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NancyLebovitz comments on Open Thread, Jun. 8 - Jun. 14, 2015 - Less Wrong Discussion
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Judging from the recent decline of LW, it seems that the initial success of LW wasn't due to rationality, but rather due to Eliezer's great writing. If we want LW to become a fun place again, we should probably focus on writing skills instead of rationality skills. Not everyone can be as good as Eliezer or Yvain, but there's probably a lot of low hanging fruit. For example, we pretty much know what kind of fiction would appeal to an LWish audience (HPMOR, Worm, Homestuck...) and writing more of it seems like an easier task than writing fiction with mass-market appeal.
Does anyone else feel that it might be a promising direction for the community? Is there a more structured way to learn writing skills?
I think we need both rationality and improved writing. This is a crowd that isn't going to put up with entertaining writing that doesn't have significant amounts to say about rationality.
Maybe a good question is "what is the most fun (interpreted very widely) we can have with rationality? I'm not just talking about jokes and entrancing fiction and smiting the unworthy (though those are good things), but looking for emotional intensity, which can be about cracking a problem open as much as anything else.