Someone interested in rationality but not already familiar with the last few decades’ research on heuristics and biases, who hasn’t spend a long time thinking about the scientific method and how religions spread and so on and so forth, coming to LW in (say) 2008, would have found Eliezer posting his “Sequences”, which set out a large quantity of fairly-basic material in friendly form. They’d have got plenty of insight per hour of reading.
Someone in the exact same epistemic situation now could come along to LW and … read the Sequences. They would get more or less the same amount of insight per hour. (Maybe either a bit more or a bit less, because they wouldn’t be interacting with the comments in the same way as when originally posted.)
Or they could come along to LW and read whatever’s in Main and Discussion at the time. That will probably give them less insight per hour, because LW isn’t now full of systematically presented material for beginning-to-intermediate rationalists, because Eliezer very kindly already did that and it’s all in the archives.
The only way to deliver that level of insight-per-hour to that reader is to fill LW with the same sort of material as the Sequences, but there probably just isn’t all that much beginning-to-intermediate rationalism tutorial stuff that hasn’t mostly been covered in the Sequences and other Sequence-ish articles since then (e.g., Yvain’s “Diseased thinking” and “Generalizing from one example”).
So, if the “problem” we are trying to solve is that current LW content doesn’t deliver as much insight to beginning-to-intermediate rationalists as in 2008, then “solving” that problem probably implies filling LW with material that strongly overlaps stuff that’s been posted here long before.
Perhaps we should consider a different audience. Existing LW regulars, for instance. (Many of whom were the first kind of reader, back in 2008.) Those readers have read most of the Sequence-ish material, or familiarized themselves with similar ideas by other means. Rehashing the same stuff won’t give them much insight per hour. They’re familiar with all the standard stuff. What they need is lots of new ideas.
So, if the the “problem” we are trying to solve is that current LW content doesn’t deliver as much insight to advanced rationalists as LW did to beginning-to-intermediate rationalists in 2008, then “solving” that problem implies delivering new ideas at a rate comparable to the rate at which Eliezer delivered the not-all-so-new ideas in the Sequences back in 2008.
There is scope for debate about just how new those ideas were then. (You can find some in this post and its comments.) But even the ideas that were entirely original to Eliezer were, I think, ones he had had some time before; he was mostly not generating them on the fly. I think it’s fairly clear that to deliver the same rate of insights-per-hour to someone who’s read everything ever posted on LW it would be necessary to generate novelty faster than Eliezer generated summaries—and to do so working on more difficult material.
To summarize:
For a beginning-to-intermediate rationalist, willing to read old material: Same insight-per-hour is available now as then: read the same things as they’d have read then, all of which are still in the archives.
For a beginning-to-intermediate rationalist, reading new material: Same insight-per-hour would require posting a lot of unoriginal material; do we really want that?
For someone familiar with most existing LW material: Same insight-per-hour would require generating new research at the same rate at which Eliezer generated summaries.
So it seems to me that “less insight per hour of reading” may not be a problem we should be trying to solve. It’s either already solved (if you take the first of those interpretations) or not worth solving (if you take the second) or maybe humanly impossible (if you take the third).
I would say that one of the biggest things that changed is the fact that there are too many posts like the one i’m responding to. I’m not sure what it is, but i think most others can see it.
The wrong thing to link to is the “typical mind fallacy”.
As probably the person with most to gain from understanding what you think is deplorable about the comment you were replying to (I’m assuming, perhaps wrongly, that you are referring to my comment rather than the original post), I regret that it’s not at all clear to me; perhaps my brain just doesn’t work as well as those of “most others”. Perhaps you might like to give me a clue? Even if you’re not sure what you don’t like, you must have some idea.
Navel-gazing introspection about Less Wrong?
Lengthy analysis of something you consider not worth analysing at length?
Something you think I got wrong in that analysis?
Something you don’t like about my comments about the “Sequences”?
A writing style that doesn’t appeal to you?
Something entirely different?
(Responding super-briefly to the first three: I agree that LW has too much navel-gazing and mostly talk about other things; I think thinking clearly about things is a useful skill and worth practising even when the objects available for practising on aren’t the most interesting imaginable; I may have made errors but they aren’t obvious to me. I don’t think I have anything to say about the others without more specific criticism.)
It’s hard to explain, i’ll edit it in later if I think of a good explanation.
It’s just the overly pedantic style complimented by a lovely personality and the passive framing. It has to do with the organizational style as well, maybe a bit too spruced up? Don’t let me get you down though, I didn’t mean it like that.
Well, of course if S.E. is correct that “there are too many posts like the one I’m responding to” then we should expect that other people will like that sort of thing even though s/he doesn’t.
(Unsurprisingly, I think my comment was perfectly OK too. Thanks for the expression of support.)
1) put a link to “Rationality” e-book on the LW title page, and maybe also in the sidebar—for the new users;
2) for the old users—someone should study something rationality-related, and then post it in a form similar to Sequences (for me that means: motivating and easy to read), adding their own insights. Easier said than done, but this approximately what Sequences were about.
None of this seems related to the typical solutions on “improving Less Wrong”, but maybe other people are trying to solve a different problem.
I think you missed a step...
Did we spend 5 minutes holding off on proposing solutions, or define the problem yet?
Problem: less “insight per hour of reading” than years ago.
For whom, reading what?
