A general rule that I try to follow is “never write something which someone else has already written better”.
A sensible rule, but I’d like to bring some rationalist insights to other communities that might be able to benefit from seeing how people who’ve read the Sequences handle things. This seems to necessitate a little bit of redundant writing.
Also, I could stand to get better at writing. On the other hand, if I limit myself to writing only novel things, I wouldn’t practice nearly as much as I ought to do. Of course, the decision to publish any given piece is a separate issue.
I worry about confusing novelty with importance—the example scale in the OP seems to mix the two.
Not on purpose. I just couldn’t think of something super-novel yet unimportant.
Perhaps a better approach would be to give handles for several different ways things can be novel, and then use those as tags?
That sounds like a good idea inasmuch as it maps to reality the best, but it’s also more work than I thought I’d have to do. I’m considering collapsing the novelty scale to no more than five points and trying to make it more coarse to deliberately paper over the different ways a piece can be novel.
Thanks for demonstrating that novelty isn’t totally orderable, though; I thought it was, more or less.
A sensible rule, but I’d like to bring some rationalist insights to other communities that might be able to benefit from seeing how people who’ve read the Sequences handle things. This seems to necessitate a little bit of redundant writing.
Also, I could stand to get better at writing. On the other hand, if I limit myself to writing only novel things, I wouldn’t practice nearly as much as I ought to do. Of course, the decision to publish any given piece is a separate issue.
Not on purpose. I just couldn’t think of something super-novel yet unimportant.
That sounds like a good idea inasmuch as it maps to reality the best, but it’s also more work than I thought I’d have to do. I’m considering collapsing the novelty scale to no more than five points and trying to make it more coarse to deliberately paper over the different ways a piece can be novel.
Thanks for demonstrating that novelty isn’t totally orderable, though; I thought it was, more or less.