Just read the short story. I'm glad I did. Thanks.
If you're at all interested in this story then the full novel is definitely worth reading, it's not very long. One of my all time favorite books.
I read it many years ago- it is well written but has a terrible message, and is a really good example of how much good writing can be used to deliver bad messages. The essential lesson is that being smarter can be much worse, unintended consequences, hubris of humanity, etc. And as is often the case with this sort of thing, rather than actually examine the implications of a technology that would make people smarter, it has to turn out that the effect is only temporary. Why? Because otherwise the deck wouldn't be stacked the way Keyes wants it to be stacked.
My point is that reader_utility is more or less the same when the story is posted here, as it would be if it was posted in the Open Thread and Media Thread, but that nonreader_utility would be significantly better if it was posted there rather than here.
I don't follow. A viewer is a viewer whether they are viewing from an open thread or discussion. Posting in Open Thread vs Discussion only has the effect of scaling viewer numbers (in this model, num_nonreaders & num_readers) up or down. And I would expect that the num_nonreaders to num_readers ratio is the same for Discussion readers vs Open Thread readers. (BTW note that num_readers refers to the fact that the people have read Flowers for Algernon, etc... sorry for the confusingly named variables. Feel free to refer back to the grandparent comment.)
In fact, in this toy model the open thread vs discussion vs main distinction is fairly pointless: if the expected utility of a given person seeing a given post is positive, we should give it as much exposure as possible in order to harvest as much utility is possible. And if the expected utility is negative it should not be posted anywhere.
To the extent the toy model is wrong, it's wrong because people have a limited amount of time when they read LW and we would like to put the highest expected utility stuff in places where they are more likely to see it. If everything was posted to Discussion, finding higher-value stuff might be harder. But if there isn't already stuff competing for attention in main/discussion, little is lost that I can see by upgrading open thread posts to discussion posts or discussion posts to main posts.
Daniel Keyes, the author of the short story Flowers for Algernon, and a novel of the same title that is its expanded version, died three days ago.
Keyes wrote many other books in the last half-century, but none achieved nearly as much prominence as the original short story (published in 1959) or the novel (came out in 1966).
It's probable that many or even most regulars here at Less Wrong read Flowers for Algernon: it's a very famous SF story, it's about enhanced intelligence, and it's been a middle/high school literature class staple in the US. But most != all, and past experience showed me that assumptions of cultural affinity are very frequently wrong. So in case you haven't read the story, I'd like to invite you explicitly to do so. It's rather short, and available at this link:
Flowers for Algernon
(I was surprised to find out that the original story is not available on Amazon. The expanded novelization is. If you wonder which version is better to read, I have no advice to offer)
(I will edit this post in a week or so to remove the link to the story and this remark)