I think we need an actual style guide, and it needs to be prominent, properly maintained, and right here.
If it’s not obvious why, and I weakly presume it isn’t, it’s because linguistic standardization seems like the obvious group-context form of linguistic precision, which seems like an obvious rationality virtue.
There’s something of a style guide for wiki-tagging (see the FAQ).
For the site more broadly, I fear that any explicit style guide it would be possible to write would be too prescriptive and narrow. There’s a wide variety of styles that suitable for the site, albeit that there’s an even wider variety that isn’t.
In the practice, the best style guide are the great posts already on LessWrong. That’s why we encourage new users to read quite a bit before posting. By reading, you get a sense of the LW discourse style.
We find ourselves in a perpetual tug-of-war between a desire for more reliable, higher quality posts and the ability of people to engage and contribute at all. The trade-off is this:
The higher the standard, whether style or rigor, the fewer people will write posts. To our dismay, this includes people who would actually meet the standards but fear that they would not beforehand. Naturally the potential contributions from people below the requirements are lost.
While this makes each post more productive to read, it also means that each post is higher-effort to read, which to our dismay often means posts stop being engaged with; we run the risk of churning out a small amount of posts which are very high quality but very poorly read.
So striking that balance prevents us from setting much in the way of style standards; we usually prefer to let the community speak which rewards multiple styles. I myself am on the write early, write often side of the fence.
The mods may have a more nuanced and up-to-date opinion with respect to meta information like writing guides.
I think we need an actual style guide, and it needs to be prominent, properly maintained, and right here.
If it’s not obvious why, and I weakly presume it isn’t, it’s because linguistic standardization seems like the obvious group-context form of linguistic precision, which seems like an obvious rationality virtue.
Thoughts?
There’s something of a style guide for wiki-tagging (see the FAQ).
For the site more broadly, I fear that any explicit style guide it would be possible to write would be too prescriptive and narrow. There’s a wide variety of styles that suitable for the site, albeit that there’s an even wider variety that isn’t.
In the practice, the best style guide are the great posts already on LessWrong. That’s why we encourage new users to read quite a bit before posting. By reading, you get a sense of the LW discourse style.
Welcome to LessWrong!
We find ourselves in a perpetual tug-of-war between a desire for more reliable, higher quality posts and the ability of people to engage and contribute at all. The trade-off is this:
The higher the standard, whether style or rigor, the fewer people will write posts. To our dismay, this includes people who would actually meet the standards but fear that they would not beforehand. Naturally the potential contributions from people below the requirements are lost.
While this makes each post more productive to read, it also means that each post is higher-effort to read, which to our dismay often means posts stop being engaged with; we run the risk of churning out a small amount of posts which are very high quality but very poorly read.
So striking that balance prevents us from setting much in the way of style standards; we usually prefer to let the community speak which rewards multiple styles. I myself am on the write early, write often side of the fence.
The mods may have a more nuanced and up-to-date opinion with respect to meta information like writing guides.