I do think that you can have a general discussion about which toys produce deep fun that can illuminate aspects about how human values work that’s on-topic but I don’t think the depth in which this post looks at the question leads there.
My take is something similar to Dagon’s: I think I want nonzero posts like this in the LessWrong feed – the fact that it’s short and playful and just gets me thinking about stuff without requiring me to boot up a “deep thinking mode” is in fact a key part of why I like it.
I agree there is also a “what sort of toys produce deep fun” bigger blogpost that goes into more depth that should maybe exist some day. But meanwhile I actively do want to have blogposts with a range of depth, and for some to be more like “here’s one concrete example” than “here’s a bunch of examples and an overarching theory.”
I don’t currently have a principled stance of “exactly how often and when should posts like this be on frontpage”, like Dagon noted elsethread it’s sort of important that that be vague and non-gameable.
the fact that it’s short and playful and just gets me thinking about stuff without requiring me to boot up a “deep thinking mode” is in fact a key part of why I like it.
If the LessWrong frontpage isn’t about booting up “deep thinking mode” what is it’s purpose?
Ideally, I would expect that reading things that require “deep thinking mode” is why people go to the frontpage.
I’m not saying that’s not a key purpose, but I don’t think it can or should be the only purpose.
Note that the current LW frontpage post is on average much longer than the original sequences – those contained many instances of Eliezer spelling out one idea with one example very clearly and concisely. And I think this was good. I think this was both good pedagogically for readers, and good for Eliezer’s own writing/work ethic.
I think there is potentially some argument that posts like this should be shortform rather than top-level posts, but I currently lean against it. But if so, I’d want shortform better integrated than it currently is, such that reading shortform is a more natural thing to build LW habits around.
But I think you get much more intellectual progress if you enable small bite sized posts like this than if you don’t. I don’t think Jeff was at all likely to build up a theory of what makes toys fun and write an extensive post on them. But I do think other people are more likely now to take this example and have it mulling in the back of their head, and have it feed into more comprehensive ideas.
(One of) the points of frontpage is to give newcomers a sense of what to expect from LessWrong overall, that is representative of where the overall site is trying to go. This includes ideas at different stages of the pipeline. Again, this is not a post I’d want to have here all the time – I frontpage maybe 1 in 20 of Jeff’s personal-blog-style posts, and current there aren’t many other personal-blog-style posts that get written. All I’m arguing here is the number should probably be non-zero.
On the readership side – if every LessWrong post required booting up deep thinking mode, then people would only come to LessWrong when they felt able to Deep Think, which is actually pretty rare. A key point of LW in my mind is to leverage a lot of untapped intellectual capital via the power of “being fun and feeling low effort.” We’re not paying people to be here.
I think allowing discussion to go to much to being low effort was one of the ways LW1.0 failed over time. People were spending less energy on effortful posts and then more on effortless posts.
On the readership side – if every LessWrong post required booting up deep thinking mode, then people would only come to LessWrong when they felt able to Deep Think, which is actually pretty rare.
The fact that LW1.0 drew a readership with an average IQ of 140 (in the census) does suggest that it drew readers that have an ability to think deeply that’s quite rare. That’s no bug.
I do think that you can have a general discussion about which toys produce deep fun that can illuminate aspects about how human values work that’s on-topic but I don’t think the depth in which this post looks at the question leads there.
My take is something similar to Dagon’s: I think I want nonzero posts like this in the LessWrong feed – the fact that it’s short and playful and just gets me thinking about stuff without requiring me to boot up a “deep thinking mode” is in fact a key part of why I like it.
I agree there is also a “what sort of toys produce deep fun” bigger blogpost that goes into more depth that should maybe exist some day. But meanwhile I actively do want to have blogposts with a range of depth, and for some to be more like “here’s one concrete example” than “here’s a bunch of examples and an overarching theory.”
I don’t currently have a principled stance of “exactly how often and when should posts like this be on frontpage”, like Dagon noted elsethread it’s sort of important that that be vague and non-gameable.
If the LessWrong frontpage isn’t about booting up “deep thinking mode” what is it’s purpose?
Ideally, I would expect that reading things that require “deep thinking mode” is why people go to the frontpage.
I’m not saying that’s not a key purpose, but I don’t think it can or should be the only purpose.
Note that the current LW frontpage post is on average much longer than the original sequences – those contained many instances of Eliezer spelling out one idea with one example very clearly and concisely. And I think this was good. I think this was both good pedagogically for readers, and good for Eliezer’s own writing/work ethic.
I think there is potentially some argument that posts like this should be shortform rather than top-level posts, but I currently lean against it. But if so, I’d want shortform better integrated than it currently is, such that reading shortform is a more natural thing to build LW habits around.
But I think you get much more intellectual progress if you enable small bite sized posts like this than if you don’t. I don’t think Jeff was at all likely to build up a theory of what makes toys fun and write an extensive post on them. But I do think other people are more likely now to take this example and have it mulling in the back of their head, and have it feed into more comprehensive ideas.
(One of) the points of frontpage is to give newcomers a sense of what to expect from LessWrong overall, that is representative of where the overall site is trying to go. This includes ideas at different stages of the pipeline. Again, this is not a post I’d want to have here all the time – I frontpage maybe 1 in 20 of Jeff’s personal-blog-style posts, and current there aren’t many other personal-blog-style posts that get written. All I’m arguing here is the number should probably be non-zero.
On the readership side – if every LessWrong post required booting up deep thinking mode, then people would only come to LessWrong when they felt able to Deep Think, which is actually pretty rare. A key point of LW in my mind is to leverage a lot of untapped intellectual capital via the power of “being fun and feeling low effort.” We’re not paying people to be here.
I think allowing discussion to go to much to being low effort was one of the ways LW1.0 failed over time. People were spending less energy on effortful posts and then more on effortless posts.
The fact that LW1.0 drew a readership with an average IQ of 140 (in the census) does suggest that it drew readers that have an ability to think deeply that’s quite rare. That’s no bug.
You seem (to me) to be making an extremely strong claim that the number of posts like this should be zero (as opposed to like 1-3 per year).
I’m still pretty uncertain about whether this post should be frontpaged, but that just seems like an extremely strong claim to me.