Three sequences on AI Safety were recently released. I'd suggest that in general it is probably better when new material isn't released that fast. Those sequences are quite technical so each post requires a reasonable amount of time to be invested. This means:
- There is more psychological pressure to read each post quickly rather than taking the time to understand and internalise the ideas
- There are less comments because keeping up with the posts reduces the time people have to write comments and if you're behind, by the time you catch up there's less value writing a comment as less people will see it
This isn't a particularly important post, just feedback for the future.
Re: reference works. If LW worked a bit more like a mailing list, where reading a post caused you to "subscribe" to its comment thread by default, then people would feel less pressure to comment on things quickly after they were released so their comments would be read. The old LW 1.0 had a subscribe feature, but I'm not sure how many people used it. It was opt-in rather than opt-out.
Right now, my feeling is that checking LW and participating in discussions every day frazzles my brain in subtle ways. So I mostly don't try to keep up with posts day to day, and instead figure I will archive binge at some point in the future. But it seems like the value in me reading a post and leaving a comment on it is a lot higher than just reading the post if my comment gets upvoted. And if I leave a comment while archive binging, it's much less likely to be read. So I suppose while archive binging, instead of leaving a lot of little comments, it's better for me to try to categorize related thoughts into an entire post's worth of material and make a toplevel post with those ideas so people will actually read them? I'm a lot slower at writing posts than writing comments, but I'm hoping to overcome that problem at some point.