Quick note: Kaj had expressed some uncertainty about whether it made sense as a frontpage post, and a few members of the LW Team had specifically encouraged him to post it as such. So, first, just noting that it probably makes more sense to direct confusions or frustration at us.
I can’t speak for the other team members but some of my own thoughts included:
the post/comment was long enough that it felt a bit more natural as a post
I currently think one of the main bottlenecks on LessWrong is distillation – much of the time, there’s a lot of good back and forth in the comments, but it takes a lot of effort for future-people to learn the most important takeaways. The longer the conversation goes, the harder it can be to compress into something digestible. So I think there’s something useful to having distillation posts such as this one by Wei_Dai (mostly re: Paul Christiano), and this one by me (re a conversation with Benquo, Jessicata and Zack Davis).
But, I can definitely see how it would come across as weird and escalatory if you weren’t expecting it. (I think it is probably a better cultural norm to touch base with conversation partners and give them a chance to give feedback, esp. when you’re summarizing their position).
Quick note: Kaj had expressed some uncertainty about whether it made sense as a frontpage post, and a few members of the LW Team had specifically encouraged him to post it as such. So, first, just noting that it probably makes more sense to direct confusions or frustration at us.
I can’t speak for the other team members but some of my own thoughts included:
the post/comment was long enough that it felt a bit more natural as a post
I currently think one of the main bottlenecks on LessWrong is distillation – much of the time, there’s a lot of good back and forth in the comments, but it takes a lot of effort for future-people to learn the most important takeaways. The longer the conversation goes, the harder it can be to compress into something digestible. So I think there’s something useful to having distillation posts such as this one by Wei_Dai (mostly re: Paul Christiano), and this one by me (re a conversation with Benquo, Jessicata and Zack Davis).
But, I can definitely see how it would come across as weird and escalatory if you weren’t expecting it. (I think it is probably a better cultural norm to touch base with conversation partners and give them a chance to give feedback, esp. when you’re summarizing their position).