I often feel like upvotes on LW correspond more to the “insightfulness” of a post, rather than its perceived instrumental value. Unsure how I feel about this because if I’m relying on upvotes as a social incentive to write things, this shapes what I write in directions that might not be directly useful (IMO) to the most people.
Reading too much into voting decisions is a mistake. Different readers vote for different reasons, and without downvotes (and even with) it’s difficult to get a clear signal from the system.
For me, it’s perfectly upvote-worthy to write things that are amusing, provocative, or even useless but well-intentioned. Don’t be boring, and even then I can skip it pretty easily.
Short answer is that I think insight porn can put people on hedonic treadmills that optimize for things which don’t easily cash out in the real world and neglect to consider basic, object-level advice even if they’re not currently doing it.
Oftentimes, what you really need is some way of getting yourself to just do the obvious things, by means of metacontrarian arguments or otherwise.
The problem with basic, object-level advice is that has to be specific to a particular person and a particular situation. There are not that many generic universal solutions applicable to all and sundry—in most cases, “it depends”.
It is useful to give people tools, but it also is useful to give people insights which will allow them to make and modify tools of their own.
However, I do think that most insight based posts are also fairly specific (i.e. not super generalizable).
Also, maybe I’m on the denser end here, but it took me a long time to make the connection between taking insights and finding ways to adapt them to things that would help me. I’m thinking that articles which explicitly harp on this might be useful.
If you are trying to help the most people then the odds that the right thing to do is ‘post on a website that nobody reads’ is pretty slim. Like, once you are in the ‘posting on LW’ space, then you are pretty clearly not trying to maximize how much other people get out of your time. Just do what you like.
I often feel like upvotes on LW correspond more to the “insightfulness” of a post, rather than its perceived instrumental value. Unsure how I feel about this because if I’m relying on upvotes as a social incentive to write things, this shapes what I write in directions that might not be directly useful (IMO) to the most people.
Reading too much into voting decisions is a mistake. Different readers vote for different reasons, and without downvotes (and even with) it’s difficult to get a clear signal from the system.
For me, it’s perfectly upvote-worthy to write things that are amusing, provocative, or even useless but well-intentioned. Don’t be boring, and even then I can skip it pretty easily.
Everyone likes insight porn :-)
But I don’t know why you think that insights are less useful than more instrumental advice.
Short answer is that I think insight porn can put people on hedonic treadmills that optimize for things which don’t easily cash out in the real world and neglect to consider basic, object-level advice even if they’re not currently doing it.
Oftentimes, what you really need is some way of getting yourself to just do the obvious things, by means of metacontrarian arguments or otherwise.
The problem with basic, object-level advice is that has to be specific to a particular person and a particular situation. There are not that many generic universal solutions applicable to all and sundry—in most cases, “it depends”.
It is useful to give people tools, but it also is useful to give people insights which will allow them to make and modify tools of their own.
Sure, I think that’s totally fair.
However, I do think that most insight based posts are also fairly specific (i.e. not super generalizable).
Also, maybe I’m on the denser end here, but it took me a long time to make the connection between taking insights and finding ways to adapt them to things that would help me. I’m thinking that articles which explicitly harp on this might be useful.
If you are trying to help the most people then the odds that the right thing to do is ‘post on a website that nobody reads’ is pretty slim. Like, once you are in the ‘posting on LW’ space, then you are pretty clearly not trying to maximize how much other people get out of your time. Just do what you like.