First, I want to echo that I’m extremely grateful for this writeup, and also for your hard work on a plausibly important project.
I was one of the people approached in 2016 to write math content. I said I’d think about it but never ended up writing any (aside from, IIRC, a small handful of minor edits to existing pages), and I don’t remember if I gave a detailed explanation of why I didn’t feel excited about writing content on Arbital, so for what it’s worth, here are some extremely belated thoughts about that. I want to contrast Arbital with Math.StackExchange in particular, where writing content is if anything too easy and addictive for me.
First and maybe most importantly, answering questions on math.SE involves a fast and satisfying social exchange. A person asks a question, I answer it, and then I get various social rewards, namely upvotes or comments, which are often of the form “thanks for this clear explanation!” or similar. It’s easy to get a sense that I’m helping people, and it’s nice that I get clear social credit for providing that help. The fact that I’m answering a question also means I don’t have to pick a topic to write about (this is part of what’s preventing me from writing top-level LW 2.0 posts), and I can also tailor my explanation to what the questioner seems most confused about. I got the impression (I don’t remember how accurate this is) that writing an Arbital explanation would be too similar to writing a Wikipedia article, which I’ve never been excited about: I don’t get social credit for helping, I don’t know who is being helped, I have to pick the topic, and I don’t know who to tailor my explanation to.
Looking back, I was unsatisfied with the whole concept of collaboratively writing a long modular sequence of explanations. There were roughly two ways this could go and I disliked both of them for different reasons.
Way #1 was that I’d mostly write a few pieces of such a sequence; I disliked this because 1) I didn’t want the comprehensibility of my explanations to depend on the comprehensibility of other explanations I hadn’t vetted, and 2) I didn’t want to have to fit into a particular narrative or frame from other explanations if I thought I had a better one.
Way #2 was that I’d mostly write such a sequence myself; I disliked this because 1) it takes cognitive effort to hold the first N pieces of a long explanation in working memory when modeling a reader reading the (N+1)st explanation and I wasn’t willing to do this casually, and 2) I didn’t like the idea of writing something this long for an abstract audience as opposed to a particular person or people because I didn’t feel like I had enough to go on as far as modeling where the audience is likely to be confused, etc. Having to model a variety of possible readers was also cognitively effortful and I wasn’t willing to do that casually either. The experience would have felt noticeably different for me if I was asked to model a specific set of readers, e.g. “please write an explanation of logarithms for Alice, then for Bob, then for Charlie”; then it would have felt more like answering a sequence of related math.SE questions.
To the extent that I didn’t explain this to Eric when he asked me in 2016 I can only plead that in 2016 I was less good than I am now at noticing and articulating ways in which I’m unsatisfied or annoyed by something; also I was to some extent responding to mild perceived social pressure to be enthusiastic about the project.
Thanks for the response. After reading it, it’s now even more clear to what extent collaborative explanations is just not a thing that can easily work.
The obvious question is how is it even possible that Wikipedia works at all? If Wikipedia didn’t exist in our universe, we would now be tempted walk away from this with a high probability estimate that this concept is simply impossible to pull off due to the various reasons mentioned, yet here we live in a world where Wikipedia is clear evidence to the contrary, and to my knowledge it suffers from many problems you and Qiaochu_Yuan mentioned above. Are we to conclude then, that the sequential nature of the arbital content is the crux here?
As we all know, you can almost always dig up something on what could be considered the most obscure niche topic. So what is the core appeal for the vast number of content creators? Is it simply that Wikipedia is recognized as the internets “centralized encyclopedia” and contributing to it feels so high status that ones total anonymity is not perceived as a huge issue? That would not explain how it got to where it is today, how did Wikipedia bootstrap itself to where it is now?
