A couple people had privately mentioned concerns to me about whether this post should have been curated, which seemed worth addressing.
Basically, the standard for curated is not, and cannot be, peer review.
I do personally think LessWrong should have something closer to actual peer review. I wrote about this in another recent curation notice. But if that was the standard for curation, curation would fail at two of it’s main goals – providing people with a consistent set of posts worth reading, and providing a reward for LW authors that was a reasonable standard to aspire to (given that most LW authors are either hobbyists, or professionals whose primary focus isn’t writing LW articles)
I don’t think this post is more armchair-philosophy-esque than many other posts that we curate, I think it just happened to be of a genre that made that feel a bit more salient.
A couple people had privately mentioned concerns to me about whether this post should have been curated, which seemed worth addressing.
Basically, the standard for curated is not, and cannot be, peer review.
I do personally think LessWrong should have something closer to actual peer review. I wrote about this in another recent curation notice. But if that was the standard for curation, curation would fail at two of it’s main goals – providing people with a consistent set of posts worth reading, and providing a reward for LW authors that was a reasonable standard to aspire to (given that most LW authors are either hobbyists, or professionals whose primary focus isn’t writing LW articles)
I don’t think this post is more armchair-philosophy-esque than many other posts that we curate, I think it just happened to be of a genre that made that feel a bit more salient.