ChristianKl comments on What we learned about Less Wrong from Cognito Mentoring advising - Less Wrong

20 Post author: VipulNaik 06 March 2014 09:40PM

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Comment author: ChristianKl 07 March 2014 08:42:54AM 3 points [-]

One thing that surprised me personally is that many of these people had never spent time exploring Quora.

Could you explain more about that point? I use stackexchange sites a lot when I have some question to which I need an answer. For what purposes should I investigate Quora?

Comment author: lincolnquirk 07 March 2014 02:15:33PM 4 points [-]

Quora is highly browseable. Stack Exchange is also somewhat browseable, but they are usually technical questions which are not very fun to browse. Quora has been really useful to me as an entrepreneur because they have a lot of answers from CEOs to strategic questions about startup founding. I would definitely recommend browsing it to entrepreneurs.

Comment author: Qiaochu_Yuan 14 March 2014 12:56:15AM 0 points [-]

At its best, Quora can be an interesting window into parts of the world you might have little to no direct experience with. Some of the most highly-voted answers are from prisoners, police officers, actors, CEOs, and other people you might not interact with day-to-day, and I've found those answers to be both entertaining and useful for enriching my model of the world.

I also occasionally use Quora as a way to test exposition strategies. The standard for what constitutes an accessible explanation (as measured by number of votes) is relatively high, and I like the challenge of trying to explain mathematics on Quora in as accessible a way as I can. Feedback on my attempts to do this is relatively fast and has informed how I explain mathematics in general.

Most of the time, though, I find Quora a waste of time. I have not found a way to effectively filter its feed so that I get mostly high-quality content. It seems like there is relatively little effort made to quality control questions (as opposed to answers).

Comment author: casebash 13 March 2014 11:27:55AM 0 points [-]

Quora has a not very prominent, but extremely useful "best questions section". This, along with the Quora newletters provide me with a large amount of high quality content