Yeah—retreading the same ground seems like a necessary and normal part of having a culture with common knowledge.
Creating new stuff is hard, and creating it as a group rather than working alone is an additional hard thing. This can often be at odds of the normal meetup goal of inclusiveness. The most cool new progress I’ve experienced at a meetup was in attacking epistemology problems (like the raven paradox), which kind of makes sense if we imagine that this sort of problem was hard because it was confusing, but not too complicated and not requiring much domain expertise outside the LW curriculum.
This point (from both Vaniver and Charlie) is well-taken—I definitely agree that some amount of retreading the same ground is fine and often necessary or useful. I guess what I meant to express was, if there are conversations people are having that contain potentially novel insights or interesting new ways of looking at a problem/topic, then it would be good if those were written up and added to the canon. By default this is almost never happening, so it’s the thing I want to encourage.
Yeah—retreading the same ground seems like a necessary and normal part of having a culture with common knowledge.
Creating new stuff is hard, and creating it as a group rather than working alone is an additional hard thing. This can often be at odds of the normal meetup goal of inclusiveness. The most cool new progress I’ve experienced at a meetup was in attacking epistemology problems (like the raven paradox), which kind of makes sense if we imagine that this sort of problem was hard because it was confusing, but not too complicated and not requiring much domain expertise outside the LW curriculum.
This point (from both Vaniver and Charlie) is well-taken—I definitely agree that some amount of retreading the same ground is fine and often necessary or useful. I guess what I meant to express was, if there are conversations people are having that contain potentially novel insights or interesting new ways of looking at a problem/topic, then it would be good if those were written up and added to the canon. By default this is almost never happening, so it’s the thing I want to encourage.