Only speaking for myself here, but if OB had been “how to get good grades” rather than “Hal Finney predicts Peak Oil” I’d have been less likely to start reading, and if it had been “sound advice for all walks of life” rather than “Eliezer Yudkowsky takes human psychology apart to the molecular level” I’d have been less likely to keep reading.
Personally, I devoured the Sequences out of personal interest, but I had stumbled across a few of the articles on Overcoming Bias before, and it was reading Lost Purposes, which felt tremendously relevant to the education I was pursuing, that hooked me enough that I immediately felt compelled to check out Eliezer’s whole body of work.
Yay false dilemma! I did not realize that talking about teenagers could be mindkilling, so here comes my list of disclaimers...
Of course the “LW articles for teenagers” should be nothing like the typical articles for teenagers. For exactly the same reason that LW articles today are not like the typical articles for N-years-old people for any value of N.
I advocate having some content focused on teenagers, but not a separate website for them. Best solution could be to use tags and/or later collect the teenager-oriented articles into a new sequence. (This is my personal opinion, I don’t speak for other “teenage LW” advocates here.) People who come here to read Eliezer writing about X will continue to come here, because Eliezer will continue to write about X. There will be no filter to remove Eliezer’s articles from the teenage readers’ starting pages.
Even if we assume that (aspiring) rational teenagers have exactly the same minds as (aspiring) rational adults, they still live in different conditions. An article about a job choice is more relevant to a person in a job market, and less relevant for a teenager; not because the teenager wouldn’t understand it, but simply because for a teenager, job choice is not a present-day problem, unlike for an adult. Teenagers have different present-day problems.
How much is it necessary to focus on everyone’s present-day problems? Well, this is a site for both epistemic and instrumental rationality. It’s about winning. And what one does during their average day usually contributes to their winning. Ignoring one’s everyday life and focusing on the meaning of Peano’s Fifth Axiom instead may be high status, but ultimately self-deceiving.
Yes, typical advice for teenagers is a pure far-mode “obey the authorities, don’t ask questions, and everything will magically be fine” crap. I am not suggesting anything like this here. Litany of Tarski etc.
But perhaps the best way to make sure at least some teenagers will want to read those articles, is to ask them.
I voted 3. Its not like we have a limited amount on space on here, the overall problem is a lack of content full stop. We can have both, and if we are someday in the fortunate position that we have so much quality content it is difficult to sort we can start using the tagging system properly.
If you are attracting more teenage rationalists-in-training, that increases demand. But training these teenagers also creates a larger body of rationalists who can contribute and create content. I don’t know if it weighs out.
Only speaking for myself here, but if OB had been “how to get good grades” rather than “Hal Finney predicts Peak Oil” I’d have been less likely to start reading, and if it had been “sound advice for all walks of life” rather than “Eliezer Yudkowsky takes human psychology apart to the molecular level” I’d have been less likely to keep reading.
Poll time!
[pollid:203]
Personally, I devoured the Sequences out of personal interest, but I had stumbled across a few of the articles on Overcoming Bias before, and it was reading Lost Purposes, which felt tremendously relevant to the education I was pursuing, that hooked me enough that I immediately felt compelled to check out Eliezer’s whole body of work.
Hm. This poll data won’t falsify the hypothesis that we can expand our teenage audience by writing Hints from Heloise-style stuff.
Yay false dilemma! I did not realize that talking about teenagers could be mindkilling, so here comes my list of disclaimers...
Of course the “LW articles for teenagers” should be nothing like the typical articles for teenagers. For exactly the same reason that LW articles today are not like the typical articles for N-years-old people for any value of N.
I advocate having some content focused on teenagers, but not a separate website for them. Best solution could be to use tags and/or later collect the teenager-oriented articles into a new sequence. (This is my personal opinion, I don’t speak for other “teenage LW” advocates here.) People who come here to read Eliezer writing about X will continue to come here, because Eliezer will continue to write about X. There will be no filter to remove Eliezer’s articles from the teenage readers’ starting pages.
Even if we assume that (aspiring) rational teenagers have exactly the same minds as (aspiring) rational adults, they still live in different conditions. An article about a job choice is more relevant to a person in a job market, and less relevant for a teenager; not because the teenager wouldn’t understand it, but simply because for a teenager, job choice is not a present-day problem, unlike for an adult. Teenagers have different present-day problems.
How much is it necessary to focus on everyone’s present-day problems? Well, this is a site for both epistemic and instrumental rationality. It’s about winning. And what one does during their average day usually contributes to their winning. Ignoring one’s everyday life and focusing on the meaning of Peano’s Fifth Axiom instead may be high status, but ultimately self-deceiving.
Yes, typical advice for teenagers is a pure far-mode “obey the authorities, don’t ask questions, and everything will magically be fine” crap. I am not suggesting anything like this here. Litany of Tarski etc.
But perhaps the best way to make sure at least some teenagers will want to read those articles, is to ask them.
I voted 3. Its not like we have a limited amount on space on here, the overall problem is a lack of content full stop. We can have both, and if we are someday in the fortunate position that we have so much quality content it is difficult to sort we can start using the tagging system properly.
I think effort to write a type of content is largely displaced from effort to write another. I may be wrong.
If you are attracting more teenage rationalists-in-training, that increases demand. But training these teenagers also creates a larger body of rationalists who can contribute and create content. I don’t know if it weighs out.