On reflection, I endorse the conclusion and arguments in this post. I also like that it’s short and direct. Stylistically, it argues for a behavior change among LessWrong readers who sometimes make surveys, rather than being targeted at general LessWrong readers. In particular, the post doesn’t spend much time or space building interest about surveys or taking a circumspect view of them. For this reason, I might suggest a change to the original post to add something to the top like “Target audience: LessWrong readers who often or occasionally make formal or informal surveys about the future of tech; Epistemic status: action-oriented; recommends behavior changes.” It might be nice to have a longer version of the post that takes a more circumspect view of surveys and coordination surveys, that is more optimized for interestingness to general LessWrong readers, and that is less focused on recommending a change of behavior to a specific subset of readers. I wouldn’t want this shorter more direct version to be fully replaced by the longer more broadly interesting version, though, because I’m still glad to have a short and sweet statement somewhere that just directly and publically explains the recommended behavior change.
On reflection, I endorse the conclusion and arguments in this post. I also like that it’s short and direct. Stylistically, it argues for a behavior change among LessWrong readers who sometimes make surveys, rather than being targeted at general LessWrong readers. In particular, the post doesn’t spend much time or space building interest about surveys or taking a circumspect view of them. For this reason, I might suggest a change to the original post to add something to the top like “Target audience: LessWrong readers who often or occasionally make formal or informal surveys about the future of tech; Epistemic status: action-oriented; recommends behavior changes.” It might be nice to have a longer version of the post that takes a more circumspect view of surveys and coordination surveys, that is more optimized for interestingness to general LessWrong readers, and that is less focused on recommending a change of behavior to a specific subset of readers. I wouldn’t want this shorter more direct version to be fully replaced by the longer more broadly interesting version, though, because I’m still glad to have a short and sweet statement somewhere that just directly and publically explains the recommended behavior change.