There are a few things that are tagged as “the great conversations on LessWrong” in my mind, and those are specifically ones that took the form of posts-as-responses. Two specific examples that I’m thinking of would be
Wei Dai’s The Nature of Offense, which was a response to three earlier posts by Alicorn, orthonormal and Eliezer (posts which had in turn been responding to each other), and showed how each of them was a special case of a so-far unrecognized general principle of what offense is.
Morendil and my Red Paperclip Theory of Status; this was a post that Morendil and I co-authored after I had proposed a definition of status in the comments of a post that Morendil had made that was in turn responding to a number of other posts (mine one of them) about “what is status” on LW. I’m no doubt a little biased in considering this one of the great successes, but it felt pretty significant in that to me it felt like it did to the concept of status what Wei Dai’s post did to the concept of offense: pulled together all the threads of the conflicting theories that’d been proposed so far to provide an overall synthesis and definition that the main participants in the discussion (in this case me and Morendil; not everyone seems to have found the post’s model equally useful) agreed to have resolved it.
I would also want to be able to nominate Eliezer and Robin’s FOOM debate, but while that one is certainly long and has them engaging each other, ultimately it didn’t seem to bring their views substantially closer to each other—much unlike the two other examples I mentioned.
There are a few things that are tagged as “the great conversations on LessWrong” in my mind, and those are specifically ones that took the form of posts-as-responses. Two specific examples that I’m thinking of would be
Wei Dai’s The Nature of Offense, which was a response to three earlier posts by Alicorn, orthonormal and Eliezer (posts which had in turn been responding to each other), and showed how each of them was a special case of a so-far unrecognized general principle of what offense is.
Morendil and my Red Paperclip Theory of Status; this was a post that Morendil and I co-authored after I had proposed a definition of status in the comments of a post that Morendil had made that was in turn responding to a number of other posts (mine one of them) about “what is status” on LW. I’m no doubt a little biased in considering this one of the great successes, but it felt pretty significant in that to me it felt like it did to the concept of status what Wei Dai’s post did to the concept of offense: pulled together all the threads of the conflicting theories that’d been proposed so far to provide an overall synthesis and definition that the main participants in the discussion (in this case me and Morendil; not everyone seems to have found the post’s model equally useful) agreed to have resolved it.
I would also want to be able to nominate Eliezer and Robin’s FOOM debate, but while that one is certainly long and has them engaging each other, ultimately it didn’t seem to bring their views substantially closer to each other—much unlike the two other examples I mentioned.
Thanks for contributing these examples!
Eliezer and Robin’s debate also wasn’t really no LessWrong and happened outside of it.