I think this post is excellent, and judging by the comments I diverge from other readers in what I liked about it.
In the first, I endorse the seriously-but-not-literally standard for posting concepts. The community—rightly in my view—is under continuous pressure to provide high quality posts, but when the standard gets too high we start to lose introduction of ideas and instead they just languish in the drafts folder, sometimes for years. In order to preserve the start of the intellectual pipeline, posts of this level must continue to be produced.
In the second, I have long thought that communication was a neglected topic here, particularly when it comes to groups. This post did an excellent job of pointing out how the problems of nuance and scale are in tension, and this has implications for coordination. Putting more emphasis on communication for coordination is going to be important in my view if we want the other ideas developed here to escape here. Even a more rigorous version of the concept would be a huge contribution.
In the third, a meta observation: I notice there is a pretty large segment of commenters who always interpret any numbers present as the thesis. The original title of this post was “You Have Four Words” and commentary focused enough on whether four words was correct that the title was changed to “You Have About Five Words” which is a strictly worse title in my opinion. Amusingly and I assume intentionally the change does illustrate the point. More interestingly the title change caused me to reflect on keeping numbers out of concept posts (and basically any other kind of post not focused on quantifying something), and it occurred to me it was pretty good advice in full generality rather than just in the case of LessWrong. It avoids all sorts of things: accidentally triggering analysis on the numbers, which are not the point; a particular number or statistic being mistakenly repeated as part of the claim, or worse replacing an actual core claim in the reader’s memory; it also simply and easily preserves the understanding that rigorous quantification has not been done yet and is work that still needs doing. As a consequence in my head the conclusion is now Few Words, No Numbers.
I think this post is excellent, and judging by the comments I diverge from other readers in what I liked about it.
In the first, I endorse the seriously-but-not-literally standard for posting concepts. The community—rightly in my view—is under continuous pressure to provide high quality posts, but when the standard gets too high we start to lose introduction of ideas and instead they just languish in the drafts folder, sometimes for years. In order to preserve the start of the intellectual pipeline, posts of this level must continue to be produced.
In the second, I have long thought that communication was a neglected topic here, particularly when it comes to groups. This post did an excellent job of pointing out how the problems of nuance and scale are in tension, and this has implications for coordination. Putting more emphasis on communication for coordination is going to be important in my view if we want the other ideas developed here to escape here. Even a more rigorous version of the concept would be a huge contribution.
In the third, a meta observation: I notice there is a pretty large segment of commenters who always interpret any numbers present as the thesis. The original title of this post was “You Have Four Words” and commentary focused enough on whether four words was correct that the title was changed to “You Have About Five Words” which is a strictly worse title in my opinion. Amusingly and I assume intentionally the change does illustrate the point. More interestingly the title change caused me to reflect on keeping numbers out of concept posts (and basically any other kind of post not focused on quantifying something), and it occurred to me it was pretty good advice in full generality rather than just in the case of LessWrong. It avoids all sorts of things: accidentally triggering analysis on the numbers, which are not the point; a particular number or statistic being mistakenly repeated as part of the claim, or worse replacing an actual core claim in the reader’s memory; it also simply and easily preserves the understanding that rigorous quantification has not been done yet and is work that still needs doing. As a consequence in my head the conclusion is now Few Words, No Numbers.