Comment author: Swimmer963 27 April 2011 02:19:23AM 2 points [-]

This is an awesome idea! I've been reading LessWrong for years, but I still fairly frequently click on links within articles that look interesting, read the first few paragraphs of the article linked to, only to realize that I've read it before (sometimes a few times before!)

This might be too hard to implement, but here is the system I would like: a way to mark articles as 'unread', 'in progress', or 'read'. This information would be saved and links to articles that you marked 'read' would change colour. (Of course, maybe I'm the only one absentminded enough to need this!)

Comment author: TheDave 27 April 2011 02:38:01AM 1 point [-]

Exactly! My problem is that I read an interesting article, and when I come to a link I open it in a new tab to pick up the context before continuing. When I haven't read the article I learn something new, but when I've already seen the linked-to article I can't tell until I'm into the second paragraph or so. Then, I have to re-read the original to get back to where I was.

Perhaps better reading comprehension techniques would fix this for me, but I suspect that a lot of new readers run into this problem.

Comment author: TheDave 22 April 2011 03:53:55PM *  10 points [-]

As a new reader, I would very much like to have a method for marking how far through the sequences I am. A dot next to read articles, or possibly a timestamp of last access could work, as could a button at the bottom of the article labeled "Mark as read" that would display the article title differently in the main sequence page. I feel lost when I hop around on different computers as to what articles I've read and where I have seen them before, and simply saving read articles every time is unsuitable for this.

EDIT TO ADD: Based off of what other commenters have said, I feel like a clarification is in order. What I'm looking for is a way to mark the sequence pages I've read, so that when they're linked to in the newer articles I can tell right away if I've read that particular post. Hopefully, this would work for both backward-linking sequences AND new posts that also link to sequence pages. Perhaps a way to store the URL of a read page, link it to my account, and when that URL is displayed again within LW a new graphic could show up to the side of the link to show that it has already been read.

Comment author: TheDave 05 April 2011 10:39:20PM 17 points [-]

As someone from the southern US, I was asked (jokingly) about whether or not I was a racist when I went north for college. At first I was repulsed by the question, until I noticed that I automatically got more nervous when passing a black person on the street at night. I am going to college in Cleveland, and so I have some actual reason for this since every mugger I've seen for five years in incident reports has been black. My problem (though I only started defining it this way within the past few months of reading LW) is that I was weighting race far too strongly in my everyday interactions.

After I realized I was doing this, I decided to switch my threat assessment style to a more clothing-based approach, with some success. Everyday interactions with other races than my native white within the university also felt easier and less forced. Taking an implicit association test helped me to realize that I was racist to some degree despite my intense repulsion to the idea. I now encourage everyone to examine their thought process for racism, especially if they would feel dismay if someone accused them of racism.

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