Reading Michael Vassar’s comments on WrongBot’s article (http://lesswrong.com/lw/2i6/forager_anthropology/2c7s?c=1&context=1#2c7s) made me feel that the current technique of learning how to write a LW post isn’t very efficient (read lots of LW, write a post, wait for lots of comments, try to figure out how their issues could be resolved, write another post etc—it uses up lots of the writer’s time and lot’s of the commentors time).
I was wondering whether there might be a more focused way of doing this. Ie. A short term workshop, a few writers who have been promoted offer to give feedback to a few writers who are struggling to develop the necessary rigour etc by providing a faster feedback cycle, the ability to redraft an article rather than having to start totally afresh and just general advice.
Some people may not feel that this is very beneficial—there’s no need for writing to LW to be made easier (in fact, possibly the opposite) but first off, I’m not talking about making writing for LW easier, I’m talking about making more of the writing of a higher quality. And secondly, I certainly learn a lot better given a chance to interact on that extra level. I think learning to write at an LW level is an excellent way of achieving LW aim of helping people to think at that level.
I’m a long time lurker but I haven’t even really commented before because I find it hard to jump to that next level of understanding that enables me to communicate anything of value. I wonder if there are others who feel the same or a similar way.
We could use a more structured system, perhaps. At this point, there’s nothing to stop you from writing a post before you’re ready, except your own modesty. Raise the threshold, and nobody will have to yell at people for writing posts that don’t quite work.
Possibilities:
Significantly raise the minimum karma level.
An editorial system: a more “advanced” member has to read your post before it becomes top-level.
A wiki page about instructions for posting. It should include: a description of appropriate subject matter, formatting instructions, common errors in reasoning or etiquette.
A social norm that encourages editing (including totally reworking an essay.) The convention for blog posts on the internet in general mandates against editing—a post is supposed to be an honest record of one’s thoughts at the time. But LessWrong is different, and we’re supposed to be updating as we learn from each other. We could make “Please edit this” more explicit.
A related thought on karma—I have the suspicion that we upvote more than we downvote. It would be possible to adjust the site to keep track of each person’s upvote/downvote stats. That is, some people are generous with karma, and some people give more negative feedback. We could calibrate ourselves better if we had a running tally.
Kuro5hin had an editorial system, where all posts started out in a special section where they were separate and only visible to logged in users. Commenters would label their comments as either “topical” or “editorial”, and all editorial comments would be deleted when the post left editing; and votes cast during editing would determine where the post went (front page, less prominent section, or deleted).
Unfortunately, most of the busy smart people only looked at the posts after editing, while the trolls and people with too much free time managed the edit queue, eventually destroying the quality of the site and driving the good users away. It might be possible to salvage that model somehow, though.
We upvote much more than we downvote—just look at the mean comment and post scores. Also, the number of downvotes a user can make is capped at their karma.
The only change I’d make is to hide editorial comments when the post leaves editing (instead of deleting them), with a toggle option for logged-in users to carry on viewing them.
Unfortunately, most of the busy smart people only looked at the posts after editing, while the trolls and people with too much free time managed the edit queue, eventually destroying the quality of the site and driving the good users away. It might be possible to salvage that model somehow, though.
I think it is. There are several tricks we could use to give busy-smart people more of a chance to edit posts.
On Kuro5hin, if I remember right, posts left the editing queue automatically after 24 hours, either getting posted or kicked into the bit bucket. Also, users could vote to push the story out of the queue early. If Less Wrong reimplemented this system, we could raise the threshold for voting a story out of editing early, or remove the option entirely. We could even lengthen the period it spends in the editing stage. (This would also have the advantage of filtering out impatient people who couldn’t wait 3 days or whatever for their story to post.)
LW’s also just got a much smaller troll ratio than Kuro5hin did, which would help a lot.
It seems like there’s at least some interesting in doing something to deal with helping people to develop posting skills through a means other than simply writing lots of articles and bombarding the community with them. The editorial system seems like it has a lot of promising aspects.
The main thing is, it seems more valuable to implement a weak system than to simply talk about implementing a stronger system so whether the editorial system is the best that can be done depends on whether the people in charge of the community are interested in implementing it.
