NQbass7 comments on Playing Video Games In Shuffle Mode - Less Wrong
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Comments (29)
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?
That seems like the best policy to me, especially for a site like LW. Perhaps on OB that could be a concern, but here where it's so easy to avoid the posts you don't want to read or which aren't upvoted much, having redundant information doesn't seem like it would be too much of a problem.