The problem I have with your model is that it doesn’t seem to predict reality. Consider:
Eliezer wrote the Sequences, despite explaining everything (usually multiple times, and at length), linking everything to everything, and generally taking tremendous effort.
People of the Less Wrong (and adjacent) community today (CFAR included, but certainly not exclusively) are (apparently? [1]) for the most part neither writing anything down nor publishing it (despite the norm of “explain and/or link things” clearly not being nearly strong enough to result in “Yudkowskian levels of hyperlinking” or anything close to it).
I am all for more things being written down and then published! So your general point—that barriers to writing/publishing ought to be minimized—is one which I wholeheartedly endorse. But I question whether it makes sense to object to this particular barrier, because it seems to already be absent, and yet the thing we are worried about not stifling—dissemination of the community’s current ideas and so on—is mostly not there to be stifled in the first place. Clearly, some larger problem obtains, and it’s only in the context of a discussion of that larger problem that we can discuss norms about explaining and/or linking. (One might call it an isolated demand for rigor.)
[1] I say “apparently” because, obviously, I have no real way of knowing how much (ideas, concepts, techniques, whatever) there is to be written down and published; though I do get the vague sense, from things said here and there, that there’s quite a bit of it.
Yep, I think we agree on the broader picture then. I actually think this specific requirement has a pretty decent effect size, and so exploring that specific disagreement about effect size and impact in the larger context seems like a good next thing to do, though probably in meta and not here.
True! This is certainly a good point.
The problem I have with your model is that it doesn’t seem to predict reality. Consider:
Eliezer wrote the Sequences, despite explaining everything (usually multiple times, and at length), linking everything to everything, and generally taking tremendous effort.
People of the Less Wrong (and adjacent) community today (CFAR included, but certainly not exclusively) are (apparently? [1]) for the most part neither writing anything down nor publishing it (despite the norm of “explain and/or link things” clearly not being nearly strong enough to result in “Yudkowskian levels of hyperlinking” or anything close to it).
I am all for more things being written down and then published! So your general point—that barriers to writing/publishing ought to be minimized—is one which I wholeheartedly endorse. But I question whether it makes sense to object to this particular barrier, because it seems to already be absent, and yet the thing we are worried about not stifling—dissemination of the community’s current ideas and so on—is mostly not there to be stifled in the first place. Clearly, some larger problem obtains, and it’s only in the context of a discussion of that larger problem that we can discuss norms about explaining and/or linking. (One might call it an isolated demand for rigor.)
[1] I say “apparently” because, obviously, I have no real way of knowing how much (ideas, concepts, techniques, whatever) there is to be written down and published; though I do get the vague sense, from things said here and there, that there’s quite a bit of it.
Yep, I think we agree on the broader picture then. I actually think this specific requirement has a pretty decent effect size, and so exploring that specific disagreement about effect size and impact in the larger context seems like a good next thing to do, though probably in meta and not here.