abramdemski comments on Rewriting the sequences? - Less Wrong

16 Post author: Student_UK 13 June 2011 02:14PM

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Comment author: abramdemski 02 September 2012 01:36:40AM 4 points [-]

My suggestion: lesswrong should have a prominently placed random article button.

My background: It would be hard for me to guess what fraction of material I have read. I read some stuff, enthusiastically, when this community was at Overcoming Bias. Since then I have had one foot in this community. However, when I get enthusiastic, I find myself spending Far Too Long attempting to read the sequences; I decide to put them aside again and do more productive things.

As a result, I am somewhat conflicted. I think the lesswrong philosophy is excellent. I link friends to lesswrong articles often, hoping that they will end up reading more than just the one article. Yet, for myself, I feel I "get the idea" and that reading old articles more systematically, while fun, is too hard and too time-consuming.

I get the urge to go back and read stuff every so often. Re-starting from the beginning of a sequence or the chronological list of articles is demoralizing, though; I'm just looking for something fun to read, not to start a project. Therefore, my proposal: a Random Article button.

My guess is that this would also be useful to other people not sure where to start.

(I understand that this would require a semi-significant amount of programming.)

Oh, also:

More sorting options on the main blog and on pages for individual contributors would be nice. If I could see all posts (promoted, or of an individual) in chronological order (starting with the first, not the most recent), that would be nice.