Post-hoc analysis—Wikipedia relies on a relatively small number of people who have the unusual motives/dispositions necessary to write for it, so it doesn’t have to cater to the masses or even the typical elite. However, that doesn’t explain how enough people got interested in the first place. Maybe it had to do with there being fewer alternative venues back then. Also, I’m not so familiar with the history, but I am guessing it grew out of a fairly vibrant community of wiki users. Arbital, on the other hand, tried to bootstrap in relative isolation. (Sadly the vibrant community of LWers didn’t serve the same function, likely because the use-case for Arbital 1.0 was too different from the use-case for LW.)
I’m sad I didn’t think of it before, but hosting LW content on Arbital might just be amazing. In particular, I’d like some kind of way of keeping track of networks of related claims with community ratings and counter-claims clearly visible.
Sound correct to me. Also, I think it’s much easier to start / contribute to a page on Wikipedia. Arbital’s pages were trying to be educational and readable, which, I think is a higher bar.
Yeah, I don’t really understand how Wikipedia got to where it is today. I think it is mostly edited by people very different from me; if I had to take a wild stab, much more autistic (and bless them for that, to be clear).
When I contributed a little in the early days I think it was driven by desire to promote the things I was interested in (mostly video games this case). I’d guess the same goes for historians etc writing the more serious articles. It helped that standards for things like NPOV and citations were a lot lower back then—I don’t think the project would have gotten far if everything had to be cited up the wazoo like it is now. (Now that Wikipedia is established as being important people are willing to put a bit more work in).
Although I’m not autistic as such I do suspect there’s a connection between the above and the stereotypical autistic desire to excessively talk about one’s topic of obsessive interest.
Yeah. I think it’s possible to create an addictive website that spits out good explanations, but it’s mostly an incentive problem and it seems like Arbital didn’t have a good story for incentives.
I’m very curious how you solved the insentives problem, would you mind detailing it? Alexei mentioned that you already did the write-up, so even a link to your rough-draft would satisfy me.
The fact that I’m answering a question also means I don’t have to pick a topic to write about (this is part of what’s preventing me from writing top-level LW 2.0 posts)
Is that a true objection? If so, maybe you can find somebody who tells you what to write?
First, I want to echo that I’m extremely grateful for this writeup, and also for your hard work on a plausibly important project.
I was one of the people approached in 2016 to write math content. I said I’d think about it but never ended up writing any (aside from, IIRC, a small handful of minor edits to existing pages), and I don’t remember if I gave a detailed explanation of why I didn’t feel excited about writing content on Arbital, so for what it’s worth, here are some extremely belated thoughts about that. I want to contrast Arbital with Math.StackExchange in particular, where writing content is if anything too easy and addictive for me.
First and maybe most importantly, answering questions on math.SE involves a fast and satisfying social exchange. A person asks a question, I answer it, and then I get various social rewards, namely upvotes or comments, which are often of the form “thanks for this clear explanation!” or similar. It’s easy to get a sense that I’m helping people, and it’s nice that I get clear social credit for providing that help. The fact that I’m answering a question also means I don’t have to pick a topic to write about (this is part of what’s preventing me from writing top-level LW 2.0 posts), and I can also tailor my explanation to what the questioner seems most confused about. I got the impression (I don’t remember how accurate this is) that writing an Arbital explanation would be too similar to writing a Wikipedia article, which I’ve never been excited about: I don’t get social credit for helping, I don’t know who is being helped, I have to pick the topic, and I don’t know who to tailor my explanation to.
Looking back, I was unsatisfied with the whole concept of collaboratively writing a long modular sequence of explanations. There were roughly two ways this could go and I disliked both of them for different reasons.
Way #1 was that I’d mostly write a few pieces of such a sequence; I disliked this because 1) I didn’t want the comprehensibility of my explanations to depend on the comprehensibility of other explanations I hadn’t vetted, and 2) I didn’t want to have to fit into a particular narrative or frame from other explanations if I thought I had a better one.
