In all three cases, literally the first sentence was that this is a conversation I had with someone, and in one case, I specified that it’s a very lightly edited transcript. I make it pretty explicit that the dialogue is with a real specific person, and label which parts are being said by which person.
?????
What’s missing here? Why would anyone think I’m spending a lot of work optimizing for third-party readers?
Obviously I wouldn’t share it if I thought it weren’t relevant or a reasonably efficient account, but the kind of signposts you’re asking for don’t seem like they’d add any content or even frontload the content more than it’s being frontloaded right now, and they do seem like they’d be a lot of extra work to get right.
(Deleted a bit that seemed unhelpful, but not before Wei responded to it.)
It seems like you need this labeled DISCLAIMER so you can perform ACTION: CONSIDER WHETHER NOT TO READ instead of, well, parsing the information and acting based on the model it gives you.
Model building is cognitively taxing. I usually just go by the general expectation that someone wouldn’t post on LW unless they think most readers would get positive value from reading it. It seems right to disclaim this when you already have a model and your model doesn’t predict this.
My expectation that most people trying seriously to read it would get value out of it. My expectation is also that most people aren’t really trying seriously, and that the kind of signposting you’re asking for is mostly a substitute for rather than a complement to the kind of reading that would get value out of this. It’s surprising to me that you’re asking for this given the quality of thought reflected in your own writing, so I’ll continue to give it thought and I really am confused about what’s going on here, but that’s my current position.
What’s missing here? Why would anyone think I’m spending a lot of work optimizing for third-party readers?
I think some of Eliezer’s stuff is “optimized for third-party readers” and it is presented in the form of a dialogue, and that might be a source of some of the confusion here. Either way, I read what Wei Dai said as something “Please add a dialogue tag so people who prefer ‘treatises’ to ‘essays’ will understand how to engage with the material.”. I think this is seen as useful to have at the start of posts, for the same reasons it might be useful to have distinct commenting guidelines like “Ask questions instead of telling people how they’re wrong” versus “We’re all working together to tear each other’s arguments down.”
I think some of Eliezer’s stuff is “optimized for third-party readers” and it is presented in the form of a dialogue, and that might be a source of some of the confusion here.
For what it’s worth, I find Eliezer’s dialogues (especially the ones he’s written in the past several years) to be absolutely unreadable. His non-dialogue writing was much, much easier to read.
In all three cases, literally the first sentence was that this is a conversation I had with someone, and in one case, I specified that it’s a very lightly edited transcript. I make it pretty explicit that the dialogue is with a real specific person, and label which parts are being said by which person.
?????
What’s missing here? Why would anyone think I’m spending a lot of work optimizing for third-party readers?
Obviously I wouldn’t share it if I thought it weren’t relevant or a reasonably efficient account, but the kind of signposts you’re asking for don’t seem like they’d add any content or even frontload the content more than it’s being frontloaded right now, and they do seem like they’d be a lot of extra work to get right.
(Deleted a bit that seemed unhelpful, but not before Wei responded to it.)
Model building is cognitively taxing. I usually just go by the general expectation that someone wouldn’t post on LW unless they think most readers would get positive value from reading it. It seems right to disclaim this when you already have a model and your model doesn’t predict this.
My expectation that most people trying seriously to read it would get value out of it. My expectation is also that most people aren’t really trying seriously, and that the kind of signposting you’re asking for is mostly a substitute for rather than a complement to the kind of reading that would get value out of this. It’s surprising to me that you’re asking for this given the quality of thought reflected in your own writing, so I’ll continue to give it thought and I really am confused about what’s going on here, but that’s my current position.
I think some of Eliezer’s stuff is “optimized for third-party readers” and it is presented in the form of a dialogue, and that might be a source of some of the confusion here. Either way, I read what Wei Dai said as something “Please add a dialogue tag so people who prefer ‘treatises’ to ‘essays’ will understand how to engage with the material.”. I think this is seen as useful to have at the start of posts, for the same reasons it might be useful to have distinct commenting guidelines like “Ask questions instead of telling people how they’re wrong” versus “We’re all working together to tear each other’s arguments down.”
For what it’s worth, I find Eliezer’s dialogues (especially the ones he’s written in the past several years) to be absolutely unreadable. His non-dialogue writing was much, much easier to read.