I've often had half-finished LW post ideas and crossed them off for a number of reasons, mostly they were too rough or undeveloped and I didn't feel expert enough. Other people might worry their post would be judged harshly, or feel overwhelmed, or worried about topicality, or they just want some community input before adding it.
So: this is a special sort of open thread. Please post your unfinished ideas and sketches for LW posts here as comments, if you would like constructive critique, assistance and checking from people with more expertise, etc. Just pile them in without worrying too much. Ideas can be as short as a single sentence or as long as a finished post. Both subject and presentation are on topic in replies. Bad ideas should be mined for whatever good can be found in them. Good ideas should be poked with challenges to make them stronger. No being nasty!
There is a topic I have in mind that could potentially require writing a rather large amount, and I don't want to do that unless there is some interest, rather than suddenly dumping a massive essay on LW without any prior context. The topic is control theory (the engineering discipline, not anything else those words might suggest). Living organisms are, I say (following Bill Powers, who I've mentioned before) built of control systems, and any study of people that does not take that into account is unlikely to progress very far. Among the things I might write about are these:
Purposes and intentions are the set-points of control systems. This is not a metaphor or an analogy.
Perceptions do not determine actions; instead, actions determine perceptions. (If that seems either unexceptionable or obscure, try substituting "stimulus" for "perception" and "response" for "action".)
Control systems do not, in general, work by predicting what action will produce the intended perception. They need not make any predictions at all, nor contain any model of their environment. They require neither utility measures, nor Bayesian or any other form of inference. There are methods of designing control systems that use these concepts but they are not inherent to the nature of control.
Inner conflict is, literally, a conflict between control systems that are trying to hold the same variable in two different states.
How control systems behave is not intuitively obvious, until one has studied control systems.
This is the only approach to the study of human nature I have encountered that does not appear to me to mistake what it looks like from the inside for the underlying mechanism.
What say you all? Vote this up or down if you want, but comments will be more useful to me.
I wouldn't dump a huge essay on the site. It seems that this medium has taken on the form of dividing the material into separate posts, and then stringing them together into a sequence. Each post should be whole in itself, but may presume that readers already have the background knowledge contained in previous posts of the sequence.
I've thought about writing to try to persuade people here into a form of virtue theory, but before that I would want to write a post attacking anti-naturalist ethics. I would use the same sort of form.