It seems to me like I’d have to make the abstract half the length of this post for this to work—there’s not a simple takeaway here, if I could have done this in a small abstract I wouldn’t have written the whole post!
The case for an abstract or section headings is much stronger for the Authoritarian Empiricism post which goes into detail about stuff not directly relevant to the main point, but at this point I’ve basically given up on most real engagement by people I’m not in a direct dialogue with and am throwing these things up on a sort of just-in-case basis and trying not to do extra work that I don’t expect to pay off. I also don’t think of the tangents as less important than the central structure.
Something about the way in which you’re talking about this makes me not trust the advice you’re giving. I’m finding it hard to articulate precisely, but I think it has to do with a sense that the abstract and full length article structure tends towards things where the abstract makes an assertion, and then the article makes a bunch of defensible claims and gives a GPT2ish sense of having made an argument without really adding much to the abstract. I don’t really want to compete with that, so I feel reluctant to adopt its literary conventions.
ETA: On review, there was already a summary at the beginning of the Authoritarian Empiricism post:
I noticed over the first couple days of Passover that the men in the pseudo-community I grew up in seem to think there’s a personal moral obligation to honor contracts pretty much regardless of the coercion involved, and the women seem to get that this increases the amount of violence in the world by quite a lot relative to optimal play, but they don’t really tell the men. This seems related somehow to a thing where they feel anxiety about modeling people as political subjects instead of just objectifying them, but when they slap down attempts to do that, they pretend they’re insisting on rigor and empiricism.
Which I’d wrongly internalized, as a kid, as good-faith critiques of my epistemics.
The beginning of Totalitarian ethical systems similarly summarizes somewhat telegraphically (naturally, it’s a summary) what the rest of the post explains in detail. I’m not sure what’s missing here.
On review, there was already a summary at the beginning of the Authoritarian Empiricism post
I didn’t recognize this as a summary because it seemed to be talking about a specific “pseudo-community” and I didn’t interpret it as making a general point. Even reading it now, knowing that it’s a summary, I still can’t tell what the main point of the article might be. The beginning of Totalitarian ethical systems seems clearer as summary now that you’ve described it as such, but before that I didn’t know if it was presenting the main point or just an example of a more general point or something tangential, etc., since I didn’t understand all of the rest of the post so I couldn’t be sure the main point of the post wasn’t something different.
Also it seems like the point of a summary is to clearly communicate what the main points of the post are so the reader has some reference to know whether they should read the rest of it and also to help understand the rest of the post (since they can interpret it in relation to the main points) and having an unlabeled summary seems to defeat these purposes as the reader can’t even recognize the summary as a summary before they’ve read and understood the rest of the post.
Thanks for the additional detail. In general I consider a post of that length that has a “main point” to be too long. I’m writing something more like essays than like treatises, while it seems to me that your reading style is optimized for treatises. When I’m writing something more like a treatise, I do find it intuitive to have summaries of main points, clear section headings, etc. But the essay form tends to explore the connections between a set of ideas rather than work out a detailed argument for one.
I’m open to arguments that I should be investing more in treatises, but right now I don’t really see the extra work per idea as paying off in a greater number of readers understanding the ideas and taking initiative to extend them, apply them, or explain them to others in other contexts.
but at this point I’ve basically given up on most real engagement by people I’m not in a direct dialogue with and am throwing these things up on a sort of just-in-case basis and trying not to do extra work that I don’t expect to pay off.
Thanks for the clarification, but if I had known this earlier, I probably would have invested less time/effort trying to understand these posts. Maybe you could put this disclaimer on top of your dialog posts in the future for the benefit of other readers?
Hmm, I think I can be clearer (and nicer) than I’ve been.
I wouldn’t be posting this stuff if I didn’t think it was a reasonably efficient summary of an important model component, enough that I’m happy to move on and point people back to the relevant post if they need that particular piece of context.
I try to write and title this stuff so that it’s easy to see what the theme etc. is early in the post. Dialogue that doesn’t have an intuitive narrative arc is much less likely to get posted as-is, much more likely to be cannibalized into a more conventional article. But there’s something about putting up an abstract or summary separate from the body of the article that often feels bad and forced, like it’s designed for a baseline expectation that articles will have a lot of what I’d consider pointless filler. I don’t want to signal that—I want my writing to accurately signal what it is and I worry that a shell written in a different style will tacitly send discordant signals, doing more harm than good.
I can’t write high-quality posts on these particular topics with LessWrong in mind as the target audience, because I have little expectation that my understanding will be improved by engagement from LessWrong. The motivation structure of writing for readers who include the noninterested isn’t conducive to high-quality output for me—the responses of the imagined reader affects my sense of taste. So I have to write them with some other audience in mind. I write them to be high-quality in that context. (It does seem to be getting a bit better lately, though.) But I share them on LessWrong since I do actually think there’s a non-negligible chance that someone on LessWrong will pick up some of the ideas and use them, or engage with some part productively.
