Speaking for myself, it’s mostly the fact that you decided to publish such articles daily. So it’s not just “do I want this kind of article to be here?” but “do I want this kind of article, from the same author, to be here, every day?”. And the answer is “hell no”.
Like, the other factors contribute significantly too, but this one is a multiplier on all of them. It is easier to just ignore a one-off mistake than to ignore a precommitment to keep doing them every day.
Or perhaps let me put it this way:
Thanks to various factors, mostly online advertising, we currently live in an era of abundance of text. Each day, on internet appears more new text than any of us could read during a lifetime. Uhm, maybe I got my estimates wrong here; either way, the idea is that it is physically impossible to read everything, or even a significant fraction of everything. What we read is but a tiny fraction of what was written.
So, unless we are happy with taking a random sample (thanks, but no thanks), we need filters. Something that separates the good content from the bad content, and allows us to read the good one.
For me, Less Wrong is a filter for the really good stuff. It is far from perfect, but it is better than most other options I got. (The only better option I am aware of is reading only the Slate Star Codex.) Without LW (and SSC), my best option would probably be a combination of Hacker News and some selected Reddit fora. But Less Wrong is, sometimes, better than that, mostly because it is better tuned to my interests.
And… you are polluting this filter. Not just once in a while, but each day. You generate more than 10% of headers on this website recently. Whoa, slow down please! How about instead of posting one article a day, you would just think about 7 ideas each week, and then only post the best one?
Talking about AI Safety with Hikers—good point, but too long
Applied Coalition Formation—meh
Better Decisions at the Supermarket—ok
Beliefs: A Structural Change—meh
Finding a Girlfriend with Reinforcement Learning—extremely long
Are you Living in a Me-Simulation? - long and useless
Effective Egoism, or My Life in a Video Game—confused
A Logician, an Entrepreneur, and a Hacker, discussing Intelligence—feels like a summary without conclusion
Assembling Any Lego or NYT Best Seller? - meh
Decoding, Not Encoding—either confused or I failed to understand
Should an AGI build a telescope to spot intergalactic Segways? - interesting
So, twelve articles, one of them interesting, three or four have a good idea but are very long, and the rest feels useless. I typically do not downvote the “meh” articles, but that’s under assumptions that they don’t appear daily from the same author.
My aggregate feedback would be: You have some good points. But sometimes you just write a wall of text. And I suspect that the precommitment to post an article each day could be making this a lot worse. In a different situation, such as writing for an online magazine which wants to display a lot of ads, writing a lot of text with only a few ideas would be a good move; here it is a bad move.
Lesswrong needed more content at one point. Now it does not. It needs the content to be higher quality. It would be nice for users to know if lw is looking for more content or strictly higher quality content if we can’t have both.
I gave some points about the higher quality/low quality debate in my two answers to Viliam, but I will answer more specifically to this here.
The quality of a post is relative to the other posts. Yes, if the other articles are from Scott Alexander, ialdaboth, sarahconstantin and Rob Bensiger, the quality of my daily posts are quite deplorable, and spamming the frontpage with low quality posts is not what LW users want.
However, for the last few days, I decided not to publish on the frontpage, and LW even changed the website so that I can’t publish on the frontpage. So it’s personal blog by default, and it will go to frontpage only if mods/LW users enjoy it and think it’s insightful enough.
Are you saying that people might want high quality personal blogs then?
Well, I get why people might be interested in reading personal blogs, and want them to be of high quality. And, because you got to correct some of my posts, I understand the frustration of seeing articles published where there still is a lot of work to do.
However, the LW algorithm is also responsible for this. Maybe it promotes too much the recent posts, and should highlight more the upvoted ones. Then, my posts will never be visible. Only the 20+ upvotes will be visible in the personal blogs page.
I understand why people would prefer an article that took one week to write, short and concise, particularly insightful. I might prefer that as well, and start to only post higher-quality posts here. But I don’t agree that it is not recommended for people to post not-well-thought-off articles on a website where you are able to post personal blogs.
