A ranked link of LessWrong tags/concepts
Epistemic status—a quick contribution. Possibly useless for anyone else. Also, a sort of feature suggestion.
This post provides a link to a Google sheet which ranks tags/concepts discussed on LessWrong by frequency of mention. I am not sure if it will be useful, but it was for me, so I thought I’d quickly share it.
What did I do?
On 22/9/22 I copied the tags from the Concepts Portal into a Google sheet. I did some text splitting and concatenation to split out the frequency counts and produce a long table ranked by frequency. I couldn’t copy over the links, but they are in the column A, which can be unhidden. Below are the top 20 rows.
| Concept | Mentions |
|---|---|
| AI | 3382 |
| World Modeling | 2353 |
| Rationality | 2278 |
| Practical | 1667 |
| World Optimization | 1527 |
| Community | 1110 |
| Covid-19 | 860 |
| Site Meta | 548 |
| Open Threads | 458 |
| AI Risk | 439 |
| Fiction | 414 |
| Politics | 305 |
| Book Reviews | 303 |
| Ethics & Morality | 293 |
| Decision Theory | 282 |
| Logic & Mathematics | 265 |
| Social & Cultural Dynamics | 256 |
| Economics | 245 |
| Scholarship & Learning | 245 |
| Forecasting & Prediction | 243 |
Why did I do this?
I am meeting more people in the rationalist community, and wanted a quick way to understand their key interests. I thought that seeing the frequency of tags/concepts used on LW would be a helpful overview.
What next?
If it seems useful for other people and is relatively easy, then it may be a good idea to allow users to rank tags by frequency of use on the Concepts Portal.
Right now, I’d personally be interested in seeing a list/ranking of the newest and trending tags (e.g., those that have growing fastest in the last month/year) on the concept’s portal page, but that could just be related to my perhaps unusual interest in understanding the focus of the rationality community. It might also be me projecting an unrealistic level of sustained interest going forward.
I think you should be able to pull all relevant data for this from our API, including for trending tag stuff. Well worth learning how to pull data from APIs!
I was thinking of making a TripAdvisor for concepts, in a kind of tongue-in-cheek way, like “this philosophical concept is worth 3.8 stars out of 5”. But then, I figured that it would lead to every reader learning the same ideas. It’s better if people explore random ideas independently, so they can make unique connections and come up with novel things. Still, a power-ranking of concepts could be very useful as long as you keep in mind that it doesn’t replace exploration.
Is there something similar for the EA Forum?
Is there a database listing, say, article, date, link and tags? That would give you the ability to find trending tags. It would also allow a cluster analysis and a way to find articles that are similar to a given article, “similar” meaning “nearest within the same cluster”.