a) I liked reading your guide: You managed to include many important LW-related concepts while still keeping a hands-on feeling. This makes it a nice reference for people who do not enjoy a more technical/analytical approach. Have you considered creating a link-post on lesswrong?
b) You write:
The good news is that the virtuous cycle here also works: I’ve found that if one person is consistently unusually virtuous in their conversations and arguments, a little bubble of sanity spreads around that person to everyone in the vicinity over time.
This seems like a more deliberate version of what Scott Alexander describes in Different Worlds? (a term that is used is ‘niceness fields’)
I would be very interested in approaches to actively create ‘bubbles of sanity’ or ‘niceness fields’.
The points ‘aim for success, not victory’ and ‘assume good faith’ of your guide seem important for this. A big part is probably to clearly communicate that the other’s status is in no way being questioned and thus need not be defended. In my experience, this part of communication is usually not deliberate (or even conscious) and hard to change. Of course, even small improvements can be valuable.
Yes, I didn’t have niceness fields intentionally in mind when I commented, but it is definitely the same idea.
Have you considered creating a link-post on lesswrong?
That was the first thing I did when I created an account here. It got no upvotes and did not get promoted to front page, so… maybe it was just too much to digest from somebody with no karma at the time?
(Speaking as a mod) Link posts from new users definitely (unfortunately) have a much higher burden than regular posts. This isn’t so much of a conscious choice, as result of how much effort they take to evaluate.
There are no full-time mods, just people who do moderation in addition to other LW duties. We don’t have time to read each post thoroughly before frontpaging it. I typically skim a post to get a sense of it’s overall topic, and see if the author is someone who has a track record of writing frontpage material. The default outcome is for things not to get frontpaged.
Link posts face the additional hurdle of “I have to click through to another site to read the post”, which is already a trivial inconvenience. Moderators actually see a hover-over of the post when they look through their moderation queue, but link-posts don’t appear in the hoverover because they’re offsite.
Then, on top of that, link posts get less visibility anyways – the same reasons that make them more effortful for a moderator to evaluate make people less likely to click through and read them. (i.e when people hoverover the post, or see it in Recent Discussion, they don’t get to automatically skim it, they have to evaluate an indirect summary)
I generally recommend fully crossposting things rather than just link-posting them with a small summary, you’ll typically get more engagement that way.
For the record, it might be worth turning that old post into a crosspost, I’d be up for frontpaging it this time around. It does look interesting.
If I edit the existing post, will it end up in oblivion anyway because it’s old now? Or does the clock restart when it gets promoted to frontpage? I can delete/recreate if that would be more effective.
Another thought: because it’s 6k words, it might be worth splitting across a few posts and creating a sequence out of it. I don’t see a way to do that in the editor, so it might require privileges? I’m also not sure if it would be appropriate for this or not.
edit: also (and this is getting quite far afield here) - I’ve been blogging for quite a while on rational-adjacent topics before I started posting here. I imagine a flood of cross-posts of previous work would be frowned upon, but also the line seems kind of blurry given that’s exactly what this comment thread is already discussing.
There are tools to give old posts new frontpage life, which I’d be happy to use here (you can send me a PM about it when you’re ready). But, if you want to go the sequence route instead:
We deliberately make it less obvious to new users how to create sequences (users with 1000+ karma see an obvious button in the user menu). If you go to /library page, you’ll find a Create Sequence button.
So if you want to go the sequence route, I’d just create new posts from scratch, one a time, spaced out a couple days apart. (You’ll get more engagement this way. I cry a little inside when I see users write magnum opuses that they create nicely formatted sequences for… and then post all at once, which is overwhelming and people don’t read)
Relatedly, I’d crosspost old content over at a rate of around 1-per-2-days, and check to see which sort of content gets engagement/upvotes/comments.
That was the first thing I did when I created an account here.
Oops—I didn’t notice the ‘load more’ option for the posts on your profile earlier, I upvoted your post now.
