Note: I currently lean towards changing the Progress Bar metric from "tagged posts over 25 karma" to 35 or 40 karma.
The original reason we went with 25 karma was an awkward compromise due to the LW2.0 karma inflation – old upvotes were only worth 1 point, now regular upvotes are worth 2 for most longtime users, and strong upvotes mean the average is more like 3-4. We haven't gotten around to re-running the old vote history with the new vote-weighting, and that means that old (often great) posts have much lower karma than modern posts.
We plan to bring the old and new votes in sync someday, but didn't have time to do it this week.
For modern posts, the threshold I'd have preferred to set was ~50 karma. This was roughly the equivalent of 25 back-in-the-day (hence the original metric). But I don't really want to make people feel obligated to tag a bunch of mediocre modern posts – I'd rather taggers start shifting their efforts towards improving tag descriptions (turn stubs into full fledged A or B tier tags), and thinking about how the tag ontology fits together (i.e. are some tags duplicates? which tags are related?)
My current guess is we should set the threshold to 40, and then I'm just going to strong upvote a bunch of older posts that deserve it to bump them over the threshold.
(Meanwhile, to all the users who have doing doing tons of tagging: thanks!)
Someone mentioned that they thought the Concepts / Tag Portal was really nifty and they only just got round to looking at it, and that they thought it was motivating for tagging. I probably should have included a screenshot in the text (just added), but here's a comment with a larger one:
www.lesswrong.com/tags/all
PSA: Voting on relevance is an important, underserved, and easy to contribute to area of the tagging system.
One person can create a tag, make a good description, and find a bunch of posts that fit it, but it takes multiple people's votes to create a decent ordering of posts from most to least relevant. Which posts are listed first will be an important part of the user experience.
This will be especially important for the more crowded tags, like the core tags, history, math, science, statistics, ai risk, and so forth.
Contributing can be as easy as just going through the list and upvoting posts that you've read and think are a good fit for the tag.
Edit: It would be nice to have a spreadsheet sorting tags by something like average relevance karma per post, to identify which tags most need votes.
A way I can contribute to the site without having to come up with brilliant original ideas? Excellent!
The Progress Bar has been filled!
Dubious honor to https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/XCsKmLw8L55ZyYjnK/think-before-you-speak-and-signal-it as the last post with 25+ karma to be tagged.
Making tags is fun!
Here are some tags i made:
Tagging
Category Theory (this one needs work because i know very little about category theory, but it seemed like a tag that should exist)
I wrote a first version of the new tag description, I might rewrite some parts of it later. ;)
Are there any thoughts on external links for tag wiki pages? I was looking at the social status tag, for example, and there are a few overcomingbias / ribbonfarm posts which I think would be useful but whether / how best to incorporate them isn't clear to me
Quick note that there is now a Tagging Activity page available to everyone. You can see users who have tagged posts or upvoted/downvoted their relevance. (Corresponding reminder that tag activity isn't private)
Thanks for the project, and the FAQ. I shall contribute.
Is there a way to retrieve the old tags from LW 1.0? I remember they were used to index Open Threads, for instance. I can't remember the details but that could be a good way to jumpstart some tags.
Awesome! Thanks! Don't hesitate hesitate to ask for any help making the process easier.
Re: LW1.0 tags -- good question. I believe they they were implemented via the old LW1.0 wiki and you can still view all those pages and their tagged posts. https://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Special:AllPages
We've been planning to probably import that content, we estimate about 100 high quality articles/tags, but it's been waiting behind other dev work that seemed higher priority, e.g., Talk Pages for tags.
We've also got our eyes on the Arbital content, however that's a lot more work since we don't currently have all the features that Arbital uses.
I'm not sure the Newsletters tag quite makes sense. Generally if I'm interested in one Newsletter, what I want is more of that newsletter's topic (or, more of that Newsletter, specifically), rather than other random newsletters
I suppose it's still reasonably handy for finding a specific newsletter post that you half-remember.
PSA: You can now add and edit tags for a post from the drop down menu to the right of it (in places like the front page, tag pages, user profiles, etc.).
This makes it much easier to go through a big list of posts and adding relevant tags. you can go to one of the lists that are linked in the progress bar in the main page and start ploughing through the posts.
