Here is some information about my relationship with posting essays and comments to LessWrong. I originally wrote it for a different context (in response to a discussion about how many people avoid LW because the comments are too nitpicky/counterproductive) so it’s not engaging directly with anything in the OP, but @Raemon mentioned it would be useful to have here.
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I *do* post on LW, but in a very different way than I think I would ideally. For example, I can imagine a world where I post my thoughts piecemeal pretty much as I have them, where I have a research agenda or a sequence in mind and I post each piece *as* I write it, in the hope that engagement with my writing will inform what I think, do, and write next. Instead, I do a year’s worth of work (or more), make a 10-essay sequence, send it through many rounds of editing, and only begin publishing any part of it when I’m completely done, having decided in advance to mostly ignore the comments.
It appears to me that what I write is strongly in line with the vision of LW (as I understand it; my understanding is more an extrapolation of Eliezer’s founding essays and the name of the site than a reflection of discussion with current mods), but I think it is not in line with the actual culture of LW as it exists. A whole bunch of me does not want to post to LW at all and would rather find a different audience for my work, one where I feel comfortable and excited and surrounded by creative peers who are jamming with each other and building things together or something. But I don’t know of any such place that meets my standards in all the important ways, and LW seems like the place where my contributions are most likely to gradually drag the culture in a direction where I’ll actually *enjoy* posting there, instead of feeling like I’m doing a scary unpleasant diligence thing. (Plus I really believe in the site’s underlying vision!)
Sometimes people do say cool interesting valuable-to-me things under my posts. But it’s pretty rare, and I’m always surprised when this happens. Mostly my posts get not much engagement, and the engagement they do get feels a whole lot to me like people attempting to use my post as an opportunity to score points in one way or another, often by (apparently) trying to demonstrate that they’re ahead of me in some way while also accidentally demonstrating that have probably not even tried to hear me.
My perception is very likely skewed here, but my impression is that the median comment on LW is along the lines of “This is wrong/implausible/inadequate because X.” The comments I *want* are more like, “When I thought about/tried this for five minutes, here is what happened, and here is how I’m thinking about that, and I wonder x y and z.”
Here is a comment thread that demonstrates what it looks like when *I* think that an interesting-to-me post is inadequate/not quite right. I’m not saying commenters in general should be held to this ridiculous standard, I’m just saying, “Here’s a shining example of the kind of thing that is possible, and I really want the world to move in this direction, especially in response to my posts”, or something. (However apparently it wasn’t considered particularly valuable commentary by readers *shrug*.)
Raymond has been trying to get me to post my noticing stuff from Agenty Duck to LW for *years*, or even to let *him* cross post it for me. And I keep saying “no” or “not yet”, because the personal consequences I imagine for me are mostly bad, and I just think I need to make something good enough to outweigh that first. It’s just now, after literally five to ten years of further development, that I’ve gotten that material into a shape where I think the benefit to the world and my local social spaces (and also my bank account) outweighs the personal unpleasantness of posting the stuff to LW.
(This is just one way of looking at it. The full story is a lot bigger and more complicated, I think.)
Sometimes people do say cool interesting valuable-to-me things under my posts. But it’s pretty rare, and I’m always surprised when this happens. Mostly my posts get not much engagement, and the engagement they do get feels a whole lot to me like people attempting to use my post as an opportunity to score points in one way or another, often by (apparently) trying to demonstrate that they’re ahead of me in some way while also accidentally demonstrating that have probably not even tried to hear me.
My perception is very likely skewed here, but my impression is that the median comment on LW is along the lines of “This is wrong/implausible/inadequate because X.” The comments I *want* are more like, “When I thought about/tried this for five minutes, here is what happened, and here is how I’m thinking about that, and I wonder x y and z.”
I also have the sense that most posts don’t get enough / any high-quality engagement, and my bar for such engagement is likely lower than yours.
I suspect though that the main culprit here is not the site culture, but instead a bunch of related reasons: the sheer amount of words on the site and in each essay, which cause the readership to spread out over a gigantic corpus of work; standard Internet engagement patterns (only a small fraction of readers write comments, and only a small fraction of those are high-quality); median LW essays receive too few views to produce healthy discussions; high-average-quality commenters are rare on the Internet, and their comments are spread out over everything they read; imperfect karma incentives; etc.
Are there ways for individuals to reliably get a number of comments sufficiently large to produce the occasional high-quality engagement? The only ways I’ve seen are for them to either already be famous essayists (e.g. the comments sections on ACX or Slow Boring are sufficiently big to contain the occasional gem), or to post in their own Facebook community or something. Feed-like sites like Facebook suffer from their recency bias, however, which is kind of antithetical to the goal of writing truth-seeking and timeless essays.
Mostly my posts get not much engagement, and the engagement they do get feels a whole lot to me like people attempting to use my post as an opportunity to score points in one way or another, often by (apparently) trying to demonstrate that they’re ahead of me in some way while also accidentally demonstrating that have probably not even tried to hear me.
