So yeah: for various periods of time when I have material that I think is really important and want to spend time going deep on, I would use private notes.
I might also use it in a more day-to-day sense. Like when I pull up LW and find a post I like. I might take some private notes in that situation. I’m not sure.
That said, I wouldn’t find it very valuable. I don’t think I’d do it too frequently, and when I do feel like doing it, using some other solution like Google Docs seems fine.
A vague background belief I’m forming is “actually, people should do this all the time when trying to read anything particularly complicated” (which maybe isn’t all LW posts but is a significant number of them), so part of the idea here is to nudge people towards that being a more salient option.
(Btw, the question-posing reacts (like what you’ve just given to my comment) have broken workflow: Where do I reply, especially if the react-giver wasn’t in the conversation? There’s not going to be a notification. Even as it is, with you already being in the conversation, I might want to reply in a wrong place from the point of view of the threading. Also, as an obvious workaround, do mentions work with Markdown?)
Things that are not written down keep nagging at attention, which is useful for understanding them better. Also forces developing greater fluency to be able to work with them without looking anything up. So I intentionally avoid writing down important/confusing/complicated things, giving them some time to do more work first.
It’s different for instrumentally useful or routine calculations, where either training data is plentiful, you don’t care about improving capabilities of doing the calculations, or quickly getting a result is more important.
To elaborate in response to some reacts: There is a noticeable effect where writing something down eases the mind, so that you no longer try as hard to retain awareness of it. This is less important when you can formulate a task/problem/question and then slot answering it into your workflow. But with confusing things where even formulating the issue is an unsolved problem, it’s important to retain the context that only exists in the mind at that point and is hard to recreate from a poor description. Writing something about it down causes losing traction on it, so it’s useful to hold off for a bit, perhaps until the next day.
I guess the react I actually wanted was “this doesn’t seem true for me, and seems to be making a kinda strong claim?”. “Disagree” felt a bit strong/weird in this context, since I don’t doubt that this is true for you. Maybe I want an “overstated” react. (I could have written that as a reply, but one of the things I wanted was to flag the objection to the line for people who just read the opening comment but aren’t necessarily delving into the thread)
Your original sentence might be true in some contexts for me, but in the scenarios I have in mind, I don’t usefully boot up the confusing thing into my attention to process or anything, it just slips away completely. And for a dense post, where typically each paragraph is somewhat hard to parse or I have a lot of interesting thoughts about, having some kind of working memory augmentation is really important. Little flags about where I’m confused or what my brain was doing in a specific spot helps give me some handholds to recover my attention after I get stuck for awhile.
Ah, right. Hmmm. That updates me a good deal, but I’m not quite sure it changes my mind on whether a) I think I’d use it consistently or b) whether I anticipate others using it consistently.
Sadly, I strongly suspect that a very large majority of LW usage is shallow, along the lines of casually browsing Reddit. However, it seems that the private notes are only useful for deep usage, along the lines of reading a paper in an academic journal.
Personally, my usage is to check LW multiple times a day very shallowly, and then once in a while when I see something important I go a little deeper on it (probably not enough to use private notes; at least not extensively), and then even more infrequently when something seems very important, I go very deep on it (here I would use private notes). And this actually does seem like a pretty good approach to allocating my time. I’m not sure though.
I agree a lot of use is shallow, and, that seems fine. I don’t really care what percentage of the site is shallow, but I care about how much of it is deep, in absolute terms. So I’d be aiming to just encourage a bit more deep reading on the margin, and optimize the use of it.
(It occurs to me now that the admins tracking overall, anonymized metrics for “how much private notes do people take?” might be an interesting mechanism for measuring “deep reading”)
That makes sense. And I agree with what I think you’re implying: that the question of how worthwhile it’d be to build this feature depends on how much deep usage there is in absolute terms. I don’t have a great intuition for how much there is or where the threshold would be, but I’m moving closer towards thinking that it’d be worthwhile.
Some data points:
When I initially bought Rationality from AI to Zombies, I took a bunch of notes in the pdf file. Not for every post, but a lot of them.
Then when I bought the first two book versions, I did something similar.
I spent time going through Multiagent Models of Mind and took a bunch of notes for it.
