Would summarizing lesswrong writings to be more concise and beginner friendly be a valuable project? Several times I’ve wanted to introduce people to the ideas, but couldn’t expect them to actually get through the sequences (optimized for things other than concision).
Is lowering barrier to entry to rationality considered a good thing? It sounds intuitively good, but I could imagine concern of the techniques being misused, or benefit of some minimum barrier to entry. Any failstates I should be concerned of? I anticipate shorter content is easier to immediately forget, giving an illusion of learning.
Thanks for your time. Please resist any impulse to tell me what you think I want to hear :)
I’m sure it’d be a value to some, and a distraction or misleading to others. The problem with summarizing is that you have to decide what to leave out or gloss over, and different readers are coming from different places of prior knowledge and expectation.
I don’t think lowering the barrier to entry can ever be bad, but I also think that the barriers are multidimensional and “lowering” isn’t very well-defined in a general sense.
For my own reference, and to make it easier for me to refer people to ‘the sequences’ generally, I’d love to see something between an index and a summary. Basically, a topic index with a paragraph or so of description for each sequence, and a line or two describing the content of each post in a sequence.
Thanks for your thoughts, I’m glad I asked. You’re right my goal isn’t very well defined yet. I’m mostly thinking along the lines of the https://non-trivial.org and https://ui.stampy.ai projects. I’d need a better understanding of beginner readers to communicate with them well. I’m not confident that I’ll write great summaries on the first try, but I imagine any serious issues can be solved with some feedback and iteration.
Would summarizing lesswrong writings to be more concise and beginner friendly be a valuable project? Several times I’ve wanted to introduce people to the ideas, but couldn’t expect them to actually get through the sequences (optimized for things other than concision).
Is lowering barrier to entry to rationality considered a good thing? It sounds intuitively good, but I could imagine concern of the techniques being misused, or benefit of some minimum barrier to entry.
Any failstates I should be concerned of? I anticipate shorter content is easier to immediately forget, giving an illusion of learning.
Thanks for your time. Please resist any impulse to tell me what you think I want to hear :)
I’m sure it’d be a value to some, and a distraction or misleading to others. The problem with summarizing is that you have to decide what to leave out or gloss over, and different readers are coming from different places of prior knowledge and expectation.
I don’t think lowering the barrier to entry can ever be bad, but I also think that the barriers are multidimensional and “lowering” isn’t very well-defined in a general sense.
For my own reference, and to make it easier for me to refer people to ‘the sequences’ generally, I’d love to see something between an index and a summary. Basically, a topic index with a paragraph or so of description for each sequence, and a line or two describing the content of each post in a sequence.
Thanks for your thoughts, I’m glad I asked.
You’re right my goal isn’t very well defined yet. I’m mostly thinking along the lines of the https://non-trivial.org and https://ui.stampy.ai projects. I’d need a better understanding of beginner readers to communicate with them well. I’m not confident that I’ll write great summaries on the first try, but I imagine any serious issues can be solved with some feedback and iteration.