Can anyone else write interesting and useful things, and have interesting useful ideas?
What do you mean by this, if not that you’re trying to figure out whether other people share some personal specialness Eliezer has?
If you’re not thinking of the past as an uncaused golden age and Eliezer as a legend of yore, what’s the relation between that question and the question of which kinds of post are appropriate here?
If the problem is that some posts, knowably to a group of people competent to implement shared standards, are neither interesting nor useful, and lack interesting useful ideas, then the obvious solution would be to declare those specific posts inappropriate.
What do you mean by this, if not that you’re trying to figure out whether other people share some personal specialness Eliezer has?
It’s not “some personal specialness”; it’s the ability, inclination, wherewithal, knowledge, expertise, habit, etc., etc., to write posts and comments that are useful, interesting, and otherwise desirable to have insofar as they serve the goals of Less Wrong.
These qualities can be encouraged where present, they can be developed where absent, they can be selected for from among a population, and their application can be incentivized.
But it is clearly not the case that said qualities are simply present in anyone who gets it into their head to write a Less Wrong post.
How common are these salutary qualities? We don’t know (but not very common). How common are they among the current Less Wrong commentariat, in particular? We don’t know (hopefully more common than in the general population, but clearly not as common as we’d like). What community norms, what rules, contribute to increasing and maintaining their prevalence among the membership of the site? We don’t know.
If you’re not thinking of the past as an uncaused golden age and Eliezer as a legend of yore, what’s the relation between that question and the question of which kinds of post are appropriate here?
The past is not an uncaused golden age, but whatever its causes were, they cannot possibly include “the norms and rules of Less Wrong”, because Less Wrong did not exist. Given that “what should be the norms and rules of Less Wrong” is, in fact, what we are discussing, said golden age (i.e., Eliezer writing the Sequences) is irrelevant.
As for Eliezer being a “legend of yore”… well, consider the following analogy, inspired by the very post you linked.
Suppose Einstein, late in life, founds a school for aspiring brilliant theoretical physicists. Some time passes, and I inquire of the administration whether their school has, in fact, produced any brilliant physics theories; indeed, can it? Are their teaching methods any good, even? “What makes you suspect otherwise?”, the administrators ask me. “Well,” say I, “name some brilliant theoretical phycisists who’ve come from your school.” “Why,” comes the reply, “there was Einstein!”
ETA: Tentatively deprecated, see here.
What do you mean by this, if not that you’re trying to figure out whether other people share some personal specialness Eliezer has?
If you’re not thinking of the past as an uncaused golden age and Eliezer as a legend of yore, what’s the relation between that question and the question of which kinds of post are appropriate here?
If the problem is that some posts, knowably to a group of people competent to implement shared standards, are neither interesting nor useful, and lack interesting useful ideas, then the obvious solution would be to declare those specific posts inappropriate.
It’s not “some personal specialness”; it’s the ability, inclination, wherewithal, knowledge, expertise, habit, etc., etc., to write posts and comments that are useful, interesting, and otherwise desirable to have insofar as they serve the goals of Less Wrong.
These qualities can be encouraged where present, they can be developed where absent, they can be selected for from among a population, and their application can be incentivized.
But it is clearly not the case that said qualities are simply present in anyone who gets it into their head to write a Less Wrong post.
How common are these salutary qualities? We don’t know (but not very common). How common are they among the current Less Wrong commentariat, in particular? We don’t know (hopefully more common than in the general population, but clearly not as common as we’d like). What community norms, what rules, contribute to increasing and maintaining their prevalence among the membership of the site? We don’t know.
The past is not an uncaused golden age, but whatever its causes were, they cannot possibly include “the norms and rules of Less Wrong”, because Less Wrong did not exist. Given that “what should be the norms and rules of Less Wrong” is, in fact, what we are discussing, said golden age (i.e., Eliezer writing the Sequences) is irrelevant.
As for Eliezer being a “legend of yore”… well, consider the following analogy, inspired by the very post you linked.
Suppose Einstein, late in life, founds a school for aspiring brilliant theoretical physicists. Some time passes, and I inquire of the administration whether their school has, in fact, produced any brilliant physics theories; indeed, can it? Are their teaching methods any good, even? “What makes you suspect otherwise?”, the administrators ask me. “Well,” say I, “name some brilliant theoretical phycisists who’ve come from your school.” “Why,” comes the reply, “there was Einstein!”
Would you find this reply persuasive?
No.
Obviously LessWrong does not produce writers of similar productivity to Eliezer.
You didn’t explain why that means we should discourage some but not other articles by non-Eliezers.
Huh? What are you referring to…?
Could you quote what thing I said in this thread, that you are summarizing as “we should discourage some but not other articles by non-Eliezers”?
I now think I may have misread you quite badly—see this comment—if so, thanks for your patience.