posts about things I presently care a lot about coming to a better understanding of (but where my thoughts are not so organized yet, and so trying to write about it involves much much use of the backspace, and ~80% of the time leads to me realizing the concepts are wrong, and going back to the drawing board).
This is something that I’ve been thinking about. Currently I sense that the overwhelming majority of people are hesitant to write about ideas that are in this exploratory phase. But collaboration at the exploratory phase is important! I suspect that the main way this collaboration currently happens is that people text their friends, but I feel like we can do better than that.
I’m not exactly sure how. I think it’s largely a social problem. Ie. people need to feel like it is ok to post early stage exploratory thoughts that are likely to have problems. And the way to get to that point is probably to see other (high status) members of the community doing so. There’s a chicken-egg problem there, but it could probably be bootstrapped by just convincing a critical mass of people to just do it.
I should point out that the LessWrong team has tried to solve this problem with the shortform and by making personal blog posts a thing that is very babble-y. I think that is failing though because the social convention hasn’t changed, and the social convention is the crux of the problem.
Another possibility is that this type of exploratory conversation just doesn’t happen “in public”. It needs to happen in small, tight nit groups no larger than, say, four people. In which case it would be an interesting idea for eg. LessWrong to connect people and form such groups, that are limited in size and have the explicit goal of being for discussing exploratory ideas.
Edit: A big reason why I’m excited about the possibility of (drastically) improving this exploratory phase is because of how high a level of action it is. It should trickle down and have positive effects in many places. In theory.
This is something that I’ve been thinking about. Currently I sense that the overwhelming majority of people are hesitant to write about ideas that are in this exploratory phase. But collaboration at the exploratory phase is important! I suspect that the main way this collaboration currently happens is that people text their friends, but I feel like we can do better than that.
I’m not exactly sure how. I think it’s largely a social problem. Ie. people need to feel like it is ok to post early stage exploratory thoughts that are likely to have problems. And the way to get to that point is probably to see other (high status) members of the community doing so. There’s a chicken-egg problem there, but it could probably be bootstrapped by just convincing a critical mass of people to just do it.
I should point out that the LessWrong team has tried to solve this problem with the shortform and by making personal blog posts a thing that is very babble-y. I think that is failing though because the social convention hasn’t changed, and the social convention is the crux of the problem.
Another possibility is that this type of exploratory conversation just doesn’t happen “in public”. It needs to happen in small, tight nit groups no larger than, say, four people. In which case it would be an interesting idea for eg. LessWrong to connect people and form such groups, that are limited in size and have the explicit goal of being for discussing exploratory ideas.
Edit: A big reason why I’m excited about the possibility of (drastically) improving this exploratory phase is because of how high a level of action it is. It should trickle down and have positive effects in many places. In theory.