Ok, I think our crux here is about how much posts should explicitly point out how their material connects to everything else.
Personally, I think there’s a lot of value in posts which explicitly do not explain how they connect, because explaining connections usually means pulling in a particular framing and suggesting particular questions/frameworks. In a pre-paradigmatic field, we don’t know what the right questions or frames are, so there’s a lot of value in just presenting the information without much framing. It’s the “go out and look at the world” part of rationality.
Now, a downside of this sort of post is that many people will come along who don’t have any idea how the material relates to anything. There’s no hand-holding in the interpretation/connections, so readers have to handle that part on their own, and not everyone is going to have enough prior scaffolding to see why the material matters at all. (I’ve definitely seen this on many of my own posts, when I present a result without explaining how it fits in with everything else.)
I think the best way to handle this sort of trade-off is to have some posts which present information (especially concrete examples) without much framing, and then separately have posts which try to frame that information and explain how things fit together (which usually also means positing hypotheses/theories). It’s very similar to the separation of empirical vs theoretical work we see in a lot of the sciences. We already have a lot of the latter sort of post, but could use a lot more of the former. So e.g. “this type of historical brief could easily proliferate to an excessive extent” is something I’d consider a very positive outcome.
I think you’re mostly right. To be clear, I think that there’s a lot of value in unfiltered information, but I mostly worry about other topics being drowned out by unfiltered information on a forum like this. My personal preference is to link out or do independent research to acquire unfiltered information in a community with specific views/frames of reference, because I think it’s always going to be skewed by that communities thought, and I don’t find research onerous.
I’d support either the creation of a separate [Briefs] tag that can be filtered like other tags, and in that case, I’d support this kind of post, but at the moment, I don’t know what the value add is for this to be on LessWrong, and I see several potential costs.
Ok, I think our crux here is about how much posts should explicitly point out how their material connects to everything else.
Personally, I think there’s a lot of value in posts which explicitly do not explain how they connect, because explaining connections usually means pulling in a particular framing and suggesting particular questions/frameworks. In a pre-paradigmatic field, we don’t know what the right questions or frames are, so there’s a lot of value in just presenting the information without much framing. It’s the “go out and look at the world” part of rationality.
Now, a downside of this sort of post is that many people will come along who don’t have any idea how the material relates to anything. There’s no hand-holding in the interpretation/connections, so readers have to handle that part on their own, and not everyone is going to have enough prior scaffolding to see why the material matters at all. (I’ve definitely seen this on many of my own posts, when I present a result without explaining how it fits in with everything else.)
I think the best way to handle this sort of trade-off is to have some posts which present information (especially concrete examples) without much framing, and then separately have posts which try to frame that information and explain how things fit together (which usually also means positing hypotheses/theories). It’s very similar to the separation of empirical vs theoretical work we see in a lot of the sciences. We already have a lot of the latter sort of post, but could use a lot more of the former. So e.g. “this type of historical brief could easily proliferate to an excessive extent” is something I’d consider a very positive outcome.
I think you’re mostly right. To be clear, I think that there’s a lot of value in unfiltered information, but I mostly worry about other topics being drowned out by unfiltered information on a forum like this. My personal preference is to link out or do independent research to acquire unfiltered information in a community with specific views/frames of reference, because I think it’s always going to be skewed by that communities thought, and I don’t find research onerous.
I’d support either the creation of a separate [Briefs] tag that can be filtered like other tags, and in that case, I’d support this kind of post, but at the moment, I don’t know what the value add is for this to be on LessWrong, and I see several potential costs.
Good suggestion, and I expect some mechanism along these lines will show up if and when it becomes significant.