(note: this view isn’t necessarily shared by other LW team members, and there’s at least some kind of major disagreements about how to think about this)
In my ideal world, the review process outputs “here’s what’s inadequate about all our best posts”, and there’s a period where authors are expected to actually make substantial improvements before they go in the book. This is a lot to ask of authors who are often pretty busy, and I’m not 100% sure it’s the right way to go about things but I lean that way.
Alternately, there might be a LessWrong Textbook that is “the level above the Review”, where the Review takes stock of which posts are ready for being officially canonized (which has quite high standards), but that’s pretty rare.
I am somewhat confused about how to think about things like… say, Simulacra, where there’s already been ongoing efforts to distill/refine/clarify. Benquo might choose to rewrite his original post in response to review-feedback, but Zvi has sort of already been working on that (but, on later posts that wouldn’t show up till the 2020 review)
I think the distillation function is better served by new posts, as opposed to extensive revisions of old posts. The repeated attempts to re-explain simulacra are a good example of this.
Part of why I think this is because I believe editing old posts, especially extensive editing, loses some “aliveness” from the post which lets me get in touch with the author’s thought process as they write. Let the rough off the cuff posts stay rough.
Another reason is that textbooks and high quality survey papers are not edited versions of old papers.
“Radical Probabilism” was in many ways a more mature version of “toward a new technical explanation of technical explanation”, but could never be produced by editing the old post.
Benquo might choose to rewrite his original post in response to review-feedback, but Zvi has sort of already been working on that (but, on later posts that wouldn’t show up till the 2020 review)
If Benquo re-wrote his original post extensively enough, that would also sort of count as 2020-2021 content. Which makes me wonder whether it would make sense to distinguish ‘this post is in the 2018 review because of its underlying content’ vs. ‘this post is in the 2018 review because of its implementation/presentation’? Then the ‘underlying content’ stuff could include multiple posts, or posts from later years, as warranted.
A bad situation to maybe try to avoid is: an important idea never ends up included in a review because the original exposition is in one post/year, and the best exposition is in another post/year, and the original exposition is not quite well-executed to warrant inclusion, while the best exposition is not quite noteworthy or innovative enough. (E.g., maybe the best exposition is just a shorter, lightly rephrased version of the original.)
Including content and not just posts also helps address the problem where you want to credit multiple different people for an idea (or idea+exposition), even where their collaboration was spread across multiple posts rather than a single post with multiple authors.
Yeah agreed. There’s (relatedly) the thing where “post” isn’t even always the natural category of thing-people-want-to-nominate (often I think people are nominating a sequence). It’s a somewhat tricky question “how do we let people nominate ‘concepts’ with multiple related posts?” in a way that has good UI and is clear.
I think for immediate future, it’s probably good to just manually spell out “I’m really nominating this overall concept, and am interested in comparing it to more recent work”. I’m not 100% sure what’ll make sense for handling that in the Review Phase but seems worth trying.
(note: this view isn’t necessarily shared by other LW team members, and there’s at least some kind of major disagreements about how to think about this)
In my ideal world, the review process outputs “here’s what’s inadequate about all our best posts”, and there’s a period where authors are expected to actually make substantial improvements before they go in the book. This is a lot to ask of authors who are often pretty busy, and I’m not 100% sure it’s the right way to go about things but I lean that way.
Alternately, there might be a LessWrong Textbook that is “the level above the Review”, where the Review takes stock of which posts are ready for being officially canonized (which has quite high standards), but that’s pretty rare.
I am somewhat confused about how to think about things like… say, Simulacra, where there’s already been ongoing efforts to distill/refine/clarify. Benquo might choose to rewrite his original post in response to review-feedback, but Zvi has sort of already been working on that (but, on later posts that wouldn’t show up till the 2020 review)
I think the distillation function is better served by new posts, as opposed to extensive revisions of old posts. The repeated attempts to re-explain simulacra are a good example of this.
Part of why I think this is because I believe editing old posts, especially extensive editing, loses some “aliveness” from the post which lets me get in touch with the author’s thought process as they write. Let the rough off the cuff posts stay rough.
Another reason is that textbooks and high quality survey papers are not edited versions of old papers.
“Radical Probabilism” was in many ways a more mature version of “toward a new technical explanation of technical explanation”, but could never be produced by editing the old post.
If Benquo re-wrote his original post extensively enough, that would also sort of count as 2020-2021 content. Which makes me wonder whether it would make sense to distinguish ‘this post is in the 2018 review because of its underlying content’ vs. ‘this post is in the 2018 review because of its implementation/presentation’? Then the ‘underlying content’ stuff could include multiple posts, or posts from later years, as warranted.
A bad situation to maybe try to avoid is: an important idea never ends up included in a review because the original exposition is in one post/year, and the best exposition is in another post/year, and the original exposition is not quite well-executed to warrant inclusion, while the best exposition is not quite noteworthy or innovative enough. (E.g., maybe the best exposition is just a shorter, lightly rephrased version of the original.)
Including content and not just posts also helps address the problem where you want to credit multiple different people for an idea (or idea+exposition), even where their collaboration was spread across multiple posts rather than a single post with multiple authors.
Yeah agreed. There’s (relatedly) the thing where “post” isn’t even always the natural category of thing-people-want-to-nominate (often I think people are nominating a sequence). It’s a somewhat tricky question “how do we let people nominate ‘concepts’ with multiple related posts?” in a way that has good UI and is clear.
I think for immediate future, it’s probably good to just manually spell out “I’m really nominating this overall concept, and am interested in comparing it to more recent work”. I’m not 100% sure what’ll make sense for handling that in the Review Phase but seems worth trying.
I would be excited for the review to output “Here’s a description of further work we’d like to see done”.