Mm, maybe. It is difficult for me to see such things; as I pointed out in another comment, before I wrote this, I spent scores of hours reading up on and researching terrorism and indeed posted that to LW as well; to me, terrorism is such an obviously useless approach—for anything but false flag operations—that nothing needs to be said about it.
That means people are paying attention YOU. Yes, you. This post has gotten 1,344 page views. One of Luke’s older posts got 200,000 views. (Google analytics). For contrast, a book is considered a bestseller if it sells 100,000 copies.
Page views are worth a lot less than an entire book sale, IMO—one will spend much more time on a book than even a long essay. 1344 page views doesn’t impress me. For example, for this October, gwern.net had 51x more or 69,311 total page views. The lifetime total for this essay on my site is already at 7,515, and most of that is from before I deleted the version here so I expect that will boost the numbers a bit in the future.
Page views are worth a lot less than an entire book sale, IMO
Agreed, especially if deciding things like whether to invest in publishing a particular author’s new book. However, my purpose was just to make the number seem more real. Humans have problems with that—“One death is a tragedy, a million deaths is a statistic.” as they say. I think it was an okay metaphor for that purpose.
I’m not trying to say Luke’s article is a “bestseller” (in fact it has a bounce rate of about 90%), just that LW posts can get a lot of exposure so even if it is the standard that LW members should be rational enough not to mindkill on posts like that one, we should probably care about it if non-rationalists from the world at large are mind-killing on stuff written here.
Mm, maybe. It is difficult for me to see such things; as I pointed out in another comment, before I wrote this, I spent scores of hours reading up on and researching terrorism and indeed posted that to LW as well; to me, terrorism is such an obviously useless approach—for anything but false flag operations—that nothing needs to be said about it.
Page views are worth a lot less than an entire book sale, IMO—one will spend much more time on a book than even a long essay. 1344 page views doesn’t impress me. For example, for this October,
gwern.nethad 51x more or 69,311 total page views. The lifetime total for this essay on my site is already at 7,515, and most of that is from before I deleted the version here so I expect that will boost the numbers a bit in the future.Agreed, especially if deciding things like whether to invest in publishing a particular author’s new book. However, my purpose was just to make the number seem more real. Humans have problems with that—“One death is a tragedy, a million deaths is a statistic.” as they say. I think it was an okay metaphor for that purpose.
I’m not trying to say Luke’s article is a “bestseller” (in fact it has a bounce rate of about 90%), just that LW posts can get a lot of exposure so even if it is the standard that LW members should be rational enough not to mindkill on posts like that one, we should probably care about it if non-rationalists from the world at large are mind-killing on stuff written here.