Way #2 was that I’d mostly write such a sequence myself; I disliked this because 1) it takes cognitive effort to hold the first N pieces of a long explanation in working memory when modeling a reader reading the (N+1)st explanation and I wasn’t willing to do this casually, and 2) I didn’t like the idea of writing something this long for an abstract audience as opposed to a particular person or people because I didn’t feel like I had enough to go on as far as modeling where the audience is likely to be confused, etc. Having to model a variety of possible readers was also cognitively effortful and I wasn’t willing to do that casually either. The experience would have felt noticeably different for me if I was asked to model a specific set of readers, e.g. “please write an explanation of logarithms for Alice, then for Bob, then for Charlie”; then it would have felt more like answering a sequence of related math.SE questions.
To the extent that I didn’t explain this to Eric when he asked me in 2016 I can only plead that in 2016 I was less good than I am now at noticing and articulating ways in which I’m unsatisfied or annoyed by something; also I was to some extent responding to mild perceived social pressure to be enthusiastic about the project.
Thanks for the response. After reading it, it’s now even more clear to what extent collaborative explanations is just not a thing that can easily work.
The obvious question is how is it even possible that Wikipedia works at all? If Wikipedia didn’t exist in our universe, we would now be tempted walk away from this with a high probability estimate that this concept is simply impossible to pull off due to the various reasons mentioned, yet here we live in a world where Wikipedia is clear evidence to the contrary, and to my knowledge it suffers from many problems you and Qiaochu_Yuan mentioned above. Are we to conclude then, that the sequential nature of the arbital content is the crux here?
As we all know, you can almost always dig up something on what could be considered the most obscure niche topic. So what is the core appeal for the vast number of content creators? Is it simply that Wikipedia is recognized as the internets “centralized encyclopedia” and contributing to it feels so high status that ones total anonymity is not perceived as a huge issue? That would not explain how it got to where it is today, how did Wikipedia bootstrap itself to where it is now?
Post-hoc analysis—Wikipedia relies on a relatively small number of people who have the unusual motives/dispositions necessary to write for it, so it doesn’t have to cater to the masses or even the typical elite. However, that doesn’t explain how enough people got interested in the first place. Maybe it had to do with there being fewer alternative venues back then. Also, I’m not so familiar with the history, but I am guessing it grew out of a fairly vibrant community of wiki users. Arbital, on the other hand, tried to bootstrap in relative isolation. (Sadly the vibrant community of LWers didn’t serve the same function, likely because the use-case for Arbital 1.0 was too different from the use-case for LW.)
I’m sad I didn’t think of it before, but hosting LW content on Arbital might just be amazing. In particular, I’d like some kind of way of keeping track of networks of related claims with community ratings and counter-claims clearly visible.
Sound correct to me. Also, I think it’s much easier to start / contribute to a page on Wikipedia. Arbital’s pages were trying to be educational and readable, which, I think is a higher bar.
Wikipedia can often trigger a “this is wrong on the internet” reflex that gets people involved.
Yeah, I don’t really understand how Wikipedia got to where it is today. I think it is mostly edited by people very different from me; if I had to take a wild stab, much more autistic (and bless them for that, to be clear).
When I contributed a little in the early days I think it was driven by desire to promote the things I was interested in (mostly video games this case). I’d guess the same goes for historians etc writing the more serious articles. It helped that standards for things like NPOV and citations were a lot lower back then—I don’t think the project would have gotten far if everything had to be cited up the wazoo like it is now. (Now that Wikipedia is established as being important people are willing to put a bit more work in).
Although I’m not autistic as such I do suspect there’s a connection between the above and the stereotypical autistic desire to excessively talk about one’s topic of obsessive interest.
Yeah. I think it’s possible to create an addictive website that spits out good explanations, but it’s mostly an incentive problem and it seems like Arbital didn’t have a good story for incentives.
I designed a solution from the start, I’m not stupid. It didn’t get implemented in time.
I’m very curious how you solved the insentives problem, would you mind detailing it? Alexei mentioned that you already did the write-up, so even a link to your rough-draft would satisfy me.
Is that a true objection? If so, maybe you can find somebody who tells you what to write?