I think volume is not a problem if the upvote/downvote system and the algorithms are good enough to filter the useful posts for the readers. People should not filter themselves, and keep articles they enjoy not as much as Scott Alexander ones ( but still find insightful), for themselves.
I think you’re making some good points, but you’re ignoring (in your comment) some aspects.
“do I want this kind of article, from the same author, to be here, every day?”. And the answer is “hell no”.
So what you’re saying is “whenever deciding to upvote or downvote, I decide whether I want more articles like this or not. But because you’re posting every day, when I am deciding whether or not to downvote, I am deciding if I want an article every single day and the answer to this is no”.
I understand the difference in choice here (a choice for every article, instead of just for one). I assumed that on LW people could think about posts independently, and could downvote a post and upvote another from the same author, saying what felt useful or not, even if it is daily. I understand that you just want to say “no” to the article, to say “no” to the series, and this is even more true if the ratio of good stuff is the one you mention at the end.
It is easier to just ignore a one-off mistake than to ignore a precommitment to keep doing them every day.
What would be the mistake here? From what I understand, when reading an article and seeing a mistake, the mistake is “multiplied” by the number of time it could happen again in other articles, so every tiny mistakes becomes important? If I got you right, I think that by writing daily, those little mistakes (if possible to correct easily) could be corrected quickly by commenting on a post, and I would take it into account in the next posts. A short feedback loop could improve quickly the quality of the posts. However, I understand that people might not want LW to be an error-tolerant zone, but would prefer a performance zone.
And… you are polluting this filter. Not just once in a while, but each day. You generate more than 10% of headers on this website recently.
I had not thought about it in terms of daily % of headers of the website, interesting point of view. I also use Hacker News as a filter (for other interests) and LW is also a better option for the interests I mentioned in my posts. I think the real difference is the volume of posts in hacker news/reddit/LW. It is always a tradeoff between being in a pool of hundreds of high quality posts (more people reading, but more choices for them), or a pool of only a dozens of even-higher quality posts but less traffic.
You’re right. I appreciate the time and effort you put in giving feedback, especially the google docs. I think I didn’t said it enough, and didn’t get to answer your last feedbacks (will do this weekend).
The question is: are people putting to much effort in giving feedback with small improvements in the writing/posts? If yes, then it feels utterly inefficient to continue giving feedback or writing those daily posts.
I also believe that one can control the time he spends on giving feedback, by saying only the most important thing (for instance Ikaxas saying the bold/underline thing).
I am not sure if this is enough to make daily LessWrong posts consistently better, and more importantly if it is enough to make them valuable/useful for the readers.
I am actively looking for a way to continue posting daily (on Medium or a personal website) and keep getting good feedback without spamming the community. I could request quality feedback (by posting every week max) only once in a while and not ask for too much of your time (especially you, Elo).
Thank you again for your time/efforts, and the feedback you gave in the google docs/comments.
So, twelve articles, one of them interesting, three or four have a good idea but are very long, and the rest feels useless.
I appreciate you took the time to read all of them (or enough to comment on them). I also feel some are better written than the others, and I was also more inspired for some. From what I understood, you want the articles to be “useful” and “not too long”. I understand what you would want that (maximize the (learned stuff)/(time spent on learning) ration). I used to write on Medium where the read ratio of posts would decrease significantly with the length of the post. This pushed me to read shorter and shorter posts, if I wanted to be read entirely. I wanted to try LW because I imagined here people would have longer attention spans and could focus on philosophical/mathematical thinking. However, if you’re saying I’m being “too long with very low density of ideas” I understand why this could be infuriating.
I typically do not downvote the “meh” articles, but that’s under assumptions that they don’t appear daily from the same author
I get your point, and it makes sense with what you said in the first comment. However, I don’t feel comfortable with people downvoting “meh” articles because of the author (even though it’s daily). I would prefer a website where people could rate articles independently of who the author is, and then check their other stuff.