If they turn out to not be, I still wonder whether there’s a few people out there that can volunteer to help make posts better and a few people who can volunteer to not bombard LW but instead to develop their skills in a quieter way (nb: that doesn’t refer to anyone in particular except, potentially, myself). Personally, I still think that would be useful, even if suboptimal.
Does the lack of a response from EY imply that he’s not interested in that sort of change and, if so, is it EY who would be the one to make the decision?
EY has stated in the past that the reason most suggestions do not result in a change in the web site is that no programmer (or no programmer that EY and EY’s agents trust) is available to make the change.
Also, I think he reads only a fraction of LW these months.
Meanwhile, it would be probably be worthwhile if people would write about any improvement they’ve made in their ability to think and to convey their ideas, whether it’s deliberate or the result of being in useful communities.
I’m not sure that I’ve made improvements myself—I think my strategy (which it took a while to make conscious) of writing for the my past self who didn’t have the current insight has served me pretty well—that and General Semantics (a basic understanding that the map isn’t the territory).
If I were writing for a general audience, I think I’d need to learn about appropriate levels of redundancy.
Does the lack of a response from EY imply that he’s not interested in that sort of change and, if so, is it EY who would be the one to make the decision?
I wouldn’t read anything into the lack of response, EY often doesn’t comment on meta-discussion. In fact I’d guess there’s a good chance he hasn’t even seen this thread!
I guess it might be worth raising this in the Spring 2010 meta-thread? Come to think of it, it’s been 4+ months since that meta thread was started—it may even be worth someone posting a Summer 2010 meta-thread with this as a topic starter.
Okay then. Well I don’t have the karma to start a thread so I’ll leave it to someone who has if they think it’s worth while.
If nothing else, I wondered about the possibility of doing a top level post expressly for this purpose. So people could post an article with the idea being that comments in response would be aimed at improving it, rather than just general comments. And the further understanding that the original article would then be edited and people could comment on this new one. If the post got a good enough response after a few drafts, it could then be posted at the top level. Otherwise, it would be a good lesson anyway. It would also be less cluttered because it would all be within that purpose made, top level post.
Sounds like a good idea. The Open Thread could be (and has been) used for this, but it may be worthwhile to set up a thread specifically for constructive criticism on draft articles.
Another technical solution. Not trivial to implement, but also contains significant side benefits.
Find some subset of sequences and other highly ranked posts that are “super-core” and has large consensus not just in karma, but also in agreement by high-karma members (say top ten).
Create a multiple choice test and implement it online, which is external technologies exist for already I am sure.
Some karma + passing test gets top posting privileges.
I have to confess I abused my newly acquired posting privileges and probably diluted the site’s value with a couple of posts. Thank goodness they were rather short :). I took the hint though and took to participating in the comment discussion and reading sequences until I am ready to contribute at a higher level.
Is there any consensus about the “right” way to write a LW post? I see a lot of diversity in style, topic, and level of rigor in highly-voted posts. I certainly have no good way to tell if I’m doing it right; Michael Vassar doesn’t think so, but he’s never had a post voted as highly as my first one was. (Voting is not solely determined by post quality; this is a big part of the problem.)
I would certainly love to have a better way to get feedback than the current mechanisms; it’s indisputable that my writing could be better. Being able to workshop posts would be great, but I think it would be hard to find the right people to do the workshopping; off the top of my head I can really only think of a handful of posters I’d want to have doing that, and I get the impression that they’re all too busy. Maybe not, though.
Michael Vassar doesn’t think so, but he’s never had a post voted as highly as my first one was.
I didn’t think there was anything particularly wrong with your post, but newer posts get a much higher level of karma than old ones, which must be taken into account. Some of the core sequence posts have only 2 karma, for example.
I suppose there’s a few options including: See who’s willing to run workshops and then once that’s known, people can choose whether to join or not. If none of the top contributors could be convinced to run them then they may still be useful for people of a lower level of post writing ability (which I suspect is where I am, at the moment). The other thing is, even regardless of who ran the workshops, the ability to get faster feedback and to redraft gives a chance to develop an article more thoroughly before posting it properly and may give a sense of where improvements can be made and where the gaps in thinking and writing are.
But I guess that questions like that are secondary to the question of whether enough people think it’s a good enough idea and whether anyone would be willing to run workshops at all.
