Two: I had offered theselinks in the anticipation that they would be taken as sufficient evidence that newbies are in fact obliged to read the entire sequences before commenting, and it was from there that I derived my beliefs that there was a problem that needed solving. Since you’re a mod, it seems reasonable that you would have strong first-hand knowledge of the balance of good and bad comments; but on the other hand those links contain even more tightly first-hand assertions from newbies that something suboptimal is going on. I’m not sure what to believe at this point, which means it’s probably not a good thing that my brain is still trying to propose solutions.
Three: I don’t have real evidence for this one; I had imagined that newbies are turned off by an apparent social pressure to have read the sequences, so if Two is out and you say it doesn’t work like that then this is likely wrong.
Four: I’d assumed, roughly, one inferential step per post. It’s already discretized, posts have globally-unique names (at worst, we can use the URL), and the dependency graph is explicit. And even if there are in fact several inferential steps for a given person in a given post, it’s a reasonable amount of reading to ask someone to absorb one post.
LW-baseline being higher than humanity-baseline just means we don’t need as many tiers.
Five through Seven: I said before I shouldn’t still be proposing solutions, but...
It bugs me that the dependency pointers are only listed in one direction. I want to be able to start at the beginning of the Sequences and chase pointers to the end. And, wherever I am in the Sequences, it would be nice to have a discussion area for that stage, where I can quickly find questions from other people who might have had the same questions I have. (The comments don’t really work for this—commenting on a blog post from 2007 or something always feels like thread necromancy.)
And, as long as we’re setting up a big separate additional optional system for reading through, we might as well structure it as a conspiracy rather than a university, assuming the Do Not Want problem discussed under Five can be solved. (Conspiracies are fun, right?)
The first tier, for people who are reading the dependencyless posts, would of course be publicly accessible. And people who just fundamentally DNW can just continue using the regular LW that currently exists.
And I’m rationalizing aren’t I. I have two separate desires: I want a neat fun conspiracy with fearsome rituals, and I want to chase pointers from bottom to top with individual discussion areas. I have no particular reason to believe that either of these two things would benefit from being combined with the other.
I had offered these links in the anticipation that they would be taken as sufficient evidence that newbies are in fact obliged to read the entire sequences before commenting
I think you’re using “obliged” to mean encouraged/pushed, and Alicorn is using it to mean required-before-being useful. The former is accurate, but to a variable degree; the latter, as she demonstrated, is not.
I had imagined that newbies are turned off by an apparent social pressure to have read the sequences
Yes. and being restricted to a newbie-only (i.e. devoid of useful content!) area until we could prove we had done so would not be less of a turnoff. :P
Two: I had offered these links in the anticipation that they would be taken as sufficient evidence that newbies are in fact obliged to read the entire sequences before commenting, and it was from there that I derived my beliefs that there was a problem that needed solving. Since you’re a mod, it seems reasonable that you would have strong first-hand knowledge of the balance of good and bad comments; but on the other hand those links contain even more tightly first-hand assertions from newbies that something suboptimal is going on. I’m not sure what to believe at this point, which means it’s probably not a good thing that my brain is still trying to propose solutions.
Three: I don’t have real evidence for this one; I had imagined that newbies are turned off by an apparent social pressure to have read the sequences, so if Two is out and you say it doesn’t work like that then this is likely wrong.
Four: I’d assumed, roughly, one inferential step per post. It’s already discretized, posts have globally-unique names (at worst, we can use the URL), and the dependency graph is explicit. And even if there are in fact several inferential steps for a given person in a given post, it’s a reasonable amount of reading to ask someone to absorb one post.
LW-baseline being higher than humanity-baseline just means we don’t need as many tiers.
Five through Seven: I said before I shouldn’t still be proposing solutions, but...
It bugs me that the dependency pointers are only listed in one direction. I want to be able to start at the beginning of the Sequences and chase pointers to the end. And, wherever I am in the Sequences, it would be nice to have a discussion area for that stage, where I can quickly find questions from other people who might have had the same questions I have. (The comments don’t really work for this—commenting on a blog post from 2007 or something always feels like thread necromancy.)
And, as long as we’re setting up a big separate additional optional system for reading through, we might as well structure it as a conspiracy rather than a university, assuming the Do Not Want problem discussed under Five can be solved. (Conspiracies are fun, right?)
The first tier, for people who are reading the dependencyless posts, would of course be publicly accessible. And people who just fundamentally DNW can just continue using the regular LW that currently exists.
And I’m rationalizing aren’t I. I have two separate desires: I want a neat fun conspiracy with fearsome rituals, and I want to chase pointers from bottom to top with individual discussion areas. I have no particular reason to believe that either of these two things would benefit from being combined with the other.
I think you’re using “obliged” to mean encouraged/pushed, and Alicorn is using it to mean required-before-being useful. The former is accurate, but to a variable degree; the latter, as she demonstrated, is not.
Yes. and being restricted to a newbie-only (i.e. devoid of useful content!) area until we could prove we had done so would not be less of a turnoff. :P
I’ve since come to think of the tiered discussions as being in addition to what currently exists, rather than instead of it.
But, uh,
yeah, that’s a good point.