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gwern comments on What Direct Instruction is - Less Wrong Discussion
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Comments (81)
Editors. You are not the first person I've seen who could really use an editor on their material.
Editors are feedback. The only place I was gonna find suitable editors was LW. Rather than PMing people, I posted it to the section called "discussion".
For heaven's sake, what else was I supposed to do?! :P
A very specific kind of feedback, with understood social roles and norms of interaction; it is a 'kind' of person, which you can solicit for. If you cannot think how else to do it because PMing random LWers (a perfectly valid way! Just ask politely and take no for an answer.), there are many other ways. Just off the top of my head:
And this isn't even thinking outside the box a little; for example, I bet you could find plenty of editors/reviewers if you posted a Bitcoin advertisement.
(Also, little in your original post was LW-specific. Any intelligent college grad, for example, could offer good feedback on that. It's not like you were discussing the finer details of UDT or something.)
No, I'm on a full time internship as an elementary teacher. The theory I'm studying by myself.
I'm surrounded by people who know how to deliver DI programs, how to do superb classroom management, etc, but not by anyone who could read Theory of Instruction in one weekend and write a report on it (How many posts of lorem ipsum would Misha have to make for me to upvote for the karma system to accurately reflect the props he deserves :P).
But yeah, "Just Try It", right?
And it's the LW community that I have a strong emotional desire to get involved in, and the eventual intended audience anyway.
I'm not sure that advice is very good when the consequences of failure apparently made you contemplate suicide.
And when your post is sufficiently bad that a single editor could have diagnosed most of the problems, it's a little contemptuous of peoples' time to - in effect - run it simultaneously past dozens/hundreds of editors.
You know, it's also possible to learn a totally different lesson here: We should be gentle with people, because they are often much more vulnerable than we assume. I would argue that this lesson is much more generally applicable than "Be more scared of failure."
It's far easier to get the person with vivid memories of contemplating suicide to be more cautious than to get everyone in general to be more gentle.
Well, that's certainly a good point, but I wasn't talking to everyone in general, either.
Please see "I wasn't contemplating suicide per se". I knew in advance that I would decide to keep fighting, as I always do. It is actually a technique I use to cheer myself up, rather like being underwater, and dipping down just a bit so that you can kick off the ground in order to spring back to the surface.
I certainly know I'm very careful thanks to my own experiences to avoid causing unnecessary pain to others, and in fact to try very hard to make people happier.
But I am not fragile. I hurt, but I never break.
I thanked people for their harsh criticism, remember.
I wasn't contemplating suicide per se, I was just wondering seriously whether the reason I wasn't was essentially a form of akrasia.
And I have major past issues. I have an intellectual belief that I will one day be able to share true mutual understanding, love, and trust with other people. Relationships that make life worthwhile.
However, due to some traumatic experiences with people I thought I had that with just completely disappearing, even though I can see in retrospect how to discriminate such unreliable people from the real deal, it takes a lot of mental pumping for me to keep up the corresponding emotional belief.
LessWrong is my HOPE. A community that makes me feel that I could expect to find that understanding, love, and trust.
So I certainly wasn't being "contemptuous of peoples' time" on purpose, and given that my original post had 20 upvotes at one time, I don't think the community feels that way either.
If you understand where I'm coming from now and have changed your mind that I did make the right choice, please tell me that.
I stand by my comments; DI is interesting enough that even a badly written post is still a net benefit which could get 20 net votes. However, it would have been much better all around - for you and the readers both - if you had gotten someone to edit it, in any of the 3 or 5 ways I've outlined. There's no reason a well-done DI article couldn't be promoted to the main page, eg.
(In a related issue, I am also bothered that you apparently could not think of any way to get editors. You should work on that.)
I... this is one of those issues that if I am in the wrong, I will have to take a break and apply some more intense techniques for getting around my own defensiveness than I usually need to use.
But I really honestly feel no "small note of discord" in my mind that should make me expect to find that I am wrong.
At any rate, since it's over and done with now, what say the both of us just put the issue far in the back of our minds to allow any potentially useful new thoughts to crystallize by themselves, and refocus our attention on the future of what we need to write about DI?
So you don't care that most of the reaction to your article was about how it was written? You don't care about how much time you've spent discussing it with me alone? (Or how much time I've spent, hoping that future material will be better?) You don't care about how much the impact was muted because of all that? You don't care about what you've learned about the value of clear writing? You don't care about building a reputation as a guy who knows about something interesting but can't write for beans? You don't care about your apparent ignorance of editing done either by yourself or another, or how to get it, or that you were ignorant of being ignorant, or that you might be generally miscalibrated about your competence? You don't care about sending the message that you don't care about all the foregoing?
I'm not asking for a large note of discord, but I definitely think there should be a small note there somewhere.
I'd rather discuss you. DI is just one topic, and hopefully just the first of many topics you might discuss here. Someone else will sooner or later pick up the DI baton, but if you ignore any lessons to be learned here, when will you learn them? Sooner would be better than later.
After rereading your last comment here, I just wanted to make clear: I do care very much.
Thank you making an excellent, explicit, compressed list of everything I did wrong. (...Where else than LW would that be obviously non-sarcastic? :P)
It is very valuable and I will be using it to improve. If I had a printer, I'd print it out and put it by my computer. (As it is I'll just have to save it to a file I use a lot.)
I'm going to the effort of telling you this because, due to the value of the comment, I want to encourage similar feedback from you in the future.
...And if I had never made the attempt, I never would have gotten that feedback from you either. :P
Yes, I realize that you can't just say, "Well, it's all right, cuz I learned a valuable lesson!" and then keep doing the same dumb thing, but... whenever I have done a dumb thing, it's cuz I haven't learned that lesson yet! So long as you're not twisting that into an excuse to keep doing the dumb thing, or to avoid trying to learn faster not to do different dumb things in the future, you've got it right, right?
So I still think "Just Try It" was good advice.
I appreciate your willingness to have an in-depth discussion of this topic with me, and if I had infinite time, I would gladly take you up on it. But since I don't, I'm sorry, but I'm going to have to bow out of discussing the subject of me in order to have more time for the subject of DI.
I have already learned lots of things I think I could apply to better accomplishing similar goals in the future. And I don't anticipate having to introduce another such wide, deep, complex topic as DI from scratch again.
Again, thank you, and I hope to see more of you in the DI discussion.