We’ve had this discussion before, and I am not super interested in having it again right now, but on this point most of the people whose content contributions to this site I respect most, disagree with the approach you describe here, as does the current LW 2.0 team.
Allowing authors to post rough drafts and discuss initial ideas, before knowing whether they are comprehensible to others, is really important and a major goal of LessWrong 2.0. Applying the standard that you seem to be communicating here would have prevented the vast majority of good content being posted on this site, because from the inside it is very hard to know whether your perspective will make sense to others or not, and most of our top writers would respond to your comment with “sure, I guess I will just not post here then” (which most of them did).
Eliezer, Scott G., Nate and a lot of the other top writers we’ve talked to (or who commented about the LessWrong culture somewhere publicly) have reported that LessWrong is a place that feels too hostile to post to, because of attitudes like the one you describe in this comment. Almost every major author we’ve interviewed has explicitly asked for some way to create content on LessWrong that is lower stakes and that allows for an explorative discussion instead of everyone just focusing on tearing apart their ideas. There has to be a place and a stage for exposing your idea to intense scrutiny, but we also need a place for explorative discussion and I am not happy about you trying to enforce a frame of intense scrutiny on every single post.
Said, I appreciate your contributions and think you often make good points, and I was particularly happy about your contributions and concerns in the recent moderation discussion. But both the fact that you never created any top-level posts and are not actively contributing to the idea-generation of this community, lead me to think that you vastly underestimate the stress and cost associated with having every idea of yours exposed to intense scrutiny from the very beginning. You are welcome to enforce your norms of constant intense scrutiny on your own personal blog, but right now, I am not happy with you enforcing this in every single nook and cranny of this page. I think you yourself are driving away many clear thinkers and good writers, and that this is making the site worse overall.
If a post is in curated, or the author explicitly asks for detailed scrutiny, then I think your scrutiny is well-placed and should continue (and I do soon want to have a better structure that communicates more clearly in what parts of the site authors should expect their ideas to come under intense scrutiny).
If the post is just on the frontpage or on someone’s personal page, I think it would be better for the site overall if you would change the way you comment to be significantly less harsh, more welcoming to new users, and to generally include more effort on your side to try to understand the point the author is making (and otherwise to abstain from commenting).
I would like to discuss this more, but it is definitely the case that I’ve spent a really massive amount of time over the last month being involved in meta-discussion, and that this has been delaying a lot of important engineering work on the site. I hope I can get around to giving this whole topic a more thorough treatment at some later point in time, but for the sake of us finally launching the meetup system, I will have to keep it at this comment and won’t be available to discuss further. I do really apologize for that, and it sucks, and I wish I had more time to do all the things that need to get done.
We’ve had this discussion before, and I am not super interested in having it again right now, but on this point most of the people whose content contributions to this site I respect most, disagree with the approach you describe here, as does the current LW 2.0 team.
Allowing authors to post rough drafts and discuss initial ideas, before knowing whether they are comprehensible to others, is really important and a major goal of LessWrong 2.0. Applying the standard that you seem to be communicating here would have prevented the vast majority of good content being posted on this site, because from the inside it is very hard to know whether your perspective will make sense to others or not, and most of our top writers would respond to your comment with “sure, I guess I will just not post here then” (which most of them did).
Eliezer, Scott G., Nate and a lot of the other top writers we’ve talked to (or who commented about the LessWrong culture somewhere publicly) have reported that LessWrong is a place that feels too hostile to post to, because of attitudes like the one you describe in this comment. Almost every major author we’ve interviewed has explicitly asked for some way to create content on LessWrong that is lower stakes and that allows for an explorative discussion instead of everyone just focusing on tearing apart their ideas. There has to be a place and a stage for exposing your idea to intense scrutiny, but we also need a place for explorative discussion and I am not happy about you trying to enforce a frame of intense scrutiny on every single post.
Said, I appreciate your contributions and think you often make good points, and I was particularly happy about your contributions and concerns in the recent moderation discussion. But both the fact that you never created any top-level posts and are not actively contributing to the idea-generation of this community, lead me to think that you vastly underestimate the stress and cost associated with having every idea of yours exposed to intense scrutiny from the very beginning. You are welcome to enforce your norms of constant intense scrutiny on your own personal blog, but right now, I am not happy with you enforcing this in every single nook and cranny of this page. I think you yourself are driving away many clear thinkers and good writers, and that this is making the site worse overall.
If a post is in curated, or the author explicitly asks for detailed scrutiny, then I think your scrutiny is well-placed and should continue (and I do soon want to have a better structure that communicates more clearly in what parts of the site authors should expect their ideas to come under intense scrutiny).
If the post is just on the frontpage or on someone’s personal page, I think it would be better for the site overall if you would change the way you comment to be significantly less harsh, more welcoming to new users, and to generally include more effort on your side to try to understand the point the author is making (and otherwise to abstain from commenting).
I would like to discuss this more, but it is definitely the case that I’ve spent a really massive amount of time over the last month being involved in meta-discussion, and that this has been delaying a lot of important engineering work on the site. I hope I can get around to giving this whole topic a more thorough treatment at some later point in time, but for the sake of us finally launching the meetup system, I will have to keep it at this comment and won’t be available to discuss further. I do really apologize for that, and it sucks, and I wish I had more time to do all the things that need to get done.