Someone interested in rationality but not already familiar with the last few decades’ research on heuristics and biases, who hasn’t spend a long time thinking about the scientific method and how religions spread and so on and so forth, coming to LW in (say) 2008, would have found Eliezer posting his “Sequences”, which set out a large quantity of fairly-basic material in friendly form. They’d have got plenty of insight per hour of reading.
Someone in the exact same epistemic situation now could come along to LW and … read the Sequences. They would get more or less the same amount of insight per hour. (Maybe either a bit more or a bit less, because they wouldn’t be interacting with the comments in the same way as when originally posted.)
Or they could come along to LW and read whatever’s in Main and Discussion at the time. That will probably give them less insight per hour, because LW isn’t now full of systematically presented material for beginning-to-intermediate rationalists, because Eliezer very kindly already did that and it’s all in the archives.
The only way to deliver that level of insight-per-hour to that reader is to fill LW with the same sort of material as the Sequences, but there probably just isn’t all that much beginning-to-intermediate rationalism tutorial stuff that hasn’t mostly been covered in the Sequences and other Sequence-ish articles since then (e.g., Yvain’s “Diseased thinking” and “Generalizing from one example”).
So, if the “problem” we are trying to solve is that current LW content doesn’t deliver as much insight to beginning-to-intermediate rationalists as in 2008, then “solving” that problem probably implies filling LW with material that strongly overlaps stuff that’s been posted here long before.
Perhaps we should consider a different audience. Existing LW regulars, for instance. (Many of whom were the first kind of reader, back in 2008.) Those readers have read most of the Sequence-ish material, or familiarized themselves with similar ideas by other means. Rehashing the same stuff won’t give them much insight per hour. They’re familiar with all the standard stuff. What they need is lots of new ideas.
So, if the the “problem” we are trying to solve is that current LW content doesn’t deliver as much insight to advanced rationalists as LW did to beginning-to-intermediate rationalists in 2008, then “solving” that problem implies delivering new ideas at a rate comparable to the rate at which Eliezer delivered the not-all-so-new ideas in the Sequences back in 2008.
There is scope for debate about just how new those ideas were then. (You can find some in this post and its comments.) But even the ideas that were entirely original to Eliezer were, I think, ones he had had some time before; he was mostly not generating them on the fly. I think it’s fairly clear that to deliver the same rate of insights-per-hour to someone who’s read everything ever posted on LW it would be necessary to generate novelty faster than Eliezer generated summaries—and to do so working on more difficult material.
To summarize:
For a beginning-to-intermediate rationalist, willing to read old material: Same insight-per-hour is available now as then: read the same things as they’d have read then, all of which are still in the archives.
For a beginning-to-intermediate rationalist, reading new material: Same insight-per-hour would require posting a lot of unoriginal material; do we really want that?
For someone familiar with most existing LW material: Same insight-per-hour would require generating new research at the same rate at which Eliezer generated summaries.
So it seems to me that “less insight per hour of reading” may not be a problem we should be trying to solve. It’s either already solved (if you take the first of those interpretations) or not worth solving (if you take the second) or maybe humanly impossible (if you take the third).
I would say that one of the biggest things that changed is the fact that there are too many posts like the one i’m responding to. I’m not sure what it is, but i think most others can see it.
The wrong thing to link to is the “typical mind fallacy”.
As probably the person with most to gain from understanding what you think is deplorable about the comment you were replying to (I’m assuming, perhaps wrongly, that you are referring to my comment rather than the original post), I regret that it’s not at all clear to me; perhaps my brain just doesn’t work as well as those of “most others”. Perhaps you might like to give me a clue? Even if you’re not sure what you don’t like, you must have some idea.
Navel-gazing introspection about Less Wrong?
Lengthy analysis of something you consider not worth analysing at length?
Something you think I got wrong in that analysis?
Something you don’t like about my comments about the “Sequences”?
A writing style that doesn’t appeal to you?
Something entirely different?
(Responding super-briefly to the first three: I agree that LW has too much navel-gazing and mostly talk about other things; I think thinking clearly about things is a useful skill and worth practising even when the objects available for practising on aren’t the most interesting imaginable; I may have made errors but they aren’t obvious to me. I don’t think I have anything to say about the others without more specific criticism.)
I thought the comment was good and I don’t have any idea what SanguineEmpiricist was talking about.
It’s hard to explain, i’ll edit it in later if I think of a good explanation.
It’s just the overly pedantic style complimented by a lovely personality and the passive framing. It has to do with the organizational style as well, maybe a bit too spruced up? Don’t let me get you down though, I didn’t mean it like that.
Well, of course if S.E. is correct that “there are too many posts like the one I’m responding to” then we should expect that other people will like that sort of thing even though s/he doesn’t.
(Unsurprisingly, I think my comment was perfectly OK too. Thanks for the expression of support.)
Okay, so I see two solutions here:
1) put a link to “Rationality” e-book on the LW title page, and maybe also in the sidebar—for the new users;
2) for the old users—someone should study something rationality-related, and then post it in a form similar to Sequences (for me that means: motivating and easy to read), adding their own insights. Easier said than done, but this approximately what Sequences were about.
None of this seems related to the typical solutions on “improving Less Wrong”, but maybe other people are trying to solve a different problem.
That’s unavoidable—once you picked all the low-hanging fruit, diminishing returns kick in.