As an academic, I typically find LW/SF posts to be too “pedagogic” and not skimmable enough. This limits how much I read them. Academic papers are, on average, much easier to extract a TL;DR from.
Being pedagogic has advantages, but it can be annoying if you are already familiar with much of the background and just want to skip to the (purportedly) novel bits.
Pedagogic posts are more accessible, and a large portion of the point of publishing on LW is to present technical ideas to a wide audience. While the audience here is intelligent, they also come from a wide variety of domains, so accessibility is key to successfully writing a good LW post (with some exceptions).
Do you have a proposition for how to increase skimability without sacrificing accessibility?
Maybe some, but I think that’s a bit besides the point… I agree there’s a genuine trade-off, but my post was mostly about AF. I’m mostly in LW/AF for AI Alignment content, and I think these posts should strive to be a bit closer to academic style.
A few quick thoughts: - include abstracts - say whether a post is meant to be pedagogic or not - say “you can skip this section if” - follow something more like the format of an academic paper - include a figure towards the top that should summarize the idea for someone with sufficient background with a caption like “a summary of [idea]: description / explanation”
I agree that AI alignment posts don’t need to aim for accessibility to the same degree as the typical LW post (this was what I was mainly referring to when I edited in “with some exceptions”), but you did name-check LW in your top-level post, and I don’t think it’s besides the point for the typical LW post.
I think your suggestions are good and reasonable suggestions.
As an academic, I typically find LW/SF posts to be too “pedagogic” and not skimmable enough. This limits how much I read them. Academic papers are, on average, much easier to extract a TL;DR from.
Being pedagogic has advantages, but it can be annoying if you are already familiar with much of the background and just want to skip to the (purportedly) novel bits.
Pedagogic posts are more accessible, and a large portion of the point of publishing on LW is to present technical ideas to a wide audience. While the audience here is intelligent, they also come from a wide variety of domains, so accessibility is key to successfully writing a good LW post (with some exceptions).
Do you have a proposition for how to increase skimability without sacrificing accessibility?
Maybe some, but I think that’s a bit besides the point…
I agree there’s a genuine trade-off, but my post was mostly about AF.
I’m mostly in LW/AF for AI Alignment content, and I think these posts should strive to be a bit closer to academic style.
A few quick thoughts:
- include abstracts
- say whether a post is meant to be pedagogic or not
- say “you can skip this section if”
- follow something more like the format of an academic paper
- include a figure towards the top that should summarize the idea for someone with sufficient background with a caption like “a summary of [idea]: description / explanation”
Sounds like a fair point. I’ll try to add that to my posts in the future. ;)
I agree that AI alignment posts don’t need to aim for accessibility to the same degree as the typical LW post (this was what I was mainly referring to when I edited in “with some exceptions”), but you did name-check LW in your top-level post, and I don’t think it’s besides the point for the typical LW post.
I think your suggestions are good and reasonable suggestions.
Strong agree.