh, wow. I screw up in that way occasionally too."
The other point is that it is very useful to have a library of posts that are well written and true, as long as it's not obvious to everyone. When you're talking to someone and they screw up, having read well written posts on the subject can make it easier to put your objection into words. If that fails you can just say "check your email when you get home- you have a reading assignment".