I have not yet written any posts myself and have only skimmed the detailed rules about karma some time ago, but I can easily imagine that the measures against spam can sometimes lead good posts from new accounts to be overlooked.
a) I liked reading your guide: You managed to include many important LW-related concepts while still keeping a hands-on feeling. This makes it a nice reference for people who do not enjoy a more technical/analytical approach. Have you considered creating a link-post on lesswrong?
b) You write:
This seems like a more deliberate version of what Scott Alexander describes in Different Worlds? (a term that is used is ‘niceness fields’)
I would be very interested in approaches to actively create ‘bubbles of sanity’ or ‘niceness fields’.
The points ‘aim for success, not victory’ and ‘assume good faith’ of your guide seem important for this. A big part is probably to clearly communicate that the other’s status is in no way being questioned and thus need not be defended. In my experience, this part of communication is usually not deliberate (or even conscious) and hard to change. Of course, even small improvements can be valuable.
Yes, I didn’t have niceness fields intentionally in mind when I commented, but it is definitely the same idea.
That was the first thing I did when I created an account here. It got no upvotes and did not get promoted to front page, so… maybe it was just too much to digest from somebody with no karma at the time?
(Speaking as a mod) Link posts from new users definitely (unfortunately) have a much higher burden than regular posts. This isn’t so much of a conscious choice, as result of how much effort they take to evaluate.
There are no full-time mods, just people who do moderation in addition to other LW duties. We don’t have time to read each post thoroughly before frontpaging it. I typically skim a post to get a sense of it’s overall topic, and see if the author is someone who has a track record of writing frontpage material. The default outcome is for things not to get frontpaged.
Link posts face the additional hurdle of “I have to click through to another site to read the post”, which is already a trivial inconvenience. Moderators actually see a hover-over of the post when they look through their moderation queue, but link-posts don’t appear in the hoverover because they’re offsite.
Then, on top of that, link posts get less visibility anyways – the same reasons that make them more effortful for a moderator to evaluate make people less likely to click through and read them. (i.e when people hoverover the post, or see it in Recent Discussion, they don’t get to automatically skim it, they have to evaluate an indirect summary)
I generally recommend fully crossposting things rather than just link-posting them with a small summary, you’ll typically get more engagement that way.
For the record, it might be worth turning that old post into a crosspost, I’d be up for frontpaging it this time around. It does look interesting.
If I edit the existing post, will it end up in oblivion anyway because it’s old now? Or does the clock restart when it gets promoted to frontpage? I can delete/recreate if that would be more effective.
Another thought: because it’s 6k words, it might be worth splitting across a few posts and creating a sequence out of it. I don’t see a way to do that in the editor, so it might require privileges? I’m also not sure if it would be appropriate for this or not.
edit: also (and this is getting quite far afield here) - I’ve been blogging for quite a while on rational-adjacent topics before I started posting here. I imagine a flood of cross-posts of previous work would be frowned upon, but also the line seems kind of blurry given that’s exactly what this comment thread is already discussing.
There are tools to give old posts new frontpage life, which I’d be happy to use here (you can send me a PM about it when you’re ready). But, if you want to go the sequence route instead:
We deliberately make it less obvious to new users how to create sequences (users with 1000+ karma see an obvious button in the user menu). If you go to /library page, you’ll find a Create Sequence button.
So if you want to go the sequence route, I’d just create new posts from scratch, one a time, spaced out a couple days apart. (You’ll get more engagement this way. I cry a little inside when I see users write magnum opuses that they create nicely formatted sequences for… and then post all at once, which is overwhelming and people don’t read)
Relatedly, I’d crosspost old content over at a rate of around 1-per-2-days, and check to see which sort of content gets engagement/upvotes/comments.
I’ve started the conversion into a sequence here.
Oops—I didn’t notice the ‘load more’ option for the posts on your profile earlier, I upvoted your post now.
I have not yet written any posts myself and have only skimmed the detailed rules about karma some time ago, but I can easily imagine that the measures against spam can sometimes lead good posts from new accounts to be overlooked.