I agree that theoretical-sciency-mathy-insightful stuff is less common now than when Eliezer was writing posts regularly. I suspect this is largely because writing such posts is hard. Few people have that kind of knowledge, thinking ability, and writing skills, and the time to do the writing.
As someone who spends many hours writing posts only to have them nit-picked to death by almost everyone who bothers to comment, I appreciate your advice to “express small disagreements in ‘IAWYC but’ form.”
As for your suggestion to downvote posts that “don’t present non-obvious new material,” I’m not sure what to think about that. My recent morality post probably contains only material that is obvious to someone as thoroughly familiar with LW material as yourself or Phil Goetz or Will Newsome or Vladimir Nesov or many others, but on the other hand a great many LWers are not quite that familiar, or else haven’t taken the time to apply earlier lessons to a topic like morality (and were thus confused when Eliezer skipped past these basics and jumped right into ‘Empathic Metaethics’ in his own metaethics sequence).
I agree that theoretical-sciency-mathy-insightful stuff is less common now than when Eliezer was writing posts regularly. I suspect this is largely because writing such posts is hard. Few people have that kind of knowledge, thinking ability, and writing skills, and the time to do the writing.
As someone who spends many hours writing posts only to have them nit-picked to death by almost everyone who bothers to comment, I appreciate your advice to “express small disagreements in ‘IAWYC but’ form.”
As for your suggestion to downvote posts that “don’t present non-obvious new material,” I’m not sure what to think about that. My recent morality post probably contains only material that is obvious to someone as thoroughly familiar with LW material as yourself or Phil Goetz or Will Newsome or Vladimir Nesov or many others, but on the other hand a great many LWers are not quite that familiar, or else haven’t taken the time to apply earlier lessons to a topic like morality (and were thus confused when Eliezer skipped past these basics and jumped right into ‘Empathic Metaethics’ in his own metaethics sequence).
I enjoyed your morality post, as I do most of your posts, and certainly wouldn’t accuse it of not presenting non-obvious new material.