Strong agree. Though I also engage in the commenting behavior, at an uncharitable view of my behavior.
One can dream of some genius cracking the filtering problem and creating a criss-crossing tesseract of subcultures that can occupy the same space (e.g. LW) but go off in their own shared-goals directions (those people who jam and analyze with each other; those people who carefully nitpick and verify; those people who gather facts; those people who just vibe; …).
Here is some information about my relationship with posting essays and comments to LessWrong. I originally wrote it for a different context (in response to a discussion about how many people avoid LW because the comments are too nitpicky/counterproductive) so it’s not engaging directly with anything in the OP, but @Raemon mentioned it would be useful to have here.
*
I *do* post on LW, but in a very different way than I think I would ideally. For example, I can imagine a world where I post my thoughts piecemeal pretty much as I have them, where I have a research agenda or a sequence in mind and I post each piece *as* I write it, in the hope that engagement with my writing will inform what I think, do, and write next. Instead, I do a year’s worth of work (or more), make a 10-essay sequence, send it through many rounds of editing, and only begin publishing any part of it when I’m completely done, having decided in advance to mostly ignore the comments.
It appears to me that what I write is strongly in line with the vision of LW (as I understand it; my understanding is more an extrapolation of Eliezer’s founding essays and the name of the site than a reflection of discussion with current mods), but I think it is not in line with the actual culture of LW as it exists. A whole bunch of me does not want to post to LW at all and would rather find a different audience for my work, one where I feel comfortable and excited and surrounded by creative peers who are jamming with each other and building things together or something. But I don’t know of any such place that meets my standards in all the important ways, and LW seems like the place where my contributions are most likely to gradually drag the culture in a direction where I’ll actually *enjoy* posting there, instead of feeling like I’m doing a scary unpleasant diligence thing. (Plus I really believe in the site’s underlying vision!)
Sometimes people do say cool interesting valuable-to-me things under my posts. But it’s pretty rare, and I’m always surprised when this happens. Mostly my posts get not much engagement, and the engagement they do get feels a whole lot to me like people attempting to use my post as an opportunity to score points in one way or another, often by (apparently) trying to demonstrate that they’re ahead of me in some way while also accidentally demonstrating that have probably not even tried to hear me.
My perception is very likely skewed here, but my impression is that the median comment on LW is along the lines of “This is wrong/implausible/inadequate because X.” The comments I *want* are more like, “When I thought about/tried this for five minutes, here is what happened, and here is how I’m thinking about that, and I wonder x y and z.”
Here is a comment thread that demonstrates what it looks like when *I* think that an interesting-to-me post is inadequate/not quite right. I’m not saying commenters in general should be held to this ridiculous standard, I’m just saying, “Here’s a shining example of the kind of thing that is possible, and I really want the world to move in this direction, especially in response to my posts”, or something. (However apparently it wasn’t considered particularly valuable commentary by readers *shrug*.)
Raymond has been trying to get me to post my noticing stuff from Agenty Duck to LW for *years*, or even to let *him* cross post it for me. And I keep saying “no” or “not yet”, because the personal consequences I imagine for me are mostly bad, and I just think I need to make something good enough to outweigh that first. It’s just now, after literally five to ten years of further development, that I’ve gotten that material into a shape where I think the benefit to the world and my local social spaces (and also my bank account) outweighs the personal unpleasantness of posting the stuff to LW.
(This is just one way of looking at it. The full story is a lot bigger and more complicated, I think.)
I also have the sense that most posts don’t get enough / any high-quality engagement, and my bar for such engagement is likely lower than yours.
I suspect though that the main culprit here is not the site culture, but instead a bunch of related reasons: the sheer amount of words on the site and in each essay, which cause the readership to spread out over a gigantic corpus of work; standard Internet engagement patterns (only a small fraction of readers write comments, and only a small fraction of those are high-quality); median LW essays receive too few views to produce healthy discussions; high-average-quality commenters are rare on the Internet, and their comments are spread out over everything they read; imperfect karma incentives; etc.
Are there ways for individuals to reliably get a number of comments sufficiently large to produce the occasional high-quality engagement? The only ways I’ve seen are for them to either already be famous essayists (e.g. the comments sections on ACX or Slow Boring are sufficiently big to contain the occasional gem), or to post in their own Facebook community or something. Feed-like sites like Facebook suffer from their recency bias, however, which is kind of antithetical to the goal of writing truth-seeking and timeless essays.
Strong agree. Though I also engage in the commenting behavior, at an uncharitable view of my behavior.
One can dream of some genius cracking the filtering problem and creating a criss-crossing tesseract of subcultures that can occupy the same space (e.g. LW) but go off in their own shared-goals directions (those people who jam and analyze with each other; those people who carefully nitpick and verify; those people who gather facts; those people who just vibe; …).