All of Raymond Arnold's Comments + Replies
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Potential issues (the results of my 5 minutes of thought)
1) Opportunity cost. Should people practice being brief, over other things (like maybe speedreading, or improving their ability to quickly read academic papers or statistics?)
1a) i.e. Academia isn't going to change, and if we want scientifically literate ideas, we will need to be better at understanding opaque, jargon-filled academic-ese, or mathy stats stuff. So maybe that's a better use of time?
1b) On the flipside, 1a is HARD to do for many people, whereas anyone can start practicing being brief wi...
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A concrete idea: what if every LessWrong article prominently linked to a summary? Or a small number of highly-ranked summaries? This could reduce the burden on the original author, at the risk of having the second author’s POV differ somewhat.
What if LW went so far as to make summaries the preferred entry ways? Instead of a reader seeing a wall of text, they see a digestible chunk first?
I have been wanting this for a very long time. It isn’t easy nor obvious nor without hard trade-offs. In any case, I don’t know of many online forums nor information sources that really explore the potential here.
Related: why not also include metadata for retractions, corrections, and the like? TurnTrout’s new web site, for example, sometimes uses “info boxes” to say things like “I no longer stand by this line of research”.
Yeah, this seemed like a good introduction.
It doesn't seem like it's yet gotten to the part where we (generic hypothetical reader "we") know if the sequence was going anywhere new yet. So I'd hope to see one or two posts exploring the further ramifications that I assume you're building towards before evaluating whether this post worked in isolation.
Mild aesthetic note: I felt like it apologized a bit too much for the outlandish metaphors. I think a single apology in the beginning and then just owning it would probably be better.