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Yvain comments on Great rationality posts by LWers not posted to LW - Less Wrong Discussion
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Comments (55)
Less Wrong requires no politics / minimal humor / definitely unambiguously rationality-relevant / careful referencing / airtight reasoning (as opposed to a sketch of something which isn't exactly true but points to the truth.) This makes writing for Less Wrong a chore as opposed to an enjoyable pastime.
If LW feels like work then it's creating an ugh field. I've noticed this when I saw someone treating reading HPMOR like homework instead of as reading for pleasure.
The main/discussion split was supposed to help alleviate this but I feel like too many are treating discussion as only appropriate for rough drafts of main material.
How can we fix this?
Not necessarily.
Posting to my own blog is kinda the same way for me sometimes. It hasn't created an ugh field and I have no problem thinking about it but I end up with a huge backlog of posts with the main idea spelled out but not understandable to others.
A couple partial solutions come to mind:
1) When you see a post that looks like it belongs on LW, tell the author. This gets rid of a lot of the uncertainty about whether LW would appreciate it or whether it's too off-topic/speculative/whatever.
2) If there are posts (or even unwritten posts) that aren't yet LW ready but sound promising, offer to help edit it. This takes a lot of the burden off the author to do all the work, and often an extra perspective makes the process more efficient.
3) Make it somehow more rewarding. Make sure to upvote posts you like, make sure you don't shame people whose posts you don't like if they sincerely thought they were contributing something you'd like, make sure you treat them how you'd treat a friend that did you a favor rather than a paid worker, etc.
This. Being invited feels good.
Alternatively, if an author is not sure whether their article is a LW material, they can ask in the Open Thread.
I agree with the "no politics" bit, but I don't think the rest are correct. I've certainly had "sketch of something that isn't quite true but points in the right direction" posts with no references and unclear connections to rationality promoted before (example), as well as ones plastered with unnecessary jokes (example).
I was going to argue with you about humor until I noticed who'd posted the comment.
One-liners and wisecracks go over well here, but perhaps subtle long form humor doesn't?
I agree. The overwhelming LW moderation focus seems to be on stifling bad content. There's very little in place to encourage good content. Even the thumbs-up works against good content. Before the thumbs-up, on OB, people would leave appreciative comments. It's much more rewarding to read appreciative comments than it is to look at your post's number (and probably compare it unfavorably to other recent posts' numbers...)
On social media sites like Digg or reddit, it's not a big deal to submit something that people don't end up liking 'cause it'll get voted down/buried and consequentially become obscure. On LW, submitting something people don't like amounts to publicly making a fool of yourself. Since it's hard to predict what people will like, folks err on the side of not posting at all.
I think the ideal solution is probably something more like Huffington Post or Daily Kos. I'm not 100% sure how those systems work but they obviously work pretty well.
I agree that it is pretty rewarding to get appreciative comments, but it unfortunately also lowers the signal/noise ratio, since everyone ends up having to read said appreciative comments (rather than the target recipient).
I'd actually argue that in most cases. keeping signal noise ratio high is much more important than increasing the sheer number of good posts. Ideally of course we could do both...
Yeah, this is a downside.
Why's that? Right now, for instance, it's easy to create an arbitrarily high-signal version of LW by going to http://lesswrong.com/prefs/ and changing the thresholds for minimum post/comment scores. Wouldn't it make more sense to let users use this mechanism to decide their own signal/noise threshold rather than enforcing one sitewide? (With a sensible default for non-logged-in users.)
If the absolute number of good posts goes up, that's more knowledge for LW's collective consciousness, that we can link to or mention to one another at times when it seems relevant. LW covers a wide variety of topics, so a greater number of absolute posts also means a greater number of posts that discuss topics relevant to any particular user.
As far as I can tell the sequences have a high number of good posts but a pretty low signal/noise ratio. My guess is that to get good posts, writing a lot and then seeing what sticks works well.
On the other hand, the current LW might work well for people who want to make important but difficult-to-understand points.
Uh, did not know that. Thank you!
I still have a caveat about posts which are extremely good at getting upvotes having a tendency to be shallow in content, but I think that overall, you are correct.
Very subtle, I like understated humor. :)