Comment on Upcoming LW Changes

Thu, 04 Feb 2016 11:32:15 GMT

My expertise, strictly speaking, is in programming and closely related technological topics; those are the only subjects where I can personally vouch for the correctness etc. of the content instead of relying on references. Everywhere else I'd be repeating what other people write, or at best providing anecdotal evidence.

But programming is an immensely wide subject. Most of the LW regulars are themselves programmers or have experience with programming (in the Israeli LW meetup there's only one 'core' / regular member who's not a programmer). I fear that most technical things I might write would be obvious to some and incomprehensible or irrelevant to others, and only useful and interesting to a minority in the middle.

On the other hand, I read a lot in subjects which I think would interest many people. I could write about those, but the epistemic status would be "I read this somewhere, here's the reference, I can't verify this for myself and I probably don't even have a good prior and neither do you unless you're already an expert in the subject." For example, at a recent Israeli LW meetup I presented a summary of biologist Nick Lane's books on the role of mitochondria in the evolution of other properties of eukaryotes. I'm not sure the two people in the audience with formal biological education liked it as much as everyone else did; one of them said something to the effect of "even if it's not necessarily true, it's a nice story".

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