I am not sure that this post belongs on Less Wrong (much less the front page), as it seems to be one of the generic “rational self-help” sorts of posts against which we found the need to write polemics once upon a time. A profusion of such posts can easily dilute the signal of the Less Wrong front page, to a disastrous degree.
But, it seems to me to clearly be a useful post, and useful for rationalists in particular.[1] (I, at least, learned something from this post which I didn’t know before!)
I wonder if a compromise might not be possible? Perhaps we might have a section of the site dedicated to collecting such guides and information, and links to similar things elsewhere, but without the aforementioned “clutter” and “signal dilution” problems that come from putting it on the front page with everything else? (I know I’ve said this before, but it bears mentioning: a wiki would seem ideal for such a purpose, especially since it would allow guides/info like this to be perfected and added to, in a crowdsourced, iterative way.)
[1] Insofar as the sorts of people who tend to make up “rationalist” spaces are disproportionately unlikely to be aware of good practices of public speaking.
I am not sure that this post belongs on Less Wrong (much less the front page), as it seems to be one of the generic “rational self-help” sorts of posts against which we found the need to write polemics once upon a time. A profusion of such posts can easily dilute the signal of the Less Wrong front page, to a disastrous degree.
But, it seems to me to clearly be a useful post, and useful for rationalists in particular.[1] (I, at least, learned something from this post which I didn’t know before!)
I wonder if a compromise might not be possible? Perhaps we might have a section of the site dedicated to collecting such guides and information, and links to similar things elsewhere, but without the aforementioned “clutter” and “signal dilution” problems that come from putting it on the front page with everything else? (I know I’ve said this before, but it bears mentioning: a wiki would seem ideal for such a purpose, especially since it would allow guides/info like this to be perfected and added to, in a crowdsourced, iterative way.)
[1] Insofar as the sorts of people who tend to make up “rationalist” spaces are disproportionately unlikely to be aware of good practices of public speaking.