Broadcasting is good for transferring information from people with more valuable time to people with less valuable time—in those cases “using up the explainer’s time” much more than doubles the cost. I expect it would be better to do transmitting information 1-on-1 transmission to specialized explainers who broadcast it, but we aren’t good at that.
This suggests some models:
(thinker → conversation partner) repeated for everyone of the community
thinker ⇒ everyone in the community
thinker → explainer ⇒ everyone in the community
(where ‘=>’ implies telling a lot of people via an essay)
These models are in order of decreasing net cost to the system, if we assume the thinker’s time is the most expensive.
Let me propose another model
thinker ⇒ group of readers in a nearby inferential space ⇒ everyone in the community
I think there’s room for LW to intervene on this part of the model. Here are some ways to do that:
Create a new type of post which is an ‘explainer’ - something that does not claim original content, but does purport to re-explain another’s content in a more broadly understandable way. Give the best of these a permanent/prime position on the site (i.e. the way that R:AZ/Codex/HPMOR currently are) to incentivise their creation.
Let an author whitelist a set of other users, who may edit/re-write their posts, and who are rewarded for doing so in a way that successfully communicates the post to a wider range of people.
A small scale example of this at work would be how the commenters on Goodhart Taxonomy came up with multiple concrete examples using basketball, and these were incorporated into the post (which vastly improved my understanding of it, and I think significantly improved others’ ability to quickly grok the post).
Create a new type of sequence which is a ‘first-draft’, and create a system whereby an author can write a sequence of posts, get feedback from the comments, before re-writing / structuring the sequence, and potentially handing over the ‘next-draft’ to a different author.
This is not specifically for the original thinker, but can be thought of as analogy to how lecture series at universities work; the first lecturer of an advanced course may be the person who invented the ideas, but subsequent lecturers can be different individuals who nonetheless iterate on the explanations used.
This would go hand-in-hand with a feature whereby authors and trusted users can create exercises for posts, and those who successfully answer them can create new exercises themselves + mark others’ answers. Incentivise taking and creating such exercises. Use these as a test of the quality of an explanation.
By investing in really great explanations you can save total time compared to one-on-one explanations. I think a very small fraction of public discussion falls into this category / meets this bar.
Such discussion however, can be selected to be brought significantly into prominence; a site restructure towards focusing attention on such writing may be highly valuable.
This suggests some models:
(thinker → conversation partner) repeated for everyone of the community
thinker ⇒ everyone in the community
thinker → explainer ⇒ everyone in the community
(where ‘=>’ implies telling a lot of people via an essay)
These models are in order of decreasing net cost to the system, if we assume the thinker’s time is the most expensive.
Let me propose another model
thinker ⇒ group of readers in a nearby inferential space ⇒ everyone in the community
I think there’s room for LW to intervene on this part of the model. Here are some ways to do that:
Create a new type of post which is an ‘explainer’ - something that does not claim original content, but does purport to re-explain another’s content in a more broadly understandable way. Give the best of these a permanent/prime position on the site (i.e. the way that R:AZ/Codex/HPMOR currently are) to incentivise their creation.
Let an author whitelist a set of other users, who may edit/re-write their posts, and who are rewarded for doing so in a way that successfully communicates the post to a wider range of people.
A small scale example of this at work would be how the commenters on Goodhart Taxonomy came up with multiple concrete examples using basketball, and these were incorporated into the post (which vastly improved my understanding of it, and I think significantly improved others’ ability to quickly grok the post).
Create a new type of sequence which is a ‘first-draft’, and create a system whereby an author can write a sequence of posts, get feedback from the comments, before re-writing / structuring the sequence, and potentially handing over the ‘next-draft’ to a different author.
This is not specifically for the original thinker, but can be thought of as analogy to how lecture series at universities work; the first lecturer of an advanced course may be the person who invented the ideas, but subsequent lecturers can be different individuals who nonetheless iterate on the explanations used.
This would go hand-in-hand with a feature whereby authors and trusted users can create exercises for posts, and those who successfully answer them can create new exercises themselves + mark others’ answers. Incentivise taking and creating such exercises. Use these as a test of the quality of an explanation.
Such discussion however, can be selected to be brought significantly into prominence; a site restructure towards focusing attention on such writing may be highly valuable.