Thanks for the LW team for enabling this feature :)
When I click "Add Tag", this is what I see:
Then I clicked to show more, because I know there are a lot more tags and want to make sure that if I tag a post it has all of the proper tags (because if I don't it'll be marked as tagged and it's likely that no one will return to it to add the proper tags):
But this view isn't organized well like the concepts portal is (below), so I felt the need to skim through each individual tag, which took a long time. Seems like it'd be a good idea to organize the above view to look more like the below view.
Just commenting to say it's pretty cool to see the bar filling up and the number of tagged posts growing up. Thanks to all the taggers!
We haven't yet built any ways to recognize or reward the taggers, and I'd really like to. Any suggestions for how to do that?
Publish a book of the best instances of people applying tags to posts in 2020.
The progress bar in the main page is super cool. I'm curious, how is it being calculated?
Edit: oh, when you hover over it it says "X out of 4735 posts have been tagged (filtered for 25+ karma)"
So i guess that's how
Ahh, hmm. That is embarrassing. Hmm, I wish I had a better excuse for this. Hmm...
I mean, look over there a three-headed monkey!
(Will be fixed within the hour)
Edit: And it's fixed. Sorry about that!
I notice that when you try to tag a post but its relevance was in the negatives and your vote doesn't bring it above zero, the site doesn't give any feedback. It looks like there was a bug, or your connection messed up and didn't submit the tag properly.
This is somewhat mitigated now by being able to look at the tag voting page to confirm that you vote went through, but a lot of people won't know to do that.
I'm not sure how to distinguish between the Empiricism tag and the Philosophy of Science tag. Anyone have a strong sense of what goes it one vs the other?
Tagging meta question:
There's a Calibration (Probability) tag. How important is it to keep that distinct from other forms of calibration (i.e. if you think some parameter will be within particular bounds, those bounds tend to be correct).
Prompted by this post on time calibration.
I suppose that all calibration is implicit probability calibration (i.e. if I think something will take between 15 and 45 minutes, I'm sort of implicitly claiming it has a high probability of being so, even if I didn't concretely decide it was my 90% confidence in...
Would be nice to be able to see tags by date created, or something to know what new tags are created, so we can take a look and think if there's anything that needs to go there.
I have tagged a few posts from the top of the spreadsheet but not too many because it caused me reading too many old posts...
I have added the tag Habits; hope that makes sense. I'm not too clear about the taxonomy.
How frequently is the spreadsheet updated? UPDATE: Every 5 Min according to the OP.
We'd like to build a small community around taggers – the people who maintain the ontology of LessWrong's library ensuring that desired information can always be found.
Maybe this is a dumb question but, is this actually needed?
Can we get what we want with people just randomly adding tags when they notice? Do we need to have people specializing on this?
I'd expect that a bunch of work would be needed up front to get the tag system into a good state, but I'd think most of that work has been done already (by the LW team, and others). And then going forward I'd expect much less work to be required. Am I missing something?
Alternatively, we have an automatically updating spreadsheet (every 5 min) that tracks the tags on the most viewed posts according to our data and their current tags.
Note that this spreadsheet seems to open by default to the "sorted by karma" tab, and you have to manually switch to the "sorted by view rank" tab (spent half a minute wondering whether the link was incorrect before happening to look at the tab list).
(Also: Oh wow, our most viewed post in one with four karma?)
In https://www.lesswrong.com/tag/intuition?showPostCount=true&useTagName=true the description seemed to be copied from Wikipedia but the content is not licensed in a way that's compatible with Wikipedia's license.
It might be good to distinguish "content type" tags from "format type" tags. (Examples of the former are "AI risk" or "Introspection", examples of the latter are "dialogues", "open threads", "fiction").
lesswrong.com/tagvoting isn't loading for me. All I get is the error " Error: TypeError: Cannot read property 'isEvent' of null". I'm using Chrome, if that's relevant.
I wanted to create a 'Law and Legal Systems' tag, but then i saw there's a Government tag, currently only with 2 posts. should these tags be separate, or should i change the current tag to "Law, Legal Systems And Government"?
The tags page is occasionally suddenly replacing itself with the message "Error: TypeError: Cannot read property '_id' of null", forcing me to reload the page. Has anyone else seen this?
Edit: I also got the same error on the page for a post, when I added a tag, the server response was slow, and I tried to add it again.
It's a good to start by becoming familiar with LessWrong's existing tags. You can see them on the new Concepts page.
