First of all, I’m really sorry you’ve had this discouraging experience in your first few weeks on LessWrong. It does seem unfair that you’ve received a lot of negative votes while receiving very little feedback on why that is. I think there’s something real in all of the interpretations you listed, and my guess would be that each one was an opinion held by at least one person who read at least one of your posts (presuming high traffic on Frontpage posts).
For now, I think it makes most sense for you to continue to post regularly, just on your personal blog. Given what you’ve said here I definitely don’t want to discourage you from writing, but I think there are certain expectations of Frontpage posts that you’re unlikely to meet since you’re a newcomer both to writing and to the ideas of the community.
I strongly encourage you to read more of the rationality canon and become familiar with the discussion around various ideas before writing too much about those ideas. From what I remember of surveys of prominent users of the old LessWrong, most of them, upon discovering the site, spent several months just reading the Sequences without posting or commenting, then spent several months or years just commenting, and only then began writing their own top-level posts. Obviously times have changed in a lot of ways; I just want to emphasize that familiarity with the canon is a quite important prerequisite for writing well-received posts.
I also agree with Elo that you might want to wait before addressing sensitive topics—if you are a newcomer to the community and an inexperienced writer, it will be difficult for you to write about controversial or sensitive things in a way that is:
interesting to long-time readers of the site—in that it provides novel insight and is framed in a way that makes it relevant to their interests
comprehensible—it can be really difficult to convey your thoughts on complex topics to strangers through only the written word, and I think this just takes a lot of practice (hopefully with fast feedback loops)
nuanced, not clumsy—the thing about writing about sensitive topics is that people can be really, well, sensitive about them (surprise!); there are a myriad of ways you can end up putting your foot in your mouth and you need to know your audience well and write clearly and carefully to be able to avoid all those failure modes
Some other, more concrete things:
I found your post on effective altruism difficult to follow; I didn’t actually understand it until reading Ixakas’ comment. On a first (uncomprehending) read, it kind of comes off as a naïve attack on something that is really important to a lot of people here, which may be where a lot of the downvotes came from. You also seemed to present things as novel insights when pretty much every premise in the post is something that’s been discussed in this community for years. That said, now that I’ve read Ixakas’ top-level comment, I do find the post pretty interesting.
As for your post on dating: I’m a young female and it didn’t make me personally uncomfortable, but the framing is a bit rude, as Elo said—even just the title, ‘Finding a Girlfriend’, feels to me like it elides a lot of what a romantic relationship actually is. I had a friend who thought in these terms, trying to find The One using a search algorithm that involved dating apps and spreadsheets, and he was wildly unsuccessful at dating. Actually, my main thought when reading your post was that it might be pretty helpful to someone like him. So, that general way of looking at the problem may not be the best, but as long as a lot of people are going to do it anyway your post seems like it could be valuable.
To look at an example of someone managing to successfully navigate discussing this sensitive topic—when lukeprog wrote about rational romantic relationships, he included personal anecdotes, but he also looked at what was going on from other points of view (including a lot of female POV), and mostly framed the problem as one that humans in general have, rather than one specific to any group. It also helped that he included a whole bunch of scientific evidence.
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In conclusion, this was a very long comment but I hope you find at least parts of it useful. Good luck, Michaël.
First of all, I’m really sorry you’ve had this discouraging experience in your first few weeks on LessWrong. It does seem unfair that you’ve received a lot of negative votes while receiving very little feedback on why that is. I think there’s something real in all of the interpretations you listed, and my guess would be that each one was an opinion held by at least one person who read at least one of your posts (presuming high traffic on Frontpage posts).
For now, I think it makes most sense for you to continue to post regularly, just on your personal blog. Given what you’ve said here I definitely don’t want to discourage you from writing, but I think there are certain expectations of Frontpage posts that you’re unlikely to meet since you’re a newcomer both to writing and to the ideas of the community.
I strongly encourage you to read more of the rationality canon and become familiar with the discussion around various ideas before writing too much about those ideas. From what I remember of surveys of prominent users of the old LessWrong, most of them, upon discovering the site, spent several months just reading the Sequences without posting or commenting, then spent several months or years just commenting, and only then began writing their own top-level posts. Obviously times have changed in a lot of ways; I just want to emphasize that familiarity with the canon is a quite important prerequisite for writing well-received posts.
I also agree with Elo that you might want to wait before addressing sensitive topics—if you are a newcomer to the community and an inexperienced writer, it will be difficult for you to write about controversial or sensitive things in a way that is:
interesting to long-time readers of the site—in that it provides novel insight and is framed in a way that makes it relevant to their interests
comprehensible—it can be really difficult to convey your thoughts on complex topics to strangers through only the written word, and I think this just takes a lot of practice (hopefully with fast feedback loops)
nuanced, not clumsy—the thing about writing about sensitive topics is that people can be really, well, sensitive about them (surprise!); there are a myriad of ways you can end up putting your foot in your mouth and you need to know your audience well and write clearly and carefully to be able to avoid all those failure modes
Some other, more concrete things:
I found your post on effective altruism difficult to follow; I didn’t actually understand it until reading Ixakas’ comment. On a first (uncomprehending) read, it kind of comes off as a naïve attack on something that is really important to a lot of people here, which may be where a lot of the downvotes came from. You also seemed to present things as novel insights when pretty much every premise in the post is something that’s been discussed in this community for years. That said, now that I’ve read Ixakas’ top-level comment, I do find the post pretty interesting.
As for your post on dating: I’m a young female and it didn’t make me personally uncomfortable, but the framing is a bit rude, as Elo said—even just the title, ‘Finding a Girlfriend’, feels to me like it elides a lot of what a romantic relationship actually is. I had a friend who thought in these terms, trying to find The One using a search algorithm that involved dating apps and spreadsheets, and he was wildly unsuccessful at dating. Actually, my main thought when reading your post was that it might be pretty helpful to someone like him. So, that general way of looking at the problem may not be the best, but as long as a lot of people are going to do it anyway your post seems like it could be valuable.
To look at an example of someone managing to successfully navigate discussing this sensitive topic—when lukeprog wrote about rational romantic relationships, he included personal anecdotes, but he also looked at what was going on from other points of view (including a lot of female POV), and mostly framed the problem as one that humans in general have, rather than one specific to any group. It also helped that he included a whole bunch of scientific evidence.
--
In conclusion, this was a very long comment but I hope you find at least parts of it useful. Good luck, Michaël.