On several occasions I’ve wanted to introduce people to Eliezer’s writings (and OB/LW aswell), but due to its disorganized and heavily-dependent-on-other-material-in-a-great-messy-web-like nature, I have feared that just a “hey check this guy out” would most likely just result in the person reading a few random essays, saying “yeah I guess that’s pretty interesting” and then forgetting about it. Right before LW launched, I seem to recall Eliezer talking about how the LW architecture would allow better organization and that maybe he would do something to make his material more accessible. I haven’t heard anything since then, but if something like that would be done I think that would be great.
(sorry if I’m being rude by focusing on just Eliezer’s material when we’re discussing the greater LW picture, but this is just a situation that I’ve found myself in a few times and I think it’s still relevant to this topic. I also second ciphergoth’s point about the elephant)
My original plan was to organize things into sequences, but I now think that converting to a wiki/post model (concepts defined in wiki, which organizes posts, which link back to wiki) is an even bigger win, though sequence browsing would still be nice.
Thing is, while I was actually writing all this stuff, I needed to just focus on writing it, as much as possible, even at the expense of usability—and go back and fix the accessibility afterward. It’s not optimal but it got the job done.
A big positive here would be the book being published, like the freakonomics blog took off after freakonomics got popular and then they added more contributors who would add research that would be of interest to freakonomics readers.
That was precisely my point. After the book gets published, the wiki and the blog will get popular. People, who are successful in other fields and who have got interested in x-rationality will have a background to understand posts better and will contribute to better discussions.
On several occasions I’ve wanted to introduce people to Eliezer’s writings (and OB/LW aswell), but due to its disorganized and heavily-dependent-on-other-material-in-a-great-messy-web-like nature, I have feared that just a “hey check this guy out” would most likely just result in the person reading a few random essays, saying “yeah I guess that’s pretty interesting” and then forgetting about it. Right before LW launched, I seem to recall Eliezer talking about how the LW architecture would allow better organization and that maybe he would do something to make his material more accessible. I haven’t heard anything since then, but if something like that would be done I think that would be great.
(sorry if I’m being rude by focusing on just Eliezer’s material when we’re discussing the greater LW picture, but this is just a situation that I’ve found myself in a few times and I think it’s still relevant to this topic. I also second ciphergoth’s point about the elephant)
My original plan was to organize things into sequences, but I now think that converting to a wiki/post model (concepts defined in wiki, which organizes posts, which link back to wiki) is an even bigger win, though sequence browsing would still be nice.
Thing is, while I was actually writing all this stuff, I needed to just focus on writing it, as much as possible, even at the expense of usability—and go back and fix the accessibility afterward. It’s not optimal but it got the job done.
A big positive here would be the book being published, like the freakonomics blog took off after freakonomics got popular and then they added more contributors who would add research that would be of interest to freakonomics readers.
I believe the freakonomics blog was started after the book was published. The blog was a spin off from the book, not the other way around.
That was precisely my point. After the book gets published, the wiki and the blog will get popular. People, who are successful in other fields and who have got interested in x-rationality will have a background to understand posts better and will contribute to better discussions.