This post’s main points seemed surprisingly simple, and probably I already knew them, but a) it happened to be exactly what I needed to hear yesterday, and b) I don’t think it’s really been covered on LessWrong before. The “practicality” mindset here was an important aspect of coordination that I hadn’t been consciously considering.
I did find a few things about this post somewhat dissatisfying. The post only gives a partial history of many important events, and jumps back and forth between them. I struggled a bit to figure out “wait, how old was Monnet at each of these times? How do all these events fit together?”. This was exacerbated by having lots of quotes that I wanted to look up for the full context of, but which didn’t include a link or footnote to the original context.
(All in all this is fine – I know it’s a lot of extra work to make everything properly cited. And I think the default result of adding more explanation of how all the pieces of history fit together would probably have made the post more bloated. I think the post succeeded at tying together a lot of small anecdotes to get me interested in a facet of history I hadn’t really seen before. But I think it’s good in curation notices to note how the post could be improved, at least hypothetically)
Unfortunately, the article is mess partly because the events back then were a mess and the entire topic seems to be under-researched. For example, I don’t think there’s any kind of official narrative for the early history of the EU. Popular understanding, I think, is that WWII was followed by the postwar boom. The entire dark period of 1945-1950 kind of went down the memory hole. (But I’m from the Ostblok, so maybe kids in the West were taught more about it.)
Anyway, I’ve added couple of links at the end of the article, but again, the events back then were complex and confusing, the resources are in multiple languages etc.
Curated.
This post’s main points seemed surprisingly simple, and probably I already knew them, but a) it happened to be exactly what I needed to hear yesterday, and b) I don’t think it’s really been covered on LessWrong before. The “practicality” mindset here was an important aspect of coordination that I hadn’t been consciously considering.
I did find a few things about this post somewhat dissatisfying. The post only gives a partial history of many important events, and jumps back and forth between them. I struggled a bit to figure out “wait, how old was Monnet at each of these times? How do all these events fit together?”. This was exacerbated by having lots of quotes that I wanted to look up for the full context of, but which didn’t include a link or footnote to the original context.
(All in all this is fine – I know it’s a lot of extra work to make everything properly cited. And I think the default result of adding more explanation of how all the pieces of history fit together would probably have made the post more bloated. I think the post succeeded at tying together a lot of small anecdotes to get me interested in a facet of history I hadn’t really seen before. But I think it’s good in curation notices to note how the post could be improved, at least hypothetically)
Thanks for the feedback!
Unfortunately, the article is mess partly because the events back then were a mess and the entire topic seems to be under-researched. For example, I don’t think there’s any kind of official narrative for the early history of the EU. Popular understanding, I think, is that WWII was followed by the postwar boom. The entire dark period of 1945-1950 kind of went down the memory hole. (But I’m from the Ostblok, so maybe kids in the West were taught more about it.)
Anyway, I’ve added couple of links at the end of the article, but again, the events back then were complex and confusing, the resources are in multiple languages etc.