This post on Overcoming Bias – a real old Less Wrong progress report, is sort of a neat vantage point on the “interesting what’s changed, what’s stayed the same.”
This particular quote from the comments was helpful orientation to me:
The general rule in groups with reasonably intelligent discussion and community moderation, once a community consensus is reached on a topic, is that
– Agreement with consensus, well articulated, will be voted up strongly
– Disagreement with consensus, well articulated, will be voted up and start a lengthy discussion
– Agreement with consensus, expressed poorly, will be voted up weakly or ignored
– Disagreement with consensus, expressed poorly, will be voted down viciously
People who complain about groupthink are typically in the habit of doing #4 and then getting upset because they don’t get easy validation of their opinions the way people who agree inarticulately do.
As an example on LW, consider Annoyance, who does both #2 and #4 with some regularity and gets wildly varying comment scores because of it.
His about page has a lot of interesting perspective on the Long Now, and designing Long Content that will remain valuable into the future.
Blog posts might be the answer. But I have read blogs for many years and most blog posts are the triumph of the hare over the tortoise. They are meant to be read by a few people on a weekday in 2004 and never again, and are quicklyabandoned—and perhaps as Assange says, not a moment too soon. (But isn’t that sad? Isn’t it a terrible ROI for one’s time?) On the other hand, the best blogs always seem to be building something: they are rough drafts—works in progress19. So I did not wish to write a blog. Then what? More than just evergreen content, what would constitute Long Content as opposed to the existing culture of Short Content? How does one live in a Long Now sort of way?
My answer is that one uses such a framework to work on projects that are too big to work on normally or too tedious. (Conscientiousness is often lacking online or in volunteer communities22 and many useful things go undone.) Knowing your site will survive for decades to come gives you the mental wherewithal to tackle long-term tasks like gathering information for years, and such persistence can be useful23 - if one holds onto every glimmer of genius for years, then even the dullest person may look a bit like a genius himself24. (Even experienced professionals can only write at their peak for a few hours a day25.) Half the challenge of fighting procrastination is the pain of starting—I find when I actually get into the swing of working on even dull tasks, it’s not so bad.
So this suggests a solution: never start.
Merely have perpetual drafts, which one tweaks from time to time. And the rest takes care of itself.
I think this might be a helpful approach for LW, especially at it crosses the 10-year mark – it’s now old enough that some of it’s content is showing it’s age.
This ties in with some of my thoughts in Musings on Peer Review, and in particular the notion that it feels “wrong” to update a blogpost after people have commented on it.
I find myself liking the idea of “creating a perpetual draft” rather than a finished product.
We need to encourage edit culture. Maybe bringing old posts to the top of the post list when edited. Or an optional checkbox to do so. Maybe we need a second feed for renewed content.
I will think about the tools needed to help edit culture develop.
Has any more talk/development happened on this? I’m quite interested to know what you come up with. It’s easy for me to imagine what it would be like to write in a wiki/perpetual draft style, I’m much fuzzier on what it might look like to read in that style.
A couple links that I wanted to refer to easily:
This post on Overcoming Bias – a real old Less Wrong progress report, is sort of a neat vantage point on the “interesting what’s changed, what’s stayed the same.”
This particular quote from the comments was helpful orientation to me:
I was also reading through this old post of gwern’s on wikipedia, which feels like it has some relevance for LessWrong.
Apparently I’m on a gwern kick now.
His about page has a lot of interesting perspective on the Long Now, and designing Long Content that will remain valuable into the future.
I think this might be a helpful approach for LW, especially at it crosses the 10-year mark – it’s now old enough that some of it’s content is showing it’s age.
This ties in with some of my thoughts in Musings on Peer Review, and in particular the notion that it feels “wrong” to update a blogpost after people have commented on it.
I find myself liking the idea of “creating a perpetual draft” rather than a finished product.
We need to encourage edit culture. Maybe bringing old posts to the top of the post list when edited. Or an optional checkbox to do so. Maybe we need a second feed for renewed content.
I will think about the tools needed to help edit culture develop.
Has any more talk/development happened on this? I’m quite interested to know what you come up with. It’s easy for me to imagine what it would be like to write in a wiki/perpetual draft style, I’m much fuzzier on what it might look like to read in that style.
No updates. Gwern writes perpetually in drafts.
I agree entirely with this, and (again) would like to suggest that a wiki is, perhaps, the perfect tool for precisely this sort of approach.
Though I haven’t acted on it, I do like the idea of the perpetual draft more than a bunch of discrete posts. I will try to write more in this manner.