Demosthenes 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: Demosthenes 23 March 2009 10:20:25PM *  3 points [-]

Yes! something like a table of contents?

The Tag Cloud is a good way to start, but once you generate 10 posts a day for too long, the tag cloud is no longer a useful navigation tool

Something like this maybe: <http://drupal.org/project/hypergraph>

Drupal can also automatically generate "related content" based on whatever criteria you define as important or manually entered links. Adding more and more blocks to the page might not be good for efficiency, but providing more diverse paths to explore the content on these sites would be great.

In the long run, the more crosslinking there is, the easier it will be to visualize the stronger nodes and the easier it will become to find highly cited posts. At this point, good posts get even more citation. Good navigation is the critical first step.

I spend a lot of time these days fishing through older posts on Overcoming Bias, looking for something to read, but it is definitely not set up as a repository of knowledge.

Comment author: talisman 23 March 2009 11:42:55PM 2 points [-]

That link doesn't work due to the angle brackets.