CronoDAS comments on Playing Video Games In Shuffle Mode - Less Wrong

17 Post author: talisman 23 March 2009 11:59AM

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Comment author: Yvain 23 March 2009 04:13:02PM *  7 points [-]

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?

Comment author: CronoDAS 23 March 2009 08:49:12PM 3 points [-]

I think that stating the obvious is frequently useful. There's frequently more to the obvious than is obvious at first glance.

As a wise guy once said:

No, I even suspect that you know the explicit wisdoms, the ones hidden in plain view, which practically no one looks for.