Noooooooo! I mean this in a friendly sort of sense. Not that I’m mad or indignant or anything. Just that I’m sad to see this and suspect that it is a move in the wrong direction.
This relates to something I’ve been wanting to write about for a while and just never really got around to it. Now’s as good a time as any to at least get started. I started a very preliminary shortform post on it here a while ago.
Basically, think about the progression of an idea. Let’s use academia as an initial example.
At some point in the timeline, an idea is deemed good enough to pursue an experiment on.
Then the results of the experiment are published.
Then people read about the results and talk about them. And the idea.
Then other people summarize the idea and the results. In other papers. In textbooks. In meta-analyses. In the newspaper. Blog posts. Pop science books. Whatever.
Then people discuss those summaries.
Earlier on, before the idea was deemed good enough to pursue an experiment on, the idea probably went through various revisions.
And before that, the author of the idea probably chatted with some colleagues about it to see what they think.
And before that, I dunno, maybe there was a different idea that ended up being a dead end, but lead to the author pivoting to the real idea.
And before that, I dunno, there’s probably various babble-y things going on.
What I’m trying to get at is that there is some sort of lifecycle of an idea. Maybe we can think of the stages as:
Inspiration
Ideation
Refinement
Pursuit
Spread
On platforms like LessWrong, I feel like there is a sort of cultural expectation that when you publish things publicly, they are at the later stages in this lifecycle. From what I understand, things like Personal Blog Posts, Open Thread and Shortform all exist as places where people are encouraged to post about things regardless of the lifecycle stage. However, in practice, I don’t really think people feel comfortable publishing early stage stuff.
There’s certainly pros and cons at play here. Suppose there was 10x more early stage content on LessWrong. What would the consequences of this be? And would it be a net-negative, or a net-positive? It’s hard to say. Maybe it’d screw up the signal-to-noise ratio in the eyes of readers. And maybe that’d lead to a bunch of bad things. Or maybe it’d lead to a bunch of fun and productive collaboration and ideation.
What I do feel strongly about is that the early stages of this lifecycle are in fact important. Currently I suppose that they happen at coffee shops and bars. On cell phones and email clients. On Discord and Slack. Stuff like that. Between people who are already close friends or close colleagues. I get the sense that “we” can “do better” though.
Noooooooo! I mean this in a friendly sort of sense. Not that I’m mad or indignant or anything. Just that I’m sad to see this and suspect that it is a move in the wrong direction.
This relates to something I’ve been wanting to write about for a while and just never really got around to it. Now’s as good a time as any to at least get started. I started a very preliminary shortform post on it here a while ago.
Basically, think about the progression of an idea. Let’s use academia as an initial example.
At some point in the timeline, an idea is deemed good enough to pursue an experiment on.
Then the results of the experiment are published.
Then people read about the results and talk about them. And the idea.
Then other people summarize the idea and the results. In other papers. In textbooks. In meta-analyses. In the newspaper. Blog posts. Pop science books. Whatever.
Then people discuss those summaries.
Earlier on, before the idea was deemed good enough to pursue an experiment on, the idea probably went through various revisions.
And before that, the author of the idea probably chatted with some colleagues about it to see what they think.
And before that, I dunno, maybe there was a different idea that ended up being a dead end, but lead to the author pivoting to the real idea.
And before that, I dunno, there’s probably various babble-y things going on.
What I’m trying to get at is that there is some sort of lifecycle of an idea. Maybe we can think of the stages as:
Inspiration
Ideation
Refinement
Pursuit
Spread
On platforms like LessWrong, I feel like there is a sort of cultural expectation that when you publish things publicly, they are at the later stages in this lifecycle. From what I understand, things like Personal Blog Posts, Open Thread and Shortform all exist as places where people are encouraged to post about things regardless of the lifecycle stage. However, in practice, I don’t really think people feel comfortable publishing early stage stuff.
There’s certainly pros and cons at play here. Suppose there was 10x more early stage content on LessWrong. What would the consequences of this be? And would it be a net-negative, or a net-positive? It’s hard to say. Maybe it’d screw up the signal-to-noise ratio in the eyes of readers. And maybe that’d lead to a bunch of bad things. Or maybe it’d lead to a bunch of fun and productive collaboration and ideation.
What I do feel strongly about is that the early stages of this lifecycle are in fact important. Currently I suppose that they happen at coffee shops and bars. On cell phones and email clients. On Discord and Slack. Stuff like that. Between people who are already close friends or close colleagues. I get the sense that “we” can “do better” though.