Upvoted for raising the topic, but the approach I’d prefer is jimrandomh’s suggestion of having all posts pass through an editorial stage before being posted ‘for real.’
Reading Michael Vassar’s comments on WrongBot’s article (http://lesswrong.com/lw/2i6/forager_anthropology/2c7s?c=1&context=1#2c7s) made me feel that the current technique of learning how to write a LW post isn’t very efficient (read lots of LW, write a post, wait for lots of comments, try to figure out how their issues could be resolved, write another post etc—it uses up lots of the writer’s time and lot’s of the commentors time).
I was wondering whether there might be a more focused way of doing this. Ie. A short term workshop, a few writers who have been promoted offer to give feedback to a few writers who are struggling to develop the necessary rigour etc by providing a faster feedback cycle, the ability to redraft an article rather than having to start totally afresh and just general advice.
Some people may not feel that this is very beneficial—there’s no need for writing to LW to be made easier (in fact, possibly the opposite) but first off, I’m not talking about making writing for LW easier, I’m talking about making more of the writing of a higher quality. And secondly, I certainly learn a lot better given a chance to interact on that extra level. I think learning to write at an LW level is an excellent way of achieving LW aim of helping people to think at that level.
I’m a long time lurker but I haven’t even really commented before because I find it hard to jump to that next level of understanding that enables me to communicate anything of value. I wonder if there are others who feel the same or a similar way.
Good idea? Bad idea?
We could use a more structured system, perhaps. At this point, there’s nothing to stop you from writing a post before you’re ready, except your own modesty. Raise the threshold, and nobody will have to yell at people for writing posts that don’t quite work.
Possibilities:
Significantly raise the minimum karma level.
An editorial system: a more “advanced” member has to read your post before it becomes top-level.
A wiki page about instructions for posting. It should include: a description of appropriate subject matter, formatting instructions, common errors in reasoning or etiquette.
A social norm that encourages editing (including totally reworking an essay.) The convention for blog posts on the internet in general mandates against editing—a post is supposed to be an honest record of one’s thoughts at the time. But LessWrong is different, and we’re supposed to be updating as we learn from each other. We could make “Please edit this” more explicit.
A related thought on karma—I have the suspicion that we upvote more than we downvote. It would be possible to adjust the site to keep track of each person’s upvote/downvote stats. That is, some people are generous with karma, and some people give more negative feedback. We could calibrate ourselves better if we had a running tally.
Kuro5hin had an editorial system, where all posts started out in a special section where they were separate and only visible to logged in users. Commenters would label their comments as either “topical” or “editorial”, and all editorial comments would be deleted when the post left editing; and votes cast during editing would determine where the post went (front page, less prominent section, or deleted).
Unfortunately, most of the busy smart people only looked at the posts after editing, while the trolls and people with too much free time managed the edit queue, eventually destroying the quality of the site and driving the good users away. It might be possible to salvage that model somehow, though.
We upvote much more than we downvote—just look at the mean comment and post scores. Also, the number of downvotes a user can make is capped at their karma.
Enthusiastically seconded.
The only change I’d make is to hide editorial comments when the post leaves editing (instead of deleting them), with a toggle option for logged-in users to carry on viewing them.
I think it is. There are several tricks we could use to give busy-smart people more of a chance to edit posts.
On Kuro5hin, if I remember right, posts left the editing queue automatically after 24 hours, either getting posted or kicked into the bit bucket. Also, users could vote to push the story out of the queue early. If Less Wrong reimplemented this system, we could raise the threshold for voting a story out of editing early, or remove the option entirely. We could even lengthen the period it spends in the editing stage. (This would also have the advantage of filtering out impatient people who couldn’t wait 3 days or whatever for their story to post.)
LW’s also just got a much smaller troll ratio than Kuro5hin did, which would help a lot.
It seems like there’s at least some interesting in doing something to deal with helping people to develop posting skills through a means other than simply writing lots of articles and bombarding the community with them. The editorial system seems like it has a lot of promising aspects.
The main thing is, it seems more valuable to implement a weak system than to simply talk about implementing a stronger system so whether the editorial system is the best that can be done depends on whether the people in charge of the community are interested in implementing it.
