So even if I might correctly object “hey, I don’t actually expect all content to require literally zero effort from me”, it might still be the case that I’m more impatient than I would be in a counterfactual world where I wasn’t influenced by the social forces pushing for more impatience.
Now that I think of it, I’m pretty certain that that’s actually indeed the case.
I’ll note that Logan’s writing historically gets “surprisingly” little engagement, and “it doesn’t fit well in a culture of impatience” is among my top guesses as to why.
Like, if LessWrong were 15% more patient (whatever that actually means), I suspect Logan’s writing in particular would get something like 30% more in the way of discussion and upvotes.
So my disagreement with this model is that it sounds like you’re modeling patience as a quantity that people have either more or less of, while I think of patience as a budget that you need to split between different things.
Like at one extreme, maybe I dedicate all of my patience budget to reading LW articles, and I might spend up to an hour reading an article even if its value seems unclear, with the expectation that I might get something valuable out of it if I persist enough. But then this means that I have no time/energy/patience left to read anything that’s not an LW article.
It seems to me that a significant difficulty with budgeting patience is that it’s not a thing where I know the worthwhile things in advance and just have to divide my patience between them. Rather finding out what’s worthwhile, requires an investment of patience by itself. As an alternative to spending 60% of my effort budget on one thing, I could say… take half of that and spend 5% on six things each, sampling them to see which one of them seems the most valuable to read, and then invest 30% on diving into the one that does seem the most valuable. And that might very well give me a better return.
On my model, it mostly (caveat in next paragraph) doesn’t make sense to criticize people for not having enough patience—since it’s not that they’d have less patience overall, it’s just that they have budgeted more of their patience on other things. And under this model, trying to write articles so as to make their value maximally easy to sample is the prosocial thing, since it helps others make good decisions.
I get that there’s some social pressure to just make things easy-to-digest for its own sake, and some people with principled indignation if they are forced to expend effort, that goes beyond the “budget consideration” model. But compared to the budget consideration, this seems like a relatively minor force, in my experience. Sure there are some people like that, but I don’t experience them being influential enough to be worth modeling. I think for most impatient people, the root cause of their impatience isn’t principled impatience but just having too many possible things that they could split their patience between.
it sounds like you’re modeling patience as a quantity that people have either more or less of, while I think of patience as a budget that you need to split between different things
… it’s pretty obviously both?
Like, each person is going to have a quantity, and some people will have more or less, and each person will need to budget the quantity that they have available.
And separately, one can build up one’s capacity to bring deliberate patience to bear on worthwhile endeavors, thus increasing one’s available quantity of patience, or one can not.
What I’m trying to say about Logan’s writing in particular is something like “it takes a certain degree of patience (or perhaps more aptly, a certain leisurely pace) to notice its value at all (at which point one will be motivated to keep mining it for more); that degree of patience is set higher than 85+% of LessWrongers know to even try offering to a given piece, as an experiment, if they haven’t already decided the author is worth their attention.”
Like, each person is going to have a quantity, and some people will have more or less, and each person will need to budget the quantity that they have available.
Ah, that makes sense. I like that framing as an elegant way of combining the two.
that degree of patience is set higher than 85+% of LessWrongers know to even try offering to a given piece, as an experiment, if they haven’t already decided the author is worth their attention.
Do you have a model of how to change that? Like, just have the site select for readers that can afford that leisurely pace, or something else?
Like, there are ideas along the lines of “reward people for practicing the skill of patience generally” and “disincentivize or at least do not reward the people practicing the skill of impatience/making impatient demands.”
But a) that’s not really a model and those aren’t really plans, and b) creating the capacity for patient engagement still doesn’t solve the problem of knowing when to be patient and when to move on, for a given piece of writing.
I’ll note that Logan’s writing historically gets “surprisingly” little engagement, and “it doesn’t fit well in a culture of impatience” is among my top guesses as to why.
Like, if LessWrong were 15% more patient (whatever that actually means), I suspect Logan’s writing in particular would get something like 30% more in the way of discussion and upvotes.
So my disagreement with this model is that it sounds like you’re modeling patience as a quantity that people have either more or less of, while I think of patience as a budget that you need to split between different things.
Like at one extreme, maybe I dedicate all of my patience budget to reading LW articles, and I might spend up to an hour reading an article even if its value seems unclear, with the expectation that I might get something valuable out of it if I persist enough. But then this means that I have no time/energy/patience left to read anything that’s not an LW article.
It seems to me that a significant difficulty with budgeting patience is that it’s not a thing where I know the worthwhile things in advance and just have to divide my patience between them. Rather finding out what’s worthwhile, requires an investment of patience by itself. As an alternative to spending 60% of my effort budget on one thing, I could say… take half of that and spend 5% on six things each, sampling them to see which one of them seems the most valuable to read, and then invest 30% on diving into the one that does seem the most valuable. And that might very well give me a better return.
On my model, it mostly (caveat in next paragraph) doesn’t make sense to criticize people for not having enough patience—since it’s not that they’d have less patience overall, it’s just that they have budgeted more of their patience on other things. And under this model, trying to write articles so as to make their value maximally easy to sample is the prosocial thing, since it helps others make good decisions.
I get that there’s some social pressure to just make things easy-to-digest for its own sake, and some people with principled indignation if they are forced to expend effort, that goes beyond the “budget consideration” model. But compared to the budget consideration, this seems like a relatively minor force, in my experience. Sure there are some people like that, but I don’t experience them being influential enough to be worth modeling. I think for most impatient people, the root cause of their impatience isn’t principled impatience but just having too many possible things that they could split their patience between.
… it’s pretty obviously both?
Like, each person is going to have a quantity, and some people will have more or less, and each person will need to budget the quantity that they have available.
And separately, one can build up one’s capacity to bring deliberate patience to bear on worthwhile endeavors, thus increasing one’s available quantity of patience, or one can not.
What I’m trying to say about Logan’s writing in particular is something like “it takes a certain degree of patience (or perhaps more aptly, a certain leisurely pace) to notice its value at all (at which point one will be motivated to keep mining it for more); that degree of patience is set higher than 85+% of LessWrongers know to even try offering to a given piece, as an experiment, if they haven’t already decided the author is worth their attention.”
Ah, that makes sense. I like that framing as an elegant way of combining the two.
Do you have a model of how to change that? Like, just have the site select for readers that can afford that leisurely pace, or something else?
Not really, alas.
Like, there are ideas along the lines of “reward people for practicing the skill of patience generally” and “disincentivize or at least do not reward the people practicing the skill of impatience/making impatient demands.”
But a) that’s not really a model and those aren’t really plans, and b) creating the capacity for patient engagement still doesn’t solve the problem of knowing when to be patient and when to move on, for a given piece of writing.