I don’t seem to get enhanced engagement when I try to preempt likely questions—instead the post just ends up being too long for people to bother with even if I have an abstract and section headings, and the kinds of readers who would benefit from a more tightly written treatment find it too tedious to engage with. My series on GiveWell is an example. I’m often happy to expand on arguments etc. if I find out that they’re actually unclear, depending on how sympathetic I find the confusion.
More specific feedback would be helpful to me, like, “I started reading this article because I got the sense that it was about X, and was disappointed because it didn’t cover arguments Y and Z that I consider important.” Though almost the same information is contained in “what about arguments Y and Z?”, and I expect I’d make similar updates in how to write articles in either case.
In the specific case you brought up (negotiations between NK govt or NK people), it’s really tangential to the core structural points in the dialogue, which include (a) it’s important to track your political commitments, since not representing them in your internal model doesn’t mean you don’t have them, it just means you’re unable to reason about them, and (b) it’s important to have a model of whether negotiation is possible and with whom before ruling out negotiation. Your (implied) question helped me notice that that point had been missed by at least one reader in my target audience.
(Sorry, due to attending a research retreat I didn’t get a chance to answer your comments until now.)
I don’t think you should care so much about engagement as opposed to communicating your ideas to your readers. I found your series on GiveWell a lot easier to understand would much prefer writings in that style.
More specific feedback would be helpful to me, like, “I started reading this article because I got the sense that it was about X, and was disappointed because it didn’t cover arguments Y and Z that I consider important.”
I started reading this post because I read some posts from you in the past that I liked (such as the GiveWell one), and on these dialog ones it was just really hard to tell what main points you’re trying to make. I questioned the NK government vs NK people thing because I at least understood that part, and didn’t realize it’s tangential.
Like, before you added a summary, this post started by talking to a friend who used “threatening” with regard to NK, without even mentioning EA, which made me think “why should I care about this?” so I tried to skim the article but that didn’t work (I found one part that seemed clear to me but that turned out to be tangential). I guess just don’t know how to read an article that doesn’t clearly at the outset say what the main points are (and therefore why I should care), and which also can’t be skimmed.
Thanks, this style of feedback is much easier for me to understand! I’m a bit confused about how much I should care about people having liked my post on GiveWell since it doesn’t seem like the discourse going forward changed much as a result. I don’t think I’ve seen a single clear example of someone taking initiative (where saying something new in public based on engagement with the post’s underlying model would count as taking initiative) as a result of that post, and making different giving decisions would probably count too. As a consolation prize, I’ll accept reduced initiative in counterproductive directions.
If you can point me to an example of either of those (obviously I’d have to take your word about counterfactuals) then I’ll update away from thinking that writing that sort of post is futile. Strength of update depends somewhat on effect size, of course.
FWIW, your Givewell posts have formed an important background model of how I think about the funding landscape.
I considered pushing forward in a direction that looked like “Get Good Ventures to change direction”, but after looking into the situation more, my takeaway was “Good Ventures / OpenPhil don’t actually look like they should be doing things differently. I have some sense that everyone else should be doing things differently, but not a clear sense on how to coordinate around that.”
I don’t think I’ve seen a single clear example of someone taking initiative (where saying something new in public based on engagement with the post’s underlying model would count as taking initiative) as a result of that post, and making different giving decisions would probably count too.
I wrote a post that was in part a response/followup to your GiveWell post although I’m not sure if you’d count that as engagement with your underlying model or just superficially engaging with the conclusions or going off on a tangent or something like that.
I think I have some general confusion about what you’re trying to do. If you think you have ideas that are good enough to, upon vetting by a wider community, potentially be basis for action for others or help change other people’s decisions, or be the basis for further thinking by others, and aren’t getting as much engagement as you hope, it seems like you should try harder to communicate your ideas clearly and to a wide audience. On the other hand if you’re still pretty confused about something and still trying to figure things out to your own satisfaction, then it would make sense to just talk with others who already share your context and not try super hard to make things clear to a wider audience. Or do you think you’ve figured some things out but it doesn’t seem cost effective to communicate to a wider audience but you might as well put them out there in a low-effort way and maybe a few readers will get your ideas.
(So one suggestion/complaint is to make clearer which type of post is which. Just throwing things out there isn’t low cost if it wastes readers’ time! Again maybe you think that should just be obvious from looking at the first few paragraphs of a post but it was not to me, in part because others like Eliezer use dialogs to write the first kind of post. In retrospect he was writing fictionalized dialogs instead of reporting actual dialogs but I think that’s why the post didn’t immediately jump out to me as “maybe this isn’t worthwhile for me to try to understand so I should stop before I invest more time/effort into it”.)
It seems like you’re saying that you rarely or never get enough engagement with the first type of