So yeah: for various periods of time when I have material that I think is really important and want to spend time going deep on, I would use private notes.
I might also use it in a more day-to-day sense. Like when I pull up LW and find a post I like. I might take some private notes in that situation. I’m not sure.
That said, I wouldn’t find it very valuable. I don’t think I’d do it too frequently, and when I do feel like doing it, using some other solution like Google Docs seems fine.
A vague background belief I’m forming is “actually, people should do this all the time when trying to read anything particularly complicated” (which maybe isn’t all LW posts but is a significant number of them), so part of the idea here is to nudge people towards that being a more salient option.
(Btw, the question-posing reacts (like what you’ve just given to my comment) have broken workflow: Where do I reply, especially if the react-giver wasn’t in the conversation? There’s not going to be a notification. Even as it is, with you already being in the conversation, I might want to reply in a wrong place from the point of view of the threading. Also, as an obvious workaround, do mentions work with Markdown?)
(the thing I expected you to do was reply to the same thread, I’ll continue the rest of the convo over there)
Sure, it’s general feedback on the reacts feature, not coordination on a particular conversation.
Things that are not written down keep nagging at attention, which is useful for understanding them better. Also forces developing greater fluency to be able to work with them without looking anything up. So I intentionally avoid writing down important/confusing/complicated things, giving them some time to do more work first.
It’s different for instrumentally useful or routine calculations, where either training data is plentiful, you don’t care about improving capabilities of doing the calculations, or quickly getting a result is more important.
To elaborate in response to some reacts: There is a noticeable effect where writing something down eases the mind, so that you no longer try as hard to retain awareness of it. This is less important when you can formulate a task/problem/question and then slot answering it into your workflow. But with confusing things where even formulating the issue is an unsolved problem, it’s important to retain the context that only exists in the mind at that point and is hard to recreate from a poor description. Writing something about it down causes losing traction on it, so it’s useful to hold off for a bit, perhaps until the next day.
I guess the react I actually wanted was “this doesn’t seem true for me, and seems to be making a kinda strong claim?”. “Disagree” felt a bit strong/weird in this context, since I don’t doubt that this is true for you. Maybe I want an “overstated” react. (I could have written that as a reply, but one of the things I wanted was to flag the objection to the line for people who just read the opening comment but aren’t necessarily delving into the thread)
Your original sentence might be true in some contexts for me, but in the scenarios I have in mind, I don’t usefully boot up the confusing thing into my attention to process or anything, it just slips away completely. And for a dense post, where typically each paragraph is somewhat hard to parse or I have a lot of interesting thoughts about, having some kind of working memory augmentation is really important. Little flags about where I’m confused or what my brain was doing in a specific spot helps give me some handholds to recover my attention after I get stuck for awhile.
(Btw, I recently changed my mind about the react functionality. Initially I felt pretty “meh” about it. Now I’m really liking it!)
Ah, right. Hmmm. That updates me a good deal, but I’m not quite sure it changes my mind on whether a) I think I’d use it consistently or b) whether I anticipate others using it consistently.
Sadly, I strongly suspect that a very large majority of LW usage is shallow, along the lines of casually browsing Reddit. However, it seems that the private notes are only useful for deep usage, along the lines of reading a paper in an academic journal.
Personally, my usage is to check LW multiple times a day very shallowly, and then once in a while when I see something important I go a little deeper on it (probably not enough to use private notes; at least not extensively), and then even more infrequently when something seems very important, I go very deep on it (here I would use private notes). And this actually does seem like a pretty good approach to allocating my time. I’m not sure though.
I agree a lot of use is shallow, and, that seems fine. I don’t really care what percentage of the site is shallow, but I care about how much of it is deep, in absolute terms. So I’d be aiming to just encourage a bit more deep reading on the margin, and optimize the use of it.
(It occurs to me now that the admins tracking overall, anonymized metrics for “how much private notes do people take?” might be an interesting mechanism for measuring “deep reading”)
That makes sense. And I agree with what I think you’re implying: that the question of how worthwhile it’d be to build this feature depends on how much deep usage there is in absolute terms. I don’t have a great intuition for how much there is or where the threshold would be, but I’m moving closer towards thinking that it’d be worthwhile.