My aggregate feedback would be: You have some good points. But sometimes you just write a wall of text.
Ok. So I should be more clear/concise/straight-to-the-point, gotcha.
And I suspect that the precommitment to post an article each day could be making this a lot worse. In a different situation, such as writing for an online magazine which wants to display a lot of ads, writing a lot of text with only a few ideas would be a good move; here it is a bad move.
Could you be more specific about what you think would be my move? For the online magazine, getting the maximum number of clicks/views to display the more ads makes sense, and so lots of text with lots of ads, and enough ideas to ensure the reader keeps seeing adds makes sense.
But what about LW? My move here was simple: understand better AI Safety by forcing myself to daily crystallize ideas about ideas related to the field, on a website with great feedback/discussions and low-tolerance for mistakes. For now, the result (in the discussions) is, overall, satisfying, and I feel that people here seem to enjoy AI Safety stuff.
More generally, I think the fact that if I generate 10% of headers or you get to click on all my articles may be correlated to other factors than me daily posting, such as:
The LW algorithm promotes them
You’re “Michaël Trazzi” filter (you need one, because you get to see my header) is not tuned correctly, because you still seem to still be reading them, even if only 1⁄12 felt useful (or maybe you just read them to comment on this post?).
This comment is already long (sorry for the wall of text), so I will say more about the Meta LW high/low quality debate on Elo’s comment below.
However, I don’t feel comfortable with people downvoting “meh” articles because of the author (even though it’s daily).
The “meh” articles should be downvoted. Simply because LW is the place where I come to read something better.
However, it makes sense strategically to be more lenient towards new authors. The reasoning is that it people are often scared to make the first post here, and that it takes some time to get attuned to the local culture. This there is a chance that a person who wrote a “meh” article first will write better articles later. On the other hand, having one’s only article downvoted is probably emotionally harder that having e.g. one of three articles downvoted. So it the new author’s first article is “meh”, instead of downvoting I often just abstain from voting and try to give some good advice in a comment.
While this may feel the same, the motivation is not punishing frequent authors (I would be quite happy with frequent high-quality articles), but rather making the first step into the community easier—with the tacit assumption that the author will improve.
Speaking for myself, it’s mostly the fact that you decided to publish such articles daily. So it’s not just “do I want this kind of article to be here?” but “do I want this kind of article, from the same author, to be here, every day?”. And the answer is “hell no”.
Like, the other factors contribute significantly too, but this one is a multiplier on all of them. It is easier to just ignore a one-off mistake than to ignore a precommitment to keep doing them every day.
Or perhaps let me put it this way:
Thanks to various factors, mostly online advertising, we currently live in an era of abundance of text. Each day, on internet appears more new text than any of us could read during a lifetime. Uhm, maybe I got my estimates wrong here; either way, the idea is that it is physically impossible to read everything, or even a significant fraction of everything. What we read is but a tiny fraction of what was written.
So, unless we are happy with taking a random sample (thanks, but no thanks), we need filters. Something that separates the good content from the bad content, and allows us to read the good one.
For me, Less Wrong is a filter for the really good stuff. It is far from perfect, but it is better than most other options I got. (The only better option I am aware of is reading only the Slate Star Codex.) Without LW (and SSC), my best option would probably be a combination of Hacker News and some selected Reddit fora. But Less Wrong is, sometimes, better than that, mostly because it is better tuned to my interests.
And… you are polluting this filter. Not just once in a while, but each day. You generate more than 10% of headers on this website recently. Whoa, slow down please! How about instead of posting one article a day, you would just think about 7 ideas each week, and then only post the best one?
