I’ll focus on resources rather than topics, and collect crowd opinion on resources.
I’d call it success. Really, I am more afraid of the opposite situation: too few people caring enough to comment; because then I wouldn’t know what to do. If there are too many comments, you could for example collect the resources and make a poll. Or just start another discussion a month later, where the first comment would contain the poll about the resources recommended in the previous discussion. Or anything else. The big problem is IMHO if people generally endorse the idea, but the discussion is followed by… silence.
Remember Instrumental rationality/self help resources, and more recently Proposal: periodic repost of the Best Learning resources? I think the success of those discussions means the idea is already a success. I saw that the post asking for resources became hard to navigate because all the different life categories listed generated too many recommendations. To avoid that, should I start discussions with different life categories every time? Other people have already tested the idea and it is popular, making an effective instrumental rationality resource collection program is the hard part.
How come you suggested a poll to overcome too any comments, and then reposting the discussion? I don’t think a poll would solve the too many comments problem because there are simply too many useful things to recommend improving. Many things would be useful. Look at all of lukeprog’s social skill resouces! Ask just for social skill resources, dump that in, then throw in another 20 recommendations and even more low impact suggestion and the discussion would be swamped. A poll with so many different resources will just exacerbate the problem.
The only solution I can think of is having many different discussions, each on a separate area of life or even separate categories in one area of life. Whether or not to space it out or just post ~7 discussions at once is the question.
Obviously you put more thoughts to it than I did. Yes, self-help can be a very wide category, a superset of all learning. I was thinking about something more narrow, like changing one’s habits or developing social skills.
So… uhm, I don’t know. Probably would try to split it to some categories, one per article, and put some time (a few days?) between them, if one category is enough to make a big discussion. Also, giving the specific category may help people remember some material that wouldn’t come to mind when thinking about “self-help” in general.
I’d say try the first topic, and you’ll see how it goes. Good luck!
Thanks for the clarification.
I’ll focus on resources rather than topics, and collect crowd opinion on resources.
Remember Instrumental rationality/self help resources, and more recently Proposal: periodic repost of the Best Learning resources? I think the success of those discussions means the idea is already a success. I saw that the post asking for resources became hard to navigate because all the different life categories listed generated too many recommendations. To avoid that, should I start discussions with different life categories every time? Other people have already tested the idea and it is popular, making an effective instrumental rationality resource collection program is the hard part.
How come you suggested a poll to overcome too any comments, and then reposting the discussion? I don’t think a poll would solve the too many comments problem because there are simply too many useful things to recommend improving. Many things would be useful. Look at all of lukeprog’s social skill resouces! Ask just for social skill resources, dump that in, then throw in another 20 recommendations and even more low impact suggestion and the discussion would be swamped. A poll with so many different resources will just exacerbate the problem.
The only solution I can think of is having many different discussions, each on a separate area of life or even separate categories in one area of life. Whether or not to space it out or just post ~7 discussions at once is the question.
Obviously you put more thoughts to it than I did. Yes, self-help can be a very wide category, a superset of all learning. I was thinking about something more narrow, like changing one’s habits or developing social skills.
So… uhm, I don’t know. Probably would try to split it to some categories, one per article, and put some time (a few days?) between them, if one category is enough to make a big discussion. Also, giving the specific category may help people remember some material that wouldn’t come to mind when thinking about “self-help” in general.
I’d say try the first topic, and you’ll see how it goes. Good luck!