Most of our current work continues to be on making the codebase theme-able, so that AlignmentForum and the upcoming new EA Forum can easily be re-styled.

However, we've got a new feature that I'm hoping will (eventually) play a significant role in changing how people use LessWrong: sharing drafts.

When you create a new post, you can now share it with specific users. And then, if you submit it as a draft, they can view it even though it's not posted publicly. (They can also comment on it. It's up to you whether you want to encourage this for a given post)

Currently there are no notifications associated with this, and will probably be awhile before we build out additional features one might want for this (easily sharing with groups, in-line comments, allowing multiple users to edit, version control, etc). But I wanted to at least get this basic feature out sooner rather than later, and am hoping for the longterm for this to be part of the move towards a more peer-review-esque world.

Right now LessWrong sort of encourages you to come up with an idea, write it up, post it, and then maybe there are comments and critiques but you don't actually go back to rework the original post.

Longterm I'm excited by the prospect of "write the post" just being the beginning, and having various formal and informal systems for having improve that post being a continuous, important part of the process.

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Would you appreciate work on that via github?

Yep, PR seems great to send someone a notification when they get shared on a draft. Should be quite straightforward.

This is probably the file to do this in, and the linked line has an example of doing it for new posts.

Would anyone be interested in previews of my posts?

Likely upcoming topics:

  • A defence of the halver-position for the Sleeping Beauty Problem
  • A review of Chen and Rubio's paper Surreal Decisions (https://www.eddykemingchen.net/uploads/4/6/1/3/46137503/surreal_decisions_ppr.pdf)
  • A post on all of the other problems related to infinities solved by surreal numbers
  • Constructing the counterfactuals a Perfect Parfit's Hitchhiker
  • The Doubling Paradox
  • A post or series of posts on the Anthropic Problem

I'm willing to do a trade with someone who is writing about a similar area where we each review each other's posts (though perhaps not for certain maths heavy posts which would take too long for me to decode if they would require me to learn about an area I'm unfamiliar with)

I'm curious if anyone notices that there are particular additional-features that seem necessary for sharing to actually be useful. (I've noticed as I started experimenting with it that I felt a bit weird using it in some contexts, and might want things like "be able to reliably share with the same group of people")

Awesome! I might actually use this soon.

I had a draft shared with me, and was unable to find it until I manually added to the end of the url for the profile of the person to who shared it with me "?view=drafts" making the whole thing 'https://www.lesswrong.com/users/[name of user]?view=drafts'. Is there any other way to reach this?

Just started writing a post and noticed this feature. Am a big fan.