This is a problem of writing in general: different audiences require different speed of explanation and level of detail. Write for beginners, and the experts will complain that your texts advance very slowly and repeat endlessly. Write for experts, and the beginners will complain they are not able to understand.
(Even worse, write a longer text for experts because the inferential distance is high; the experts will underestimate the inferential distance, pattern-match your text with writing for beginners, complain that there were too many details they had to skip, and then write a comment showing some basic misunderstanding they wouldn’t make if they wouldn’t skip those parts. -- “You wrote a lot of stuff about AI that everyone who studied AI knows, so I skipped it. Why don’t you simply make an AI that does not have goals? Also, the superhuman AI would obviously be smart enough to invent the correct morality. What? No, I am not going to read the Sequences!”)
So when you want to recommend something to other people, you shouldn’t recommend what is best for you now, because now you are a kind of expert (at least in the LW lingo) and they are beginners.
This is analogical to when someone asks me to recommend them some good texts online to learn programming. What are good sources for me is not a good source for the beginner. I prefer encyclopedia to find the missing details; the beginner needs a textbook to explain the simple concepts one at a time.
This is a problem of writing in general: different audiences require different speed of explanation and level of detail. Write for beginners, and the experts will complain that your texts advance very slowly and repeat endlessly. Write for experts, and the beginners will complain they are not able to understand.
(Even worse, write a longer text for experts because the inferential distance is high; the experts will underestimate the inferential distance, pattern-match your text with writing for beginners, complain that there were too many details they had to skip, and then write a comment showing some basic misunderstanding they wouldn’t make if they wouldn’t skip those parts. -- “You wrote a lot of stuff about AI that everyone who studied AI knows, so I skipped it. Why don’t you simply make an AI that does not have goals? Also, the superhuman AI would obviously be smart enough to invent the correct morality. What? No, I am not going to read the Sequences!”)
So when you want to recommend something to other people, you shouldn’t recommend what is best for you now, because now you are a kind of expert (at least in the LW lingo) and they are beginners.
This is analogical to when someone asks me to recommend them some good texts online to learn programming. What are good sources for me is not a good source for the beginner. I prefer encyclopedia to find the missing details; the beginner needs a textbook to explain the simple concepts one at a time.