It would be nice if we had a way to separate what a post was about from the rationality displayed by the post. Maybe something like the Alignment Forum arrangement, where there is a highly-technical version of the post and a regular public version of the post, but we replace the highly technical discussion with the rationality of the post.
Another comparison would be the Wikipedia talk pages, where the page has a public face but the talk page dissecting the contents requires navigating to specifically.
My reasoning here is that when reading a post and its comments, the subject of the post, the quality of the post on regular stylistic grounds, and the quality of the post on rationality grounds all compete for my bandwidth. Creating a specific zone where attention can be focused exclusively on the rationality elements will make it easier to identify where the problems are, and capitalize on the improvements thereby.
In sum: the default view of a post should be about the post. We should have a way to be able to only look at and comment on the rationality aspects.
For the vast majority of posts, I don’t expect nor want a separation between the rationality of the post and the target of the post. This is a place to rationally discuss rationalist topics, and if either side is lacking for a post, we should comment on and improve it.
For the few posts I think you’re talking about (posts about the communities and organizations loosely related to or with some membership overlap with the site), I might just recommend a tag and filtering for those of us who don’t care very much.
I also have a notion this would help with things like the renewal of old content by making it incremental. For example, there has been a low-key wish for the Sequences to be revised and updated, but they are huge and this has proved too daunting a task for anyone to volunteer to tackle by themselves, and Eliezer is a busy man. With a tool similar to this, the community could divide up the work into comment-size increments, and once a critical mass has been reached someone can transform the post into an updated version without carrying the whole burden themselves. Also solves the problem of being too dependent on one person’s interpretations.
It would be nice if we had a way to separate what a post was about from the rationality displayed by the post. Maybe something like the Alignment Forum arrangement, where there is a highly-technical version of the post and a regular public version of the post, but we replace the highly technical discussion with the rationality of the post.
Another comparison would be the Wikipedia talk pages, where the page has a public face but the talk page dissecting the contents requires navigating to specifically.
My reasoning here is that when reading a post and its comments, the subject of the post, the quality of the post on regular stylistic grounds, and the quality of the post on rationality grounds all compete for my bandwidth. Creating a specific zone where attention can be focused exclusively on the rationality elements will make it easier to identify where the problems are, and capitalize on the improvements thereby.
In sum: the default view of a post should be about the post. We should have a way to be able to only look at and comment on the rationality aspects.
For the vast majority of posts, I don’t expect nor want a separation between the rationality of the post and the target of the post. This is a place to rationally discuss rationalist topics, and if either side is lacking for a post, we should comment on and improve it.
For the few posts I think you’re talking about (posts about the communities and organizations loosely related to or with some membership overlap with the site), I might just recommend a tag and filtering for those of us who don’t care very much.
I also have a notion this would help with things like the renewal of old content by making it incremental. For example, there has been a low-key wish for the Sequences to be revised and updated, but they are huge and this has proved too daunting a task for anyone to volunteer to tackle by themselves, and Eliezer is a busy man. With a tool similar to this, the community could divide up the work into comment-size increments, and once a critical mass has been reached someone can transform the post into an updated version without carrying the whole burden themselves. Also solves the problem of being too dependent on one person’s interpretations.