I’d say that LessWrong has an even stronger aesthetic of effort than academia. It is virtually impossible to have a highly-voted lesswrong post without it being long, even though many top posts can be summarized in as little as 1-2 paragraphs.
Hmm, I notice a pretty strong negative correlation between how long it takes me to write a blog post and how much karma it gets. For example, very recently I spent like a month of full-time work to write two posts on social status (karma = 71 & 36), then I took a break to catch up on my to-do list, in the course of which I would sometimes spend a few hours dashing off a little post, and there have been three posts in that category, and their karma is 57, 60, 121 (this one). So, 20ish times less effort, somewhat more karma. This is totally in line with my normal expectations.
I think that’s because if I’m spending a month on a blog post then it’s probably going to be full of boring technical details such that it’s not fun to read, and if I spend a few hours on a blog post like this one, it’s gonna consist of stories and rants and wild speculation and so on, which is more fun to read.
In terms of word count, here you go, I did the experiment:
I could make a long list of “advice” to get lots of lesswrong karma (but that probably actually makes a post less valuable), but I don’t think “conspicuous signals of effort” would be one of them. Instead it would be things like: Give it a clickbaity title & intro, Make it about an ongoing hot debate (e.g. the eternal battle between “yay Eliezer” vibes versus “boo Eliezer” vibes, or the debate over whether p(doom) is high versus low, AGI timelines, etc.), Make it reinforce popular rationalist tribal beliefs (yay YIMBY, boo FDA, etc.—this post is an example), make it an easy read, don’t mention AI because the AI tag gets penalized by default in the frontpage ranking, etc. My impression is that length per se is not particularly rewarded in terms of LW karma, and that the kind of “rigor” that would be well-received in peer-review (e.g. comprehensive lit reviews) is a negative in terms of lesswrong karma.
Of course this is stupid, because karma is meaningless internet points, and the obvious right answer is to basically not care about lesswrong karma in the first place. Instead I recommend metrics like “My former self would have learned a lot from reading this” or “This constitutes meaningful progress on such-and-such long-term project that I’m pursuing and care about”. For example, I have a number of super-low-karma posts that I feel great pride and affinity towards. I am not doing month-long research projects because it’s a good way to get karma, which it’s not, but rather because it’s a good way to make progress on my long-term research agenda. :)
How many people read your post is probably meaningful to you, and karma affects that a lot.
I say this because I certainly care about how many people read which posts, so it’s kind of sad when karma doesn’t track value in the post (though of course brevity and ease of reading are also important and valuable).
This is interesting, but how do you explain the observation that LW posts are frequently much much longer than they need to be to convey their main point? They take forever to get started (“what this NOT arguing: [list of 10 points]” etc) and take forever to finish.
Point 1: I think “writing less concisely than would be ideal” is the natural default for writers, so we don’t need to look to incentives to explain it. Pick up any book of writing advice and it will say that, right? “You have to kill your darlings”, “If I had more time, I would have written a shorter letter”, etc.
Point 2: I don’t know if this applies to you-in-particular, but there’s a systematic dynamic where readers generally somewhat underestimate the ideal length of a piece of nonfiction writing. The problem is, the writer is writing for a heterogeneous audience of readers. Different readers are coming in with different confusions, different topics-of-interest, different depths-of-interest, etc. So you can imagine, for example, that every reader really only benefits from 70% of the prose … but it’s a different 70% for different readers. Then each individual reader will be complaining that it’s unnecessarily long, but actually it can’t be cut at all without totally losing a bunch of the audience.
(To be clear, I think both of these are true—Point 2 is not meant as a denial to Point 1; not all extra length is adding anything. I think the solution is to both try to write concisely and make it easy for the reader to recognize and skip over the parts that they don’t need to read, for example with good headings and a summary / table-of-contents at the top. Making it fun to read can also somewhat substitute for making it quick to read.)
I’d say that LessWrong has an even stronger aesthetic of effort than academia. It is virtually impossible to have a highly-voted lesswrong post without it being long, even though many top posts can be summarized in as little as 1-2 paragraphs.
Hmm, I notice a pretty strong negative correlation between how long it takes me to write a blog post and how much karma it gets. For example, very recently I spent like a month of full-time work to write two posts on social status (karma = 71 & 36), then I took a break to catch up on my to-do list, in the course of which I would sometimes spend a few hours dashing off a little post, and there have been three posts in that category, and their karma is 57, 60, 121 (this one). So, 20ish times less effort, somewhat more karma. This is totally in line with my normal expectations.
I think that’s because if I’m spending a month on a blog post then it’s probably going to be full of boring technical details such that it’s not fun to read, and if I spend a few hours on a blog post like this one, it’s gonna consist of stories and rants and wild speculation and so on, which is more fun to read.
In terms of word count, here you go, I did the experiment:
I could make a long list of “advice” to get lots of lesswrong karma (but that probably actually makes a post less valuable), but I don’t think “conspicuous signals of effort” would be one of them. Instead it would be things like: Give it a clickbaity title & intro, Make it about an ongoing hot debate (e.g. the eternal battle between “yay Eliezer” vibes versus “boo Eliezer” vibes, or the debate over whether p(doom) is high versus low, AGI timelines, etc.), Make it reinforce popular rationalist tribal beliefs (yay YIMBY, boo FDA, etc.—this post is an example), make it an easy read, don’t mention AI because the AI tag gets penalized by default in the frontpage ranking, etc. My impression is that length per se is not particularly rewarded in terms of LW karma, and that the kind of “rigor” that would be well-received in peer-review (e.g. comprehensive lit reviews) is a negative in terms of lesswrong karma.
Of course this is stupid, because karma is meaningless internet points, and the obvious right answer is to basically not care about lesswrong karma in the first place. Instead I recommend metrics like “My former self would have learned a lot from reading this” or “This constitutes meaningful progress on such-and-such long-term project that I’m pursuing and care about”. For example, I have a number of super-low-karma posts that I feel great pride and affinity towards. I am not doing month-long research projects because it’s a good way to get karma, which it’s not, but rather because it’s a good way to make progress on my long-term research agenda. :)
How many people read your post is probably meaningful to you, and karma affects that a lot.
I say this because I certainly care about how many people read which posts, so it’s kind of sad when karma doesn’t track value in the post (though of course brevity and ease of reading are also important and valuable).
This is interesting, but how do you explain the observation that LW posts are frequently much much longer than they need to be to convey their main point? They take forever to get started (“what this NOT arguing: [list of 10 points]” etc) and take forever to finish.
Point 1: I think “writing less concisely than would be ideal” is the natural default for writers, so we don’t need to look to incentives to explain it. Pick up any book of writing advice and it will say that, right? “You have to kill your darlings”, “If I had more time, I would have written a shorter letter”, etc.
Point 2: I don’t know if this applies to you-in-particular, but there’s a systematic dynamic where readers generally somewhat underestimate the ideal length of a piece of nonfiction writing. The problem is, the writer is writing for a heterogeneous audience of readers. Different readers are coming in with different confusions, different topics-of-interest, different depths-of-interest, etc. So you can imagine, for example, that every reader really only benefits from 70% of the prose … but it’s a different 70% for different readers. Then each individual reader will be complaining that it’s unnecessarily long, but actually it can’t be cut at all without totally losing a bunch of the audience.
(To be clear, I think both of these are true—Point 2 is not meant as a denial to Point 1; not all extra length is adding anything. I think the solution is to both try to write concisely and make it easy for the reader to recognize and skip over the parts that they don’t need to read, for example with good headings and a summary / table-of-contents at the top. Making it fun to read can also somewhat substitute for making it quick to read.)