Wei Dai had a comment below about how important it is to know whether there’s any criticism or not, but mostly I don’t care about this either because my prior is just that it’s bad whether or not there’s criticism. In other words, I think the only good approach here is to focus on farming the rare good stuff and ignoring the bad stuff (except for the stuff that ends up way overrated, like (IMO) Babble or Simulators, which I think should be called out directly).
But how do you find the rare good stuff amidst all the bad stuff? I tend to do it with a combination of looking at karma, checking the comments to see whether or not there’s good criticism, and finally reading it myself if it passes the previous two filters. But if a potentially good criticism was banned or disincentivized, then that 1) causes me to waste time (since it distorts both signals I rely on), and 2) potentially causes me to incorrectly judge the post as “good” because I fail to notice the flaw myself. So what do you do such that it doesn’t matter whether or not there’s criticism?
My approach is to read the title, then if I like it read the first paragraph, then if I like that skim the post, then in rare cases read the post in full (all informed by karma).
I can’t usually evaluate the quality of criticism without at least having skimmed the post. And once I’ve done that then I don’t usually gain much from the criticisms (although I do agree they’re sometimes useful).
I’m partly informed here by the fact that I tend to find Said’s criticisms unusually non-useful.
But how do you find the rare good stuff amidst all the bad stuff? I tend to do it with a combination of looking at karma, checking the comments to see whether or not there’s good criticism, and finally reading it myself if it passes the previous two filters. But if a potentially good criticism was banned or disincentivized, then that 1) causes me to waste time (since it distorts both signals I rely on), and 2) potentially causes me to incorrectly judge the post as “good” because I fail to notice the flaw myself. So what do you do such that it doesn’t matter whether or not there’s criticism?
My approach is to read the title, then if I like it read the first paragraph, then if I like that skim the post, then in rare cases read the post in full (all informed by karma).
I can’t usually evaluate the quality of criticism without at least having skimmed the post. And once I’ve done that then I don’t usually gain much from the criticisms (although I do agree they’re sometimes useful).
I’m partly informed here by the fact that I tend to find Said’s criticisms unusually non-useful.