The following comment is about LW and not about this post, per se. I enjoyed reading this post for some reason and I don’t object to its content in any way so please do not take what I say as a criticism.
I’m wondering...what makes this post apropos to lesswrong? I’m not saying it doesn’t belong here, I’m just wondering what other people’s takes are for why it does or does not belong here.
I think it is simply automatic crossposting of Zvi’s feed, is it not? One of the post submitted because many posts on that source are of LW interest, not necessarily with any particular post claimed to be super-relevant.
In this case, you could certainly extract a LW-relevant lesson: “small towns are pretty nice & cheap places to live if you are unambitious and don’t want to meet people, but are intellectually costly”. This is important to note about the tradeoffs, and this was precisely what was at issue with MIRI’s recent evaluation of whether to move out of the Bay Area to places a lot like Warwick, NY, and their choice not to: as crummy and getting worse as the Bay Area may be, it is still ultra-dense with the people that MIRI needs both professionally and as amenities for its people personally.
I didn’t realize that was happening. Now that you say it I looked back and couldn’t figure it out how I was supposed to know that for awhile until I realized that the de-emphasized text below the title can be hovered to find that out.
I think your second paragraph makes a good argument for it’s LW-appropriateness.
Our policy is that most content is welcome on LessWrong, regardless of topic; however, only content that is of interest to most of our readers will be Frontpaged/given much visibility.
gwern’s correct in saying this post was an automatic crosspost, but it would have been fine and good even if Zvi had manually posted it.
I’d encourage most people to post without worrying if their content is “appropriate” and let the mods/site architecture determine how much visibility to give to different pieces.
I think what makes it apropos is that it’s one of Zvi’s blog posts, and Zvi is one of the people whose blog posts get auto-syndicated here on LW because they are sufficiently often LW-relevant. See also: jefftk, who sometimes posts very-LW-relevant things and sometimes posts “here’s a cute thing my children did” or “here’s some information about contra dancing”, but all of it appears here.
(For the avoidance of doubt, none of the above is complaint or criticism; I too enjoy reading the not-very-LW-ish stuff written by these people and don’t think it does any particular harm for it to appear on LW.)
[EDITED to add:] When I wrote the above, I didn’t see that gwern had also replied saying something similar. My apologies for the redundancy. I don’t think it’s so redundant that I need to delete it :-).
Can confirm gwern/gjm’s responses that the system autoposts my stuff to LW when I post to my personal blog, which is where this is intended to go. Posts that are not good fits for LW remain here as personal blog posts, and I appreciate this backup system in case my blog goes offline for some reason in the future (e.g. rising censorship).
I think that the key point of LessWrong is the community, rather than the content. The community is fairly unique and specialized. Any content that’s a good fit for the community seems relevant here (even if it seems quite different, I personally would be interested in the comments of others here).
I think over time the filtering and tagging systems will continue to improve. Ideally LessWrong will continue to be able to absorb larger and larger genres of topics, while still being able to allow readers to get what they want out of it.
The following comment is about LW and not about this post, per se. I enjoyed reading this post for some reason and I don’t object to its content in any way so please do not take what I say as a criticism.
I’m wondering...what makes this post apropos to lesswrong? I’m not saying it doesn’t belong here, I’m just wondering what other people’s takes are for why it does or does not belong here.
I think it is simply automatic crossposting of Zvi’s feed, is it not? One of the post submitted because many posts on that source are of LW interest, not necessarily with any particular post claimed to be super-relevant.
In this case, you could certainly extract a LW-relevant lesson: “small towns are pretty nice & cheap places to live if you are unambitious and don’t want to meet people, but are intellectually costly”. This is important to note about the tradeoffs, and this was precisely what was at issue with MIRI’s recent evaluation of whether to move out of the Bay Area to places a lot like Warwick, NY, and their choice not to: as crummy and getting worse as the Bay Area may be, it is still ultra-dense with the people that MIRI needs both professionally and as amenities for its people personally.
I didn’t realize that was happening. Now that you say it I looked back and couldn’t figure it out how I was supposed to know that for awhile until I realized that the de-emphasized text below the title can be hovered to find that out.
I think your second paragraph makes a good argument for it’s LW-appropriateness.
Our policy is that most content is welcome on LessWrong, regardless of topic; however, only content that is of interest to most of our readers will be Frontpaged/given much visibility.
gwern’s correct in saying this post was an automatic crosspost, but it would have been fine and good even if Zvi had manually posted it.
I’d encourage most people to post without worrying if their content is “appropriate” and let the mods/site architecture determine how much visibility to give to different pieces.
I think what makes it apropos is that it’s one of Zvi’s blog posts, and Zvi is one of the people whose blog posts get auto-syndicated here on LW because they are sufficiently often LW-relevant. See also: jefftk, who sometimes posts very-LW-relevant things and sometimes posts “here’s a cute thing my children did” or “here’s some information about contra dancing”, but all of it appears here.
(For the avoidance of doubt, none of the above is complaint or criticism; I too enjoy reading the not-very-LW-ish stuff written by these people and don’t think it does any particular harm for it to appear on LW.)
[EDITED to add:] When I wrote the above, I didn’t see that gwern had also replied saying something similar. My apologies for the redundancy. I don’t think it’s so redundant that I need to delete it :-).
Can confirm gwern/gjm’s responses that the system autoposts my stuff to LW when I post to my personal blog, which is where this is intended to go. Posts that are not good fits for LW remain here as personal blog posts, and I appreciate this backup system in case my blog goes offline for some reason in the future (e.g. rising censorship).
Personally, I found this useful.
I think that the key point of LessWrong is the community, rather than the content. The community is fairly unique and specialized. Any content that’s a good fit for the community seems relevant here (even if it seems quite different, I personally would be interested in the comments of others here).
I think over time the filtering and tagging systems will continue to improve. Ideally LessWrong will continue to be able to absorb larger and larger genres of topics, while still being able to allow readers to get what they want out of it.