From a poster’s perspective: it is very hard to tell which ideas your audience considers beginner-level and which they consider advanced-level. Especially when the audience is as diverse and self-selected as at LW. I’ve posted a few times asking “Hey, does everyone here already know X or not?” and I’ve rarely gotten the answer I expected.
Responses to my post last night ranged from “this is obvious” to “this is wrong” to “this acronym could be useful” to “this was one of my favorite posts yet”. I don’t quite know what to do with that. Right now I am erring on the side of caution; I’d rather write something obvious to everyone than skip an inferential distance somewhere.
Upvoting ought to be the main feedback mechanism here, but right now I worry that a well-written true (but obvious) article will get voted up just because it’s well-written and true, and everyone figures it will probably help someone else. Maybe make a rule that you should not upvote a post unless it teaches you something? Or maybe end a post whose difficulty level you’re not sure of with “Please rate this as too obvious, okay, or too hard”?
EDIT: It’s also hard to remember if something has already been covered on Overcoming Bias (see: source confusion). There’s not any nice list of Robin or the other writers’ posts like there is of Eliezer’s, is there?
Right now I am erring on the side of caution; I’d rather write something obvious to everyone than skip an inferential distance somewhere.
That seems like the best policy to me, especially for a site like LW. Perhaps on OB that could be a concern, but here where it’s so easy to avoid the posts you don’t want to read or which aren’t upvoted much, having redundant information doesn’t seem like it would be too much of a problem.
Drupal can also automatically generate “related content” based on whatever criteria you define as important or manually entered links. Adding more and more blocks to the page might not be good for efficiency, but providing more diverse paths to explore the content on these sites would be great.
In the long run, the more crosslinking there is, the easier it will be to visualize the stronger nodes and the easier it will become to find highly cited posts. At this point, good posts get even more citation. Good navigation is the critical first step.
I spend a lot of time these days fishing through older posts on Overcoming Bias, looking for something to read, but it is definitely not set up as a repository of knowledge.
One problem is that it’s not always easy to tell which ones you learn from.
It seems that my impression of most of EY’s (and your) posts was that they were “well-written and true (but obvious)”, but that doesn’t mean I didn’t learn anything. Once I started thinking about it, I started catching myself mistakes that I normally wouldn’t have caught.
It’s not that I read about mind projection fallacy and thought “Oh! I guess it doesn’t actually work like that after all”. If you asked me, I would have always told you that mind projection was a common fallacy. It was more like “Oh, wow. I screw up in that way occasionally too.”
The other point is that it is very useful to have a library of posts that are well written and true, as long as it’s not obvious to everyone. When you’re talking to someone and they screw up, having read well written posts on the subject can make it easier to put your objection into words. If that fails you can just say “check your email when you get home- you have a reading assignment”.
Maybe make a rule that you should not upvote a post unless it teaches you something?
I’m not going to do that. I don’t mind reading things that I already understand. It is useful to hear the same concepts explained differently and even just be reminded of knowledge I already have floating about in my brain. I find that if anything I am reading is particularly obvious I instinctively start skimming anyway.
As far as I am concerned, the only downside to posting ‘obvious’ things is that you waste your posting time.
From a poster’s perspective: it is very hard to tell which ideas your audience considers beginner-level and which they consider advanced-level. Especially when the audience is as diverse and self-selected as at LW. I’ve posted a few times asking “Hey, does everyone here already know X or not?” and I’ve rarely gotten the answer I expected.
Responses to my post last night ranged from “this is obvious” to “this is wrong” to “this acronym could be useful” to “this was one of my favorite posts yet”. I don’t quite know what to do with that. Right now I am erring on the side of caution; I’d rather write something obvious to everyone than skip an inferential distance somewhere.
Upvoting ought to be the main feedback mechanism here, but right now I worry that a well-written true (but obvious) article will get voted up just because it’s well-written and true, and everyone figures it will probably help someone else. Maybe make a rule that you should not upvote a post unless it teaches you something? Or maybe end a post whose difficulty level you’re not sure of with “Please rate this as too obvious, okay, or too hard”?
EDIT: It’s also hard to remember if something has already been covered on Overcoming Bias (see: source confusion). There’s not any nice list of Robin or the other writers’ posts like there is of Eliezer’s, is there?
That seems like the best policy to me, especially for a site like LW. Perhaps on OB that could be a concern, but here where it’s so easy to avoid the posts you don’t want to read or which aren’t upvoted much, having redundant information doesn’t seem like it would be too much of a problem.
Yes! something like a table of contents?
The Tag Cloud is a good way to start, but once you generate 10 posts a day for too long, the tag cloud is no longer a useful navigation tool
Something like this maybe: http://drupal.org/project/hypergraph
Drupal can also automatically generate “related content” based on whatever criteria you define as important or manually entered links. Adding more and more blocks to the page might not be good for efficiency, but providing more diverse paths to explore the content on these sites would be great.
In the long run, the more crosslinking there is, the easier it will be to visualize the stronger nodes and the easier it will become to find highly cited posts. At this point, good posts get even more citation. Good navigation is the critical first step.
I spend a lot of time these days fishing through older posts on Overcoming Bias, looking for something to read, but it is definitely not set up as a repository of knowledge.
That link doesn’t work due to the angle brackets.
I think that stating the obvious is frequently useful. There’s frequently more to the obvious than is obvious at first glance.
As a wise guy once said:
One problem is that it’s not always easy to tell which ones you learn from.
It seems that my impression of most of EY’s (and your) posts was that they were “well-written and true (but obvious)”, but that doesn’t mean I didn’t learn anything. Once I started thinking about it, I started catching myself mistakes that I normally wouldn’t have caught.
It’s not that I read about mind projection fallacy and thought “Oh! I guess it doesn’t actually work like that after all”. If you asked me, I would have always told you that mind projection was a common fallacy. It was more like “Oh, wow. I screw up in that way occasionally too.”
The other point is that it is very useful to have a library of posts that are well written and true, as long as it’s not obvious to everyone. When you’re talking to someone and they screw up, having read well written posts on the subject can make it easier to put your objection into words. If that fails you can just say “check your email when you get home- you have a reading assignment”.
I’m not going to do that. I don’t mind reading things that I already understand. It is useful to hear the same concepts explained differently and even just be reminded of knowledge I already have floating about in my brain. I find that if anything I am reading is particularly obvious I instinctively start skimming anyway.
As far as I am concerned, the only downside to posting ‘obvious’ things is that you waste your posting time.