Writing to think makes sense. But what if the end result still turns out crappy? What if it’s meh? What if it’s good but not great? Should you publish it to the world? I’m someone who leans towards saying no. I like to make sure it’s pretty refined and high quality.
But that leads me to a catch-22: most thoughts I want to explore don’t seem promising enough where I’d end up publishing them. Or, rather, they usually seem like they’d take way too much time to refine. And if I’m not going to publish them, well, why write them up in the first place?
I feel like there is a conceptually (but possibly technically challenging) solution to this. You don’t want to push away readers by writing bad posts, and you do not want them to update towards you being dumb. You also don’t want to push away readers by writing about topics that they are not interested in. This would likely happen by default if you write about a wide range of topics.
IIRC somewhere in the Arbital postmortem there is a simple solution to this. Instead of having only one channel to publish your content, create multiple ones.
You could devise a system where you can assign a tag to a post. Readers can then decide for which tags they want to get notifications. This also gives you dynamic filtering of posts. I expect that to be good for exploring the content, e.g. finding older posts that you are likely interested in.
Additionally, you could, for each post, attach the amount of time that you have invested into the post per word written. This is probably a reasonable proxy for quality.
You could also sort each post into 3 bins based on how good you think that post turned out. Or have categories that classify how exploratory some piece of writing is. Is this writing the result of you trying to get a better understanding of something, or does the writing aim to provide the best possible explanation for an important topic that you understand well?
And I am sure if there is a lot more that you could do. It would probably be important to have a few good default configurations that people can choose between, to not overwhelm them with the available options. E.g. there could be one stream that is about topics you expect LessWrongers to be interested in, from the high-quality post tag category.
A Stream model of Content Publishing
I feel like there is a conceptually (but possibly technically challenging) solution to this. You don’t want to push away readers by writing bad posts, and you do not want them to update towards you being dumb. You also don’t want to push away readers by writing about topics that they are not interested in. This would likely happen by default if you write about a wide range of topics.
IIRC somewhere in the Arbital postmortem there is a simple solution to this. Instead of having only one channel to publish your content, create multiple ones.
You could devise a system where you can assign a tag to a post. Readers can then decide for which tags they want to get notifications. This also gives you dynamic filtering of posts. I expect that to be good for exploring the content, e.g. finding older posts that you are likely interested in.
Additionally, you could, for each post, attach the amount of time that you have invested into the post per word written. This is probably a reasonable proxy for quality.
You could also sort each post into 3 bins based on how good you think that post turned out. Or have categories that classify how exploratory some piece of writing is. Is this writing the result of you trying to get a better understanding of something, or does the writing aim to provide the best possible explanation for an important topic that you understand well?
And I am sure if there is a lot more that you could do. It would probably be important to have a few good default configurations that people can choose between, to not overwhelm them with the available options. E.g. there could be one stream that is about topics you expect LessWrongers to be interested in, from the high-quality post tag category.