If they turn out to not be, I still wonder whether there’s a few people out there that can volunteer to help make posts better and a few people who can volunteer to not bombard LW but instead to develop their skills in a quieter way (nb: that doesn’t refer to anyone in particular except, potentially, myself). Personally, I still think that would be useful, even if suboptimal.
Does the lack of a response from EY imply that he’s not interested in that sort of change and, if so, is it EY who would be the one to make the decision?
EY has stated in the past that the reason most suggestions do not result in a change in the web site is that no programmer (or no programmer that EY and EY’s agents trust) is available to make the change.
Also, I think he reads only a fraction of LW these months.
Meanwhile, it would be probably be worthwhile if people would write about any improvement they’ve made in their ability to think and to convey their ideas, whether it’s deliberate or the result of being in useful communities.
I’m not sure that I’ve made improvements myself—I think my strategy (which it took a while to make conscious) of writing for the my past self who didn’t have the current insight has served me pretty well—that and General Semantics (a basic understanding that the map isn’t the territory).
If I were writing for a general audience, I think I’d need to learn about appropriate levels of redundancy.
I wouldn’t read anything into the lack of response, EY often doesn’t comment on meta-discussion. In fact I’d guess there’s a good chance he hasn’t even seen this thread!
I guess it might be worth raising this in the Spring 2010 meta-thread? Come to think of it, it’s been 4+ months since that meta thread was started—it may even be worth someone posting a Summer 2010 meta-thread with this as a topic starter.
Okay then. Well I don’t have the karma to start a thread so I’ll leave it to someone who has if they think it’s worth while.
If nothing else, I wondered about the possibility of doing a top level post expressly for this purpose. So people could post an article with the idea being that comments in response would be aimed at improving it, rather than just general comments. And the further understanding that the original article would then be edited and people could comment on this new one. If the post got a good enough response after a few drafts, it could then be posted at the top level. Otherwise, it would be a good lesson anyway. It would also be less cluttered because it would all be within that purpose made, top level post.
Sounds like a good idea. The Open Thread could be (and has been) used for this, but it may be worthwhile to set up a thread specifically for constructive criticism on draft articles.
Another technical solution. Not trivial to implement, but also contains significant side benefits.
Find some subset of sequences and other highly ranked posts that are “super-core” and has large consensus not just in karma, but also in agreement by high-karma members (say top ten).
Create a multiple choice test and implement it online, which is external technologies exist for already I am sure.
Some karma + passing test gets top posting privileges.
I have to confess I abused my newly acquired posting privileges and probably diluted the site’s value with a couple of posts. Thank goodness they were rather short :). I took the hint though and took to participating in the comment discussion and reading sequences until I am ready to contribute at a higher level.
Is there any consensus about the “right” way to write a LW post? I see a lot of diversity in style, topic, and level of rigor in highly-voted posts. I certainly have no good way to tell if I’m doing it right; Michael Vassar doesn’t think so, but he’s never had a post voted as highly as my first one was. (Voting is not solely determined by post quality; this is a big part of the problem.)
I would certainly love to have a better way to get feedback than the current mechanisms; it’s indisputable that my writing could be better. Being able to workshop posts would be great, but I think it would be hard to find the right people to do the workshopping; off the top of my head I can really only think of a handful of posters I’d want to have doing that, and I get the impression that they’re all too busy. Maybe not, though.
(I think this is a great idea.)
I didn’t think there was anything particularly wrong with your post, but newer posts get a much higher level of karma than old ones, which must be taken into account. Some of the core sequence posts have only 2 karma, for example.
Agreed, and that is exactly the sort of factor I was alluding to in my parenthetical.
I suppose there’s a few options including: See who’s willing to run workshops and then once that’s known, people can choose whether to join or not. If none of the top contributors could be convinced to run them then they may still be useful for people of a lower level of post writing ability (which I suspect is where I am, at the moment). The other thing is, even regardless of who ran the workshops, the ability to get faster feedback and to redraft gives a chance to develop an article more thoroughly before posting it properly and may give a sense of where improvements can be made and where the gaps in thinking and writing are.
But I guess that questions like that are secondary to the question of whether enough people think it’s a good enough idea and whether anyone would be willing to run workshops at all.
Upvoted for raising the topic, but the approach I’d prefer is jimrandomh’s suggestion of having all posts pass through an editorial stage before being posted ‘for real.’