Every now and then, I write an LW comment on some topic and feel that the contents of my comment pretty much settles the issue decisively. Instead, the comment seems to get ignored entirely - it either gets very few votes or none, nobody responds to it, and the discussion generally continues as if it had never been posted.
Similarly, every now and then I see somebody else make a post or comment that they clearly feel is decisive, but which doesn't seem very interesting to me. Either it seems to be saying something obvious, or I don't get its connection to the topic at hand in the first place.
This seems like it would be about inferential distance: either the writer doesn't know the things that make the reader experience the comment as uninteresting, or the reader doesn't know the things that make the writer experience the comment as interesting. So there's inferential silence - a sufficiently long inferential distance that a claim doesn't provoke even objections, just uncomprehending or indifferent silence.
But "explain your reasoning in more detail" doesn't seem like it would help with the issue. For one, we often don't know beforehand when people don't share our assumptions. Also, some of the comments or posts that seem to encounter this kind of a fate are already relatively long. For example, Wei Dai wondered why MIRI-affiliated people don't often respond to his posts that raise criticisms, and I essentially replied that I found the content of his post relatively obvious so didn't have much to say.
Perhaps people could more often explicitly comment if they notice that something that a poster seems to consider a big thing doesn't seem very interesting or meaningful to them, and briefly explain why? Even a sentence or two might be helpful for the original poster.
Really brainstorming now, I consider the premise that focus on features related to single posts are orthogonal; the core of the topic is not in any given comment, but in the relations between comments themselves. Let's see what my brain turns up...
Reviewing the comments here, I am reminded that sub-comments often have higher vote counts than the comments they are in reply to: Are we valuing the answers to the questions posed in the first-order comments? Moreover, if the base of the comment tree is not voted highly but the comments within it are, what should appear when sorted by leading? Destructuring the apparatus, and from writing the "branching point" comment earlier, I wonder about free-form connection of comments in reply to other comments. (To say nothing of the implementation details.) What if we were to allow users other than the author of a post to mark it as reply-relevant to another post? Which posts would end up deserving of first-order leading status? Moreover, what about comments between articles? Are articles themselves not comments, of a sort? Should definitive-solution-to-the-topic comments more properly be classified as articles unto themselves? Should an article be written instead? What is the optimal method of communication and collaboration for a community of rationalists? If a "comment cloud" is deemed to be a useful structural apparatus, what implementations could be constructed to make interfacing with the ever-evolving live discussion realistically usable? What dynamics and habits would interfere with any given interface? Is "thumbs up/down" a proper branching point for human psychology? Is there a better metric a community of rationalists could use to order posts? I myself vastly prefer sorting by controversial on reddit, but I've found myself questioning if that is the best way to sort LessWrong as well. On reddit, to increase the controversy rating of a comment, you vote it in the direction of zero. I honestly advocate this to anyone who understands the concept behind the idea, at least for the majority of reddit. This of course alters the meaning and implications of "karma" entirely, but I think it a useful heuristic: If people aren't disagreeing about it, I question how much it will interest me.
I'm having difficulty not finding the continuous comment cloud idea worthy of experimentation in terms of usefulness, but it would require many different viewpoints assessing things in their own preferred manner to produce a result. Unsure of the exact mechanics of such a structure, I would have advocated that a programmable interface be provided, such that each individual can view comments in the way they find most optimally useful to themselves, if we had managed to find ourselves in a civilization more apt to scripting. Still, I would advocate many flavors of interface optimization, with each user simultaneously trying to provide as much data to the different paradigms being tested as possible. Though perhaps I'm dreaming too far ahead on that front.
Even without an immediate implementation, I still find the idea useful: What can we do with the existing implementation to make it behave more optimally? In trying to reference other comments within this section, I've found that the hyperlink method is limited: I'm unsure how many users would look at the URL to see if it was a comment within this document, or if most users are liable to simply click the link regardless. Should I be clicking all the links, to ensure total coverage of the discussion on my part? Can we expect useful reformation if only a few participants are willing to change/override their commenting habits?
That all said, I feel as though I'm missing the point that I was aiming for: Am I still focusing on the comments rather than the discussions they communicate? Is the implementation irrelevant? Would trying to adopt a new method of browsing comments be of any usefulness?
What makes discussions useful? How do we detect that usefulness? Was my time spent brainstorming aloud useless to all others but myself in determining how not to solve this problem?
And most importantly: Which of those three questions is the one most worth trying to provide feedback on?
I managed to bake these thoughts:
There are three things worth upvoting:
There's no way for me to upvote the discussion resulting from a comment without upvoting the root comment or the author of that command. Given those two side-effects don't seem important to me, I've opted to upvote comments in which interesting discussions have occurred, though I'm not honestly sure sorting by leading doesn't already serve that purpose. Honestly... (read more)