I think this post should be included in the best posts of 2018 collection. It does an excellent job of balancing several desirable qualities: it is very well written, being both clear and entertaining; it is informative and thorough; it is in the style of argument which is preferred on LessWrong, by which I mean makes use of both theory and intuition in the explanation.
This post adds to the greater conversation by displaying rationality of the kind we are pursuing directed at a big societal problem. A specific example of what I mean that distinguishes this post from an overview that any motivated poster might write is the inclusion of Warren Smith’s results; Smith is a mathematician from an unrelated field who has no published work on the subject. But he had work anyway, and it was good work which the author himself expanded on, and now we get to benefit from it through this post. This puts me very much in mind of the fact that this community was primarily founded by an autodidact who was deeply influenced by a physicist writing about probability theory.
A word on one of our sacred taboos: in the beginning it was written that Politics is the Mindkiller, and so it was for years and years. I expect this is our most consistently and universally enforced taboo. Yet here we have a high-quality and very well received post about politics, and of the ~70 comments only one appears to have been mindkilled. This post has great value on the strength of being an example of how to address troubling territory successfully. I expect most readers didn’t even consider that this was political territory.
Even though it is a theory primer, it manages to be practical and actionable. Observe how the very method of scoring posts for the review, quadratic voting, is one that is discussed in the post. Practical implications for the management of the community weigh heavily in my consideration of what should be considered important conversation within the community.
Carrying on from that point into its inverse, I note that this post introduced the topic to the community (though there are scattered older references to some of the things it contains in comments). Further, as far as I can tell the author wasn’t a longtime community member before this post and the sequence that followed it. The reason this matters is that LessWrong can now attract and give traction to experts in fields outside of its original core areas of interest. This is not a signal of the quality of the post so much as the post being a signal about LessWrong, so there is a definite sense in which this weighs against its inclusion: the post showed up fully formed rather than being the output of our intellectual pipeline.
I would have liked to see (probably against the preferences of most of the community and certainly against the signals the author would have received as a lurker) the areas where advocacy is happening as a specific section. I found them anyway, because they were contained in the disclosures and threaded through the discussion, and clicking the links, but I suspect that many readers would have missed them. This is especially true for readers less politically interested than I, which most of them. The obvious reason is for interested people to be able to find it more easily, which matters a lot to problems like this one. The meta-reason is that posts that tread dangerous ground might benefit from directing people somewhere else for advocacy specifically, kind of like a communication-pressure release valve. It speaks to the quality of the post this wasn’t even an issue here, but for future posts on similar topics in a growing LessWrong I expect it to be.
Lastly I want to observe the follow-up posts in the sequence are also good, suggesting that this post was fertile ground for more discussion. In terms of additional follow-up: I would like to see this theory deployed at the level of intuition building, in a way similar to how we use markets, Prisoner’s Dilemmas, and more recently considered Stag Hunts. I feel like it would be a good, human-achievable counterweight to things like utility functions and value handshakes in our conversation, and make our discussions more actionable thereby.
Yet here we have a high-quality and very well received post about politics, and of the ~70 comments only one appears to have been mindkilled.
Being about political mechanisms rather than object-level disagreements helps a lot. Even though political mechanisms is an object-level disagreement for monarchists vs republicans.
I think this post should be included in the best posts of 2018 collection. It does an excellent job of balancing several desirable qualities: it is very well written, being both clear and entertaining; it is informative and thorough; it is in the style of argument which is preferred on LessWrong, by which I mean makes use of both theory and intuition in the explanation.
This post adds to the greater conversation by displaying rationality of the kind we are pursuing directed at a big societal problem. A specific example of what I mean that distinguishes this post from an overview that any motivated poster might write is the inclusion of Warren Smith’s results; Smith is a mathematician from an unrelated field who has no published work on the subject. But he had work anyway, and it was good work which the author himself expanded on, and now we get to benefit from it through this post. This puts me very much in mind of the fact that this community was primarily founded by an autodidact who was deeply influenced by a physicist writing about probability theory.
A word on one of our sacred taboos: in the beginning it was written that Politics is the Mindkiller, and so it was for years and years. I expect this is our most consistently and universally enforced taboo. Yet here we have a high-quality and very well received post about politics, and of the ~70 comments only one appears to have been mindkilled. This post has great value on the strength of being an example of how to address troubling territory successfully. I expect most readers didn’t even consider that this was political territory.
Even though it is a theory primer, it manages to be practical and actionable. Observe how the very method of scoring posts for the review, quadratic voting, is one that is discussed in the post. Practical implications for the management of the community weigh heavily in my consideration of what should be considered important conversation within the community.
Carrying on from that point into its inverse, I note that this post introduced the topic to the community (though there are scattered older references to some of the things it contains in comments). Further, as far as I can tell the author wasn’t a longtime community member before this post and the sequence that followed it. The reason this matters is that LessWrong can now attract and give traction to experts in fields outside of its original core areas of interest. This is not a signal of the quality of the post so much as the post being a signal about LessWrong, so there is a definite sense in which this weighs against its inclusion: the post showed up fully formed rather than being the output of our intellectual pipeline.
I would have liked to see (probably against the preferences of most of the community and certainly against the signals the author would have received as a lurker) the areas where advocacy is happening as a specific section. I found them anyway, because they were contained in the disclosures and threaded through the discussion, and clicking the links, but I suspect that many readers would have missed them. This is especially true for readers less politically interested than I, which most of them. The obvious reason is for interested people to be able to find it more easily, which matters a lot to problems like this one. The meta-reason is that posts that tread dangerous ground might benefit from directing people somewhere else for advocacy specifically, kind of like a communication-pressure release valve. It speaks to the quality of the post this wasn’t even an issue here, but for future posts on similar topics in a growing LessWrong I expect it to be.
Lastly I want to observe the follow-up posts in the sequence are also good, suggesting that this post was fertile ground for more discussion. In terms of additional follow-up: I would like to see this theory deployed at the level of intuition building, in a way similar to how we use markets, Prisoner’s Dilemmas, and more recently considered Stag Hunts. I feel like it would be a good, human-achievable counterweight to things like utility functions and value handshakes in our conversation, and make our discussions more actionable thereby.
Being about political mechanisms rather than object-level disagreements helps a lot. Even though political mechanisms is an object-level disagreement for monarchists vs republicans.