I haven’t looked through your links in much detail, but wanted to reply to this:
Overall I would suggest to approach this with some intellectual humility and study existing research more, rather then try to reinvent large part of network science on LessWrong. (My guess is something like >2000 research years were spent on the topic often by quite good people.)
I either disagree or am confused. It seems good to use resources to outsource your ability to do literature reviews, distillation or extrapolation, to someone with higher comparative advantage. If the LW question feature can enable that, it will make the market for intellectual progress more efficient; and I wanted to test whether this was so.
I am not trying to reinvent network science, and I’m not that interested in the large amount of theoretical work that has been done. I am trying to 1) apply these insights to very particular problems I face (relating to forecasting and more); and 2) think about this from a cost-effectiveness perspective.
I am very happy to trade money for my time in answering these questions.
(Neither 1) nor 2) seems like something I expect the existing literature to have been very interested in. I believe this for similar reasons to those Holden Karnofsky express here.)
I was a bit confused by we but aren’t sure how to reason quantitatively about the impacts, and how much the LW community could together build on top of our preliminary search, which seemed to nudge toward original research. Outsourcing literature reviews, distillation or extrapolation seem great.
Agreed. I realise the OP could be misread; I’ve updated the first paragraph with an extra sentence mentioning that summarising and translating existing work/literature in related domains is also really helpful.
I haven’t looked through your links in much detail, but wanted to reply to this:
I either disagree or am confused. It seems good to use resources to outsource your ability to do literature reviews, distillation or extrapolation, to someone with higher comparative advantage. If the LW question feature can enable that, it will make the market for intellectual progress more efficient; and I wanted to test whether this was so.
I am not trying to reinvent network science, and I’m not that interested in the large amount of theoretical work that has been done. I am trying to 1) apply these insights to very particular problems I face (relating to forecasting and more); and 2) think about this from a cost-effectiveness perspective.
I am very happy to trade money for my time in answering these questions.
(Neither 1) nor 2) seems like something I expect the existing literature to have been very interested in. I believe this for similar reasons to those Holden Karnofsky express here.)
I was a bit confused by we but aren’t sure how to reason quantitatively about the impacts, and how much the LW community could together build on top of our preliminary search, which seemed to nudge toward original research. Outsourcing literature reviews, distillation or extrapolation seem great.
Agreed. I realise the OP could be misread; I’ve updated the first paragraph with an extra sentence mentioning that summarising and translating existing work/literature in related domains is also really helpful.