I’ve decided to curate this answer. (This is a bit of a nonstandard use of LW Curation. Hopefully some day we’ll have a better process for curating answers)
I have similar thoughts on this answer as I do on a previous curation notice for another literature review. I want LessWrong to be a place that incentives many kinds of intellectual work. Eventually, some day, I want LessWrong to be a place you can come to get the best answer given the current evidence on scientific questions, even if the data is murky.
There are a lot of pieces of that. Lit reviews are one of those pieces, and I don’t think they’re sufficiently incentivized by the default crowdsourced karma system.
I appreciated that this post outlined a number of concrete facts about what hereisonehand was able to find out. I also appreciated them writing up their process afterwards, so I have a sense of how reliable and representative the information is.
An area this answer could have been improved in was better distillation/presentation. (Something I considered before curating it was asking the author to optimize it a bit for readability. I ended up not doing that for slightly complex reasons but might do so in future similar situations)
Ideally, I’d hope hereisonehand’s answer be followed by other people delving in more – either taking their own stab at doing a review of the literature (to sanity check whether hereisonehand’s take is representative), or following up on the actual studies to get a clearer sense:
How reliable they are
What the causal mechanisms are
What other fields might be relevant
What further research might be valuable to get a more confident answer.
Longterm, I’m not sure whether this is sort of post or answer that we’d curate regularly. But right now we have relatively few levers to incentives things, and until we’ve built better or more flexible ones, it seemed good to reward people for important steps in the right direction (in the vein Sarah Constantin described in Tales of Alice Almost)
I think this answer was good, but also feel like curating it (and skipping the team-discussion that usually goes with curation) was a mistake. This answer really needed, at a minimum, a formatting cleanup, before it was ready for curation. I tried to read it, and I just… can’t. Too many fonts, too much inconsistent indentation. And I would’ve appreciated a chance to make the curation email work right (ie, make it include the actual answer), before this went out.
(Quick note about the process: I discussed this with habryka and Ruby before submitting. We had considered implementing some new features to make the curation of a comment smoother, but the ideas all seemed like they’d require some time and planning to get right.
I do think it’s good for Jim to voice his disagreement – the current sort-of-de-facto-norms around curating is that if at least a few people are excited about a post they can curate it and don’t need to get consensus from everyone, but alway speaking from their own opinions rather than speaking for the team as a whole, and it’s good for the disagreement to be visible)
I’ve decided to curate this answer. (This is a bit of a nonstandard use of LW Curation. Hopefully some day we’ll have a better process for curating answers)
I have similar thoughts on this answer as I do on a previous curation notice for another literature review. I want LessWrong to be a place that incentives many kinds of intellectual work. Eventually, some day, I want LessWrong to be a place you can come to get the best answer given the current evidence on scientific questions, even if the data is murky.
There are a lot of pieces of that. Lit reviews are one of those pieces, and I don’t think they’re sufficiently incentivized by the default crowdsourced karma system.
I appreciated that this post outlined a number of concrete facts about what hereisonehand was able to find out. I also appreciated them writing up their process afterwards, so I have a sense of how reliable and representative the information is.
An area this answer could have been improved in was better distillation/presentation. (Something I considered before curating it was asking the author to optimize it a bit for readability. I ended up not doing that for slightly complex reasons but might do so in future similar situations)
Ideally, I’d hope hereisonehand’s answer be followed by other people delving in more – either taking their own stab at doing a review of the literature (to sanity check whether hereisonehand’s take is representative), or following up on the actual studies to get a clearer sense:
How reliable they are
What the causal mechanisms are
What other fields might be relevant
What further research might be valuable to get a more confident answer.
Longterm, I’m not sure whether this is sort of post or answer that we’d curate regularly. But right now we have relatively few levers to incentives things, and until we’ve built better or more flexible ones, it seemed good to reward people for important steps in the right direction (in the vein Sarah Constantin described in Tales of Alice Almost)
I think this answer was good, but also feel like curating it (and skipping the team-discussion that usually goes with curation) was a mistake. This answer really needed, at a minimum, a formatting cleanup, before it was ready for curation. I tried to read it, and I just… can’t. Too many fonts, too much inconsistent indentation. And I would’ve appreciated a chance to make the curation email work right (ie, make it include the actual answer), before this went out.
(Quick note about the process: I discussed this with habryka and Ruby before submitting. We had considered implementing some new features to make the curation of a comment smoother, but the ideas all seemed like they’d require some time and planning to get right.
I do think it’s good for Jim to voice his disagreement – the current sort-of-de-facto-norms around curating is that if at least a few people are excited about a post they can curate it and don’t need to get consensus from everyone, but alway speaking from their own opinions rather than speaking for the team as a whole, and it’s good for the disagreement to be visible)