In the text, Concepts shows up green, like it's supposed to be a link, but it doesn't go anywhere. Was it supposed to be a link?
Diseased disciplines: the strange case of the inverted chart is an interesting case because tagging it correctly feels like a spoiler.
Would be nice to be able to add tags from the drop-down menu to the right of posts (in places like the homepage and users profiles). This would speed up the process by a lot.
You’ve listened to the LessWrong team talk about our new tagging feature for months. First a steady drip of we’re working on it, then announcements of various milestones like you can now filter Coronavirus in or out and anyone can create tags. Well, now, it's an open call for taggers.
We’ve sufficiently validated the core idea and developed enough tech that we’re ready to turn to the community in helping us gain complete tag coverage of LessWrongs’ 10-year corpus.
That means:
Why is tagging valuable?
Skip this section if you just want to know the how!
Multiple reasons, but I'm going to focus on one that is very dear to me.
One of the major goals of LessWrong is intellectual progress on important problems. As far as I have seen, all major human breakthroughs built upon other breakthroughs. Later thinkers built upon earlier ones, or better yet, great thinkers built upon each others ideas. It's a common story, but one example from my quest to answer Why wasn't science invented in China?: Francis Bacon didn't invent the modern scientific method from nowhere. Aristotle, Grosseteste, and Roger Bacon were all part of the tradition before him.
I like to frame this cumulative way that progress is made as a “sustained conversation” that thinkers maintain over time. Over decades or centuries, some thinkers focus on the same ideas and pass knowledge between them, thereby pushing the frontier of what's collectively known so that more progress can be made.
However, this requires a medium of conversation. There has to exist some way for the thinkers to find each other and say things to each other. And for new people to catch up and join in on the conversation.
It's easy to have a brief conversation in a given time or place. It's much harder to sustain a conversation around the globe and over years. It would seem that great progress can suddenly happen if a new medium of conversation is provided. For example, the meetings and journal of the Royal Society allowed top scientists of Europe to converse throughout the 17th and 18th centuries to great effect. In the 150 years after the founding of the Royal Society, more than half of the scientists who made major scientific discoveries in that period were members. Causality is hard to prove in this case, but it seems linked.
You can see where this is going. Tagging is a way to sustain conversations over time. Right now, it's easy to have conversations on LessWrong about posts and topics being discussed this week. If a post is on the Frontpage, 1) you're much more likely to find it and therefore be able to build upon it, and 2) if you comment on it, people are likely to see your comments and reply.
Suppose, however, that you're interested in anthropics. There hasn't been a LessWrong post on anthropics in the last four months, yet, over 11 years LessWrong has accrued 81 posts on that topic, some of them which are pretty darn good!
The point of tagging is that people can contribute knowledge to LessWrong's corpus, and have interested others find their contributions weeks, months, or years later. We want that when people contribute to LessWrong, they know they're contributing to something lasting. This isn't a news or entertainment site where posts are just part of a weekly cycle, they get some limelight, then are forgotten to the world. No. We're trying to build a goddamn edifice here.
Let's sustain some conversations.
How do I help tag?
Option 1: Dive right in!
Though we have some guidelines, it's totally great to just go to post pages and start tagging them with what feels like the right tags. You can even create yet-to-exists tags without worrying too much. Better you dive in and we do some clean-up than you don't get started because it's too much work to get started.
Option 2: Some helpful hints
We've worked to prepare answers to all the questions we've encountered so far in the Tagging FAQ. It covers and when and when not to tag, guidelines for creating tags, and some notes on tag voting. Ultimately, we'll aim to fix up all tags to be in-line with the style guide described there.
Feel free to comment there with any questions not yet covered.
Good places to start
It's a good idea to start by becoming familiar with LessWrong's existing tags. You can see them on the new Concepts page. Then are a couple of tagging strategies:
Tag-First
Post-First
You might find that you end up iterating between the two approaches.
Growing a community
We'd like to build a small community around taggers – the people who maintain the ontology of LessWrong's library ensuring that desired information can always be found.
Soon we'll have Discussions Pages for every tag, but in the meantime, if you want to connect with others about tagging, please comment on this post.
If you have any questions whatsoever, please comment here, DM me (or the rest of the team), or email us at ruby@lesswrong.com or team@lesswrong.com
Thanks!