Right now I am erring on the side of caution; I'd rather write something obvious to everyone than skip an inferential distance somewhere.

That seems like the best policy to me, especially for a site like LW. Perhaps on OB that could be a concern, but here where it's so easy to avoid the posts you don't want to read or which aren't upvoted much, having redundant information doesn't seem like it would be too much of a problem.

I think that stating the obvious is frequently useful. There's frequently more to the obvious than is obvious at first glance.

As a wise guy once said:

No, I even suspect that you know the explicit wisdoms, the ones hidden in plain view, which practically no one looks for.

One problem is that it's not always easy to tell which ones you learn from.

It seems that my impression of most of EY's (and your) posts was that they were "well-written and true (but obvious)", but that doesn't mean I didn't learn anything. Once I started thinking about it, I started catching myself mistakes that I normally wouldn't have caught.

It's not that I read about mind projection fallacy and thought "Oh! I guess it doesn't actually work like that after all". If you asked me, I would have always told you that mind projection was a common fallacy. It was more like "Oh, wow. I screw up in that way occasionally too."

The other point is that it is very useful to have a library of posts that are well written and true, as long as it's not obvious to everyone. When you're talking to someone and they screw up, having read well written posts on the subject can make it easier to put your objection into words. If that fails you can just say "check your email when you get home- you have a reading assignment".

Maybe make a rule that you should not upvote a post unless it teaches you something?

I'm not going to do that. I don't mind reading things that I already understand. It is useful to hear the same concepts explained differently and even just be reminded of knowledge I already have floating about in my brain. I find that if anything I am reading is particularly obvious I instinctively start skimming anyway.

As far as I am concerned, the only downside to posting 'obvious' things is that you waste your posting time.

I would agree that heavy linking to background material is extremely helpful, but perhaps it would also be good to have a "Welcome to Rationality" page with a basic primer not just on what the site is for, but where you should start post-wise. Directing to the Most Frequently Useful Things and the Most Important Thing would be a good start, I would think.

Absolutely, linking really improves the resource.

A link for each major claim or background topic would be much appreciated. Sometimes I wonder if there shouldn't be an original post layer, also containing the comments, and a wiki-ish layer, that could provide more links and notations. That way, an entrant could dig deeper, and regulars could participate in bridging those gaps, but could also continue in the original post layer without the wiki-ish clutter.

Learning through participation is a problem when a post generates 30+ comments, some of which are asking for "beginner" clarifications of known-by-regulars concepts. I think it's better to include the beginners in grappling with the concepts and attempting to build the course for themselves and others. Isn't it a bit odd that so many learn by following their interest, filling-in gaps as needed, and yet later on those very same people will attempt to teach others using a more linear method?

Looking back on something I know, I see the map of knowledge, and think "Ah, I might have been better off had I learned these foundational basics first." The click-and-pursue nature of the web seems stacked against that method, and really, would have I been better off? Maybe I wouldn't have pursued as much as I did if I couldn't choose my own path.

If a wiki-ish layer is too crazy, maybe fundamental concepts should be more present in the tags, or be a separate little part? Related links and fundamental concepts relating to the post could be voted up or down. I could vote up a "hindsight bias" tag while downvoting a smartass "jedi" tag, and propose or vote up a link to another post that explored something (say, hindsight bias) in more detail.

Rereading some of those old posts it's fascinating to see how much Eliezer's writing has sharpened from then to now!

Or if there were tags reflecting the level of the post, based on the amount of background knowledge or vocabulary you need to know to understand it.

At this point in time, I don't think a teaching wiki would be very productive. Wikis work well for topics that can be broken into small, independent chunks. I'm basing this judgment off broad comparisons between wikipedia vs wikibooks. More book-like and structured wikis require more devoted editors, and the strong contributors like Eliezer and Yvain are probably going to want to put their energy into this site for the time being.

The one variation I think does have a good chance of flourishing alongside OB and LW would be a rationalist dictionary. I mentioned this early on, but didn't get any comments then. If a beginner can have a reference for terminology, common phrases, and acronyms, most of the posts should be accessible. It could also be a standard place to post syllabi. OB and LW are the best sources to learn from right now, but they do need a reference guide.

if ideologies can have these why can't the simple truth?

Because evolution doesn't give a damn about rationality, happiness, or fulfillment... and so did not equip our hardware to supply us with any of them in abundance.

(EDIT: ...which means that rationality isn't simple, for humans. Adding this because I'm guessing the downvotes are due to people not getting why what I said is a genuine answer to the question.)

That assumes beginners know what they know, which strikes me as a poor assumption.

Ordering by average perceived difficulty won't solve the problem as different new readers will have very different backgrounds - one might find mathy post A easy and psychology post B impenetrable, while the next guy votes the opposite.

Maybe posters could be encouraged to watch out for illusion of transparency and clearly signpost to the next step back on the inferential distance tree, and commenters to suggest such links where the posters forget. I could always figure out what OB posts were about by following these links (whether to other OB posts or not) as far down as needed until I could understand the top post.

But in this interpretation examples like Newcomb problems are actually anti-advanced because they collapse into triviality or nonsense when you try to apply any mathematics to them.

You believe that only because you don't understand how to do the math, the problem itself is not inherently mysterious.