Have you used the LessWrong Concepts page, or generally used our tagging/wiki features? I’m curious to hear about your experience.
I’m particularly interested in people who read content from them, rather than people who contribute content to them. How do you use them? Do you wish you could get value from them better?
When I try to reference a concept, I often find it better to link the tag page than the original article from the Sequences, because the article in the Sequences often assumes that you have recently read the previous article, or sometimes only 1⁄2 or 1⁄3 of the article is about the idea and the rest is about something else.
In some sense, this is a difference between writing a tutorial and writing a reference book. The Sequences are a tutorial; they are supposed to be read in order. The tag pages are the reference book; they can be read individually, they are continuously updated, and they still contain the links to the most important articles so it okay to link them even if you think the articles are more valuable.
tags: used them semi-regularly to find related posts when I want to refer to previous discussions of a topic. They work well for that, and I’ve occasionally added tags when the post I was looking for wasn’t tagged yet.
Neat (that’s indeed, like, their intended use case). Do you feel like you personally end up learning stuff from seeing that previous discussion, or is it more like “hey guys, here’s some previous discussion, if you want some context?”
Hmm, usually when I go looking it’s because I remember reading a particular post, but there’s always some chance of getting tab-sniped into reading a just a few more pages...
I use it when I am interested in learning about a specific topic. I rarely use the Concepts page, because it contains too many tags, and sometimes I don’t even know what tag I am looking for. Instead, I usually already have one or two articles that I have previously read, which feels similar to the topic I am thinking about. I would then search for those posts, look at the tags, and click on the one that is relevant. In the tag page, I start by reading the wiki, but often feel disappointed by the half-done/incompleteness of the wiki. Then I filter by high karma and read the articles from top to bottom, skipping ones that feels irrelevant or uninteresting based on title.
Do you wish you could get value from them better?
I wish the default most relevant ordering is not based on the raw score, but rather a normalized relevance score or something more complicated, because right now it means nothing other that “this post is popular so a lot of people voted on the tags”. This default is really bad, every new user has to independently realize that they should change the sorting. LW also does not remember the sorting so I have to change it manually every time, which is irritating but not a big deal.
I think index pages are just meant to be used by only a small minority of people in any community. In my mind, the LW concepts page is like the wiki topic groups (not sure what they’re called).
The similarities are:
It is fun to go through the concepts page and find tags I haven’t learned about, this is good for exploration but a rare use case (for me)
Because it is an index, it is useful when you have a concept in your mind but couldn’t remember the name
But the concepts page has a worse UX than wiki since you have to explicitly search for it, rather than it popping up in the relevant tags page, and also they show up in a cluster
Have you used the LessWrong Concepts page, or generally used our tagging/wiki features? I’m curious to hear about your experience.
I’m particularly interested in people who read content from them, rather than people who contribute content to them. How do you use them? Do you wish you could get value from them better?
When I try to reference a concept, I often find it better to link the tag page than the original article from the Sequences, because the article in the Sequences often assumes that you have recently read the previous article, or sometimes only 1⁄2 or 1⁄3 of the article is about the idea and the rest is about something else.
In some sense, this is a difference between writing a tutorial and writing a reference book. The Sequences are a tutorial; they are supposed to be read in order. The tag pages are the reference book; they can be read individually, they are continuously updated, and they still contain the links to the most important articles so it okay to link them even if you think the articles are more valuable.
Sometimes I look up a tag/concept to ensure that I’m not spouting nonsense about it.
But most often I use them to find the posts related to a topic I’m interested in.
tags: used them semi-regularly to find related posts when I want to refer to previous discussions of a topic. They work well for that, and I’ve occasionally added tags when the post I was looking for wasn’t tagged yet.
Neat (that’s indeed, like, their intended use case). Do you feel like you personally end up learning stuff from seeing that previous discussion, or is it more like “hey guys, here’s some previous discussion, if you want some context?”
Hmm, usually when I go looking it’s because I remember reading a particular post, but there’s always some chance of getting tab-sniped into reading a just a few more pages...
How do you use them?
I use it when I am interested in learning about a specific topic. I rarely use the Concepts page, because it contains too many tags, and sometimes I don’t even know what tag I am looking for. Instead, I usually already have one or two articles that I have previously read, which feels similar to the topic I am thinking about. I would then search for those posts, look at the tags, and click on the one that is relevant. In the tag page, I start by reading the wiki, but often feel disappointed by the half-done/incompleteness of the wiki. Then I filter by high karma and read the articles from top to bottom, skipping ones that feels irrelevant or uninteresting based on title.
Do you wish you could get value from them better?
I wish the default most relevant ordering is not based on the raw score, but rather a normalized relevance score or something more complicated, because right now it means nothing other that “this post is popular so a lot of people voted on the tags”. This default is really bad, every new user has to independently realize that they should change the sorting. LW also does not remember the sorting so I have to change it manually every time, which is irritating but not a big deal.
Do you feel like you have a missing usecase that the concepts page should be helpful with?
To answer your question directly—not really.
I think index pages are just meant to be used by only a small minority of people in any community. In my mind, the LW concepts page is like the wiki topic groups (not sure what they’re called).
The similarities are:
It is fun to go through the concepts page and find tags I haven’t learned about, this is good for exploration but a rare use case (for me)
Because it is an index, it is useful when you have a concept in your mind but couldn’t remember the name
But the concepts page has a worse UX than wiki since you have to explicitly search for it, rather than it popping up in the relevant tags page, and also they show up in a cluster