I’ve occasionally had the experience of wanting to convey a concept from the Sequences to somebody who hasn’t read them, but when I try to find a good post to link them to, I realize that the description of the concept is spread out over three or more posts that each individually have a frustratingly low content-to-words ratio. (The LW wiki helps a bit, but there the descriptions are often too concise to be useful.)
I suspect that the popularity of the Sequences is both despite and due to the writing style. This problem with the style didn’t matter so much when the posts were being written and they showed up once a day in my RSS feed—in order to properly learn a concept, you need to encounter it several times with slight variations, and the actual message being spread out over many posts was originally helpful in this respect. It spread out the message over several days of reading and thus helped learn it better than if there had been just one clear, to-the-point post—that you read once and then forgot.
However, now that nobody is reading the posts at a one-per-day rate anymore, the style and format seems harmful. When you’re reading through a (huge) archived sequence of posts, unnecessary fluff will just create a feeling of things having being written in a needlessly wordy way. And it makes it very hard to usefully link to posts about specific concepts.
Are there some specific concepts that come readily to mind? Maybe we could experiment with making much more substantial, useful wiki pages, riddled with quotations / excerpts from LW and elsewhere. The current standard size and tone of the wiki pages could be preserved—as the lead sections for much longer articles.
(Broadly) wikipedian style is also useful for keeping articles organized and concise because of the section structure. Sections make topic divisions obvious, and ‘See more’ links can be included at the beginning of each section for more details.
We needn’t be bashful about copy-pasting large chunks of the Sequences where it’s useful to do so, and at the same time the more transparent structure of the wiki, and our ability to leave anything out that isn’t absolutely essential, would let us piece together more to-the-point presentations. The wiki would then become our go-to resource for quick but thorough introductions to concepts, and would include links to the relevant Sequence posts (and primary literature, etc.) for people who want more examples and poetry. (Both of which can be immensely important.)
I notice that comment was written two months before Eliezer published Skill: The Map is Not the Territory. Does this article satisfy you, or does it still deviate from what you’d ideally link to? If so, in what ways does it (or it + the sister articles) deviate?
That article has the problem that I was asking for a good page that would explain and summarize the meaning of the phrase. Skill never actually explains the phrase—rather it starts from the assumption that the reader already knows what that means. You may be able to figure out the intended meaning from the examples, but it would take some effort, particularly if you’re not already familiar with these kinds of ideas.
I’ve occasionally had the experience of wanting to convey a concept from the Sequences to somebody who hasn’t read them, but when I try to find a good post to link them to, I realize that the description of the concept is spread out over three or more posts that each individually have a frustratingly low content-to-words ratio. (The LW wiki helps a bit, but there the descriptions are often too concise to be useful.)
I suspect that the popularity of the Sequences is both despite and due to the writing style. This problem with the style didn’t matter so much when the posts were being written and they showed up once a day in my RSS feed—in order to properly learn a concept, you need to encounter it several times with slight variations, and the actual message being spread out over many posts was originally helpful in this respect. It spread out the message over several days of reading and thus helped learn it better than if there had been just one clear, to-the-point post—that you read once and then forgot.
However, now that nobody is reading the posts at a one-per-day rate anymore, the style and format seems harmful. When you’re reading through a (huge) archived sequence of posts, unnecessary fluff will just create a feeling of things having being written in a needlessly wordy way. And it makes it very hard to usefully link to posts about specific concepts.
Are there some specific concepts that come readily to mind? Maybe we could experiment with making much more substantial, useful wiki pages, riddled with quotations / excerpts from LW and elsewhere. The current standard size and tone of the wiki pages could be preserved—as the lead sections for much longer articles.
(Broadly) wikipedian style is also useful for keeping articles organized and concise because of the section structure. Sections make topic divisions obvious, and ‘See more’ links can be included at the beginning of each section for more details.
We needn’t be bashful about copy-pasting large chunks of the Sequences where it’s useful to do so, and at the same time the more transparent structure of the wiki, and our ability to leave anything out that isn’t absolutely essential, would let us piece together more to-the-point presentations. The wiki would then become our go-to resource for quick but thorough introductions to concepts, and would include links to the relevant Sequence posts (and primary literature, etc.) for people who want more examples and poetry. (Both of which can be immensely important.)
Here’s one example.
I notice that comment was written two months before Eliezer published Skill: The Map is Not the Territory. Does this article satisfy you, or does it still deviate from what you’d ideally link to? If so, in what ways does it (or it + the sister articles) deviate?
That article has the problem that I was asking for a good page that would explain and summarize the meaning of the phrase. Skill never actually explains the phrase—rather it starts from the assumption that the reader already knows what that means. You may be able to figure out the intended meaning from the examples, but it would take some effort, particularly if you’re not already familiar with these kinds of ideas.
seconded.