(I disagree with this comment, but upvoted it because I think it does a good job exploring the question “how do we evaluate blogposts of varying types?” which I still feel pretty overall confused about)
There’s maybe two separate question of “does this deserve a bunch of upvotes?” and “does this deserve to be in the 2019 Review Book(s)?”
I didn’t upvote this post, but I might have, for a couple reasons. One major one is novelty. Right now there aren’t that many LessWrong posts that explore object level worldmodeling. Rather than ask “is this a fit for LessWrong’s main topics?” I think it’s actually often useful to ask “does this expand on LessWrong’s main topics in a way that is potentially fruitful?”. I think intellectual progress depends in part on people curiously exploring and writing up things that they are interested in, even if we don’t have a clear picture of how they fall fit together.
Separately, I do think Progress Studies are (probably) particularly important to what I think of as one of LessWrong’s central goals: using applied rationality to put a dent in universe. I’m not sure this particular piece was crucial (I haven’t re-read it recently). But, I think understanding how human progress works, in the general sense, is disproportionately likely to yield insight into how to cause more progress to happen in important domains.
I think that’s valuable enough to consider upvoting, and valuable enough to consider it for a retrospective best-of Review. I think for in both cases it depends more on the specifics of the post, and whether it, in fact, led to some kind of later insight. (Part of the point of a retrospective review is you don’t have to guess whether something would provide useful insight – you know whether it actually helped you in the past 1.5 years).
(strong-upvoted, I think this discussion is productive and fruitful)
I think this is an interesting distinction. I think I’m probably interpreting the goals of a review as more of a “Let’s create a body of gold standard work,” whereas it seems as though you’re interpreting it more through a lens of “Let’s showcase interesting work.” I think the central question where these two differ is exemplified by this post: what happens when we get a post that is nice to have in small quantities. In the review-as-goal world, that’s not a super helpful post to curate. In the review-as-interest world, that’s absolutely a useful facet to curate. I also think that while H5 might not be true in this case, we’d have opposite recommendations of it was true, but I could be wrong about that.
Separately, I’m not sure that even given that we want to be endorsing gears-level pieces on progress studies, this is the specific work we want to curate: I’d like to see more on the specific implications and consequences of concrete and how it “meshes” with other gears (i.e. for an unrelated field, agriculture, this probably would involve at least tangential discussion of the change in societal slack brought on by agriculture). I suspect this would go a long way towards making this piece feel relevant to me.
(I disagree with this comment, but upvoted it because I think it does a good job exploring the question “how do we evaluate blogposts of varying types?” which I still feel pretty overall confused about)
There’s maybe two separate question of “does this deserve a bunch of upvotes?” and “does this deserve to be in the 2019 Review Book(s)?”
I didn’t upvote this post, but I might have, for a couple reasons. One major one is novelty. Right now there aren’t that many LessWrong posts that explore object level worldmodeling. Rather than ask “is this a fit for LessWrong’s main topics?” I think it’s actually often useful to ask “does this expand on LessWrong’s main topics in a way that is potentially fruitful?”. I think intellectual progress depends in part on people curiously exploring and writing up things that they are interested in, even if we don’t have a clear picture of how they fall fit together.
Separately, I do think Progress Studies are (probably) particularly important to what I think of as one of LessWrong’s central goals: using applied rationality to put a dent in universe. I’m not sure this particular piece was crucial (I haven’t re-read it recently). But, I think understanding how human progress works, in the general sense, is disproportionately likely to yield insight into how to cause more progress to happen in important domains.
I think that’s valuable enough to consider upvoting, and valuable enough to consider it for a retrospective best-of Review. I think for in both cases it depends more on the specifics of the post, and whether it, in fact, led to some kind of later insight. (Part of the point of a retrospective review is you don’t have to guess whether something would provide useful insight – you know whether it actually helped you in the past 1.5 years).
(strong-upvoted, I think this discussion is productive and fruitful)
I think this is an interesting distinction. I think I’m probably interpreting the goals of a review as more of a “Let’s create a body of gold standard work,” whereas it seems as though you’re interpreting it more through a lens of “Let’s showcase interesting work.” I think the central question where these two differ is exemplified by this post: what happens when we get a post that is nice to have in small quantities. In the review-as-goal world, that’s not a super helpful post to curate. In the review-as-interest world, that’s absolutely a useful facet to curate. I also think that while H5 might not be true in this case, we’d have opposite recommendations of it was true, but I could be wrong about that.
Separately, I’m not sure that even given that we want to be endorsing gears-level pieces on progress studies, this is the specific work we want to curate: I’d like to see more on the specific implications and consequences of concrete and how it “meshes” with other gears (i.e. for an unrelated field, agriculture, this probably would involve at least tangential discussion of the change in societal slack brought on by agriculture). I suspect this would go a long way towards making this piece feel relevant to me.