More specific feedback about your articles:
The Multiple Names of Beneficial AI—sounds useful
Talking about AI Safety with Hikers—good point, but too long
Applied Coalition Formation—meh
Better Decisions at the Supermarket—ok
Beliefs: A Structural Change—meh
Finding a Girlfriend with Reinforcement Learning—extremely long
Are you Living in a Me-Simulation? - long and useless
Effective Egoism, or My Life in a Video Game—confused
A Logician, an Entrepreneur, and a Hacker, discussing Intelligence—feels like a summary without conclusion
Assembling Any Lego or NYT Best Seller? - meh
Decoding, Not Encoding—either confused or I failed to understand
Should an AGI build a telescope to spot intergalactic Segways? - interesting
So, twelve articles, one of them interesting, three or four have a good idea but are very long, and the rest feels useless. I typically do not downvote the “meh” articles, but that’s under assumptions that they don’t appear daily from the same author.
My aggregate feedback would be: You have some good points. But sometimes you just write a wall of text. And I suspect that the precommitment to post an article each day could be making this a lot worse. In a different situation, such as writing for an online magazine which wants to display a lot of ads, writing a lot of text with only a few ideas would be a good move; here it is a bad move.
Lesswrong needed more content at one point. Now it does not. It needs the content to be higher quality. It would be nice for users to know if lw is looking for more content or strictly higher quality content if we can’t have both.
I gave some points about the higher quality/low quality debate in my two answers to Viliam, but I will answer more specifically to this here.
The quality of a post is relative to the other posts. Yes, if the other articles are from Scott Alexander, ialdaboth, sarahconstantin and Rob Bensiger, the quality of my daily posts are quite deplorable, and spamming the frontpage with low quality posts is not what LW users want.
However, for the last few days, I decided not to publish on the frontpage, and LW even changed the website so that I can’t publish on the frontpage. So it’s personal blog by default, and it will go to frontpage only if mods/LW users enjoy it and think it’s insightful enough.
Are you saying that people might want high quality personal blogs then?
Well, I get why people might be interested in reading personal blogs, and want them to be of high quality. And, because you got to correct some of my posts, I understand the frustration of seeing articles published where there still is a lot of work to do.
However, the LW algorithm is also responsible for this. Maybe it promotes too much the recent posts, and should highlight more the upvoted ones. Then, my posts will never be visible. Only the 20+ upvotes will be visible in the personal blogs page.
I understand why people would prefer an article that took one week to write, short and concise, particularly insightful. I might prefer that as well, and start to only post higher-quality posts here. But I don’t agree that it is not recommended for people to post not-well-thought-off articles on a website where you are able to post personal blogs.
I think volume is not a problem if the upvote/downvote system and the algorithms are good enough to filter the useful posts for the readers. People should not filter themselves, and keep articles they enjoy not as much as Scott Alexander ones ( but still find insightful), for themselves.
Thank you Viliam for your honest feedback.
I think you’re making some good points, but you’re ignoring (in your comment) some aspects.
So what you’re saying is “whenever deciding to upvote or downvote, I decide whether I want more articles like this or not. But because you’re posting every day, when I am deciding whether or not to downvote, I am deciding if I want an article every single day and the answer to this is no”.
I understand the difference in choice here (a choice for every article, instead of just for one). I assumed that on LW people could think about posts independently, and could downvote a post and upvote another from the same author, saying what felt useful or not, even if it is daily. I understand that you just want to say “no” to the article, to say “no” to the series, and this is even more true if the ratio of good stuff is the one you mention at the end.
What would be the mistake here? From what I understand, when reading an article and seeing a mistake, the mistake is “multiplied” by the number of time it could happen again in other articles, so every tiny mistakes becomes important? If I got you right, I think that by writing daily, those little mistakes (if possible to correct easily) could be corrected quickly by commenting on a post, and I would take it into account in the next posts. A short feedback loop could improve quickly the quality of the posts. However, I understand that people might not want LW to be an error-tolerant zone, but would prefer a performance zone.
