I have made a terrible mistake judgement-wise by posting this topic in the fashion I did.
The situation was like this:
I’ve been at the librabry, studying for an exam when I took a not unusual 10-minute procrastination break to surf whe web. I went onto planetrationalist.com (a website that collects the newest articles from a wide variety of “rationalist” websites of varying quality including LW), where an article about the mentioned paper was one of the most recent ones.
At that point I made at least three faulty assumptions/ mistakes that were to some extent connected:
1) “It’s the top post so this is actually news.” (I think it was actually a week old at that point already).
2) “The article about the article does not point out any obvious flaws, and because it’s linked on planetrationalist.com I assign some trust/probability that it’s not complete garbage” (by far my worst irrational crime)
3) “I’ll take a look on lesswrongs discussion board to find what people say about this topic because right now I haven’t any time to really check out this paper myself. [...] Oh, there’s no post yet in the discussion section, but since it’s news (which it wasn’t) that makes sense, so I guess I’ll open the first topic to see what others think about this paper.”
If I had realized that it was old news I would have taken the absence of discussion about this paper/topic in the discussion section as a vital hint. Bad choices and assumptions all along.
So right now I just hope people stop upvoting this and let it die in silence because more people who thinks this thread hasn’t enough downvotes yet show up all the time ruin my karma yet further, which overall has been rather positive up until very recently. On the upside however I’ve learned a valuable lesson about lesswrong at the cost of some karma I wouldn’t have learned otherwise.
Why was this post downvoted like crazy? Is Less Wrong not the sort of place to post this sort of question?
Should we have a Q&A site for this sort of purpose? It’s been discussed before.
Or is it just that this should have been posted to Discussion or the open thread?
I have made a terrible mistake judgement-wise by posting this topic in the fashion I did.
The situation was like this:
I’ve been at the librabry, studying for an exam when I took a not unusual 10-minute procrastination break to surf whe web. I went onto planetrationalist.com (a website that collects the newest articles from a wide variety of “rationalist” websites of varying quality including LW), where an article about the mentioned paper was one of the most recent ones.
At that point I made at least three faulty assumptions/ mistakes that were to some extent connected:
1) “It’s the top post so this is actually news.” (I think it was actually a week old at that point already).
2) “The article about the article does not point out any obvious flaws, and because it’s linked on planetrationalist.com I assign some trust/probability that it’s not complete garbage” (by far my worst irrational crime)
3) “I’ll take a look on lesswrongs discussion board to find what people say about this topic because right now I haven’t any time to really check out this paper myself. [...] Oh, there’s no post yet in the discussion section, but since it’s news (which it wasn’t) that makes sense, so I guess I’ll open the first topic to see what others think about this paper.”
If I had realized that it was old news I would have taken the absence of discussion about this paper/topic in the discussion section as a vital hint. Bad choices and assumptions all along.
So right now I just hope people stop upvoting this and let it die in silence because more people who thinks this thread hasn’t enough downvotes yet show up all the time ruin my karma yet further, which overall has been rather positive up until very recently. On the upside however I’ve learned a valuable lesson about lesswrong at the cost of some karma I wouldn’t have learned otherwise.