I had not thought about it in terms of daily % of headers of the website, interesting point of view. I also use Hacker News as a filter (for other interests) and LW is also a better option for the interests I mentioned in my posts. I think the real difference is the volume of posts in hacker news/reddit/LW. It is always a tradeoff between being in a pool of hundreds of high quality posts (more people reading, but more choices for them), or a pool of only a dozens of even-higher quality posts but less traffic.
There is a point to be made here about responsibility for the feedback. It takes a lot of time and energy to write good feedback.
Yes people have some willingness to help with feedback but it’s not unlimited.
You’re right. I appreciate the time and effort you put in giving feedback, especially the google docs. I think I didn’t said it enough, and didn’t get to answer your last feedbacks (will do this weekend).
The question is: are people putting to much effort in giving feedback with small improvements in the writing/posts? If yes, then it feels utterly inefficient to continue giving feedback or writing those daily posts.
I also believe that one can control the time he spends on giving feedback, by saying only the most important thing (for instance Ikaxas saying the bold/underline thing).
I am not sure if this is enough to make daily LessWrong posts consistently better, and more importantly if it is enough to make them valuable/useful for the readers.
I am actively looking for a way to continue posting daily (on Medium or a personal website) and keep getting good feedback without spamming the community. I could request quality feedback (by posting every week max) only once in a while and not ask for too much of your time (especially you, Elo).
Thank you again for your time/efforts, and the feedback you gave in the google docs/comments.
I appreciate you took the time to read all of them (or enough to comment on them). I also feel some are better written than the others, and I was also more inspired for some. From what I understood, you want the articles to be “useful” and “not too long”. I understand what you would want that (maximize the (learned stuff)/(time spent on learning) ration). I used to write on Medium where the read ratio of posts would decrease significantly with the length of the post. This pushed me to read shorter and shorter posts, if I wanted to be read entirely. I wanted to try LW because I imagined here people would have longer attention spans and could focus on philosophical/mathematical thinking. However, if you’re saying I’m being “too long with very low density of ideas” I understand why this could be infuriating.
I get your point, and it makes sense with what you said in the first comment. However, I don’t feel comfortable with people downvoting “meh” articles because of the author (even though it’s daily). I would prefer a website where people could rate articles independently of who the author is, and then check their other stuff.
Ok. So I should be more clear/concise/straight-to-the-point, gotcha.
Could you be more specific about what you think would be my move? For the online magazine, getting the maximum number of clicks/views to display the more ads makes sense, and so lots of text with lots of ads, and enough ideas to ensure the reader keeps seeing adds makes sense.
But what about LW? My move here was simple: understand better AI Safety by forcing myself to daily crystallize ideas about ideas related to the field, on a website with great feedback/discussions and low-tolerance for mistakes. For now, the result (in the discussions) is, overall, satisfying, and I feel that people here seem to enjoy AI Safety stuff.
More generally, I think the fact that if I generate 10% of headers or you get to click on all my articles may be correlated to other factors than me daily posting, such as:
The LW algorithm promotes them
You’re “Michaël Trazzi” filter (you need one, because you get to see my header) is not tuned correctly, because you still seem to still be reading them, even if only 1⁄12 felt useful (or maybe you just read them to comment on this post?).
This comment is already long (sorry for the wall of text), so I will say more about the Meta LW high/low quality debate on Elo’s comment below.
The “meh” articles should be downvoted. Simply because LW is the place where I come to read something better.
However, it makes sense strategically to be more lenient towards new authors. The reasoning is that it people are often scared to make the first post here, and that it takes some time to get attuned to the local culture. This there is a chance that a person who wrote a “meh” article first will write better articles later. On the other hand, having one’s only article downvoted is probably emotionally harder that having e.g. one of three articles downvoted. So it the new author’s first article is “meh”, instead of downvoting I often just abstain from voting and try to give some good advice in a comment.
While this may feel the same, the motivation is not punishing frequent authors (I would be quite happy with frequent high-quality articles), but rather making the first step into the community easier—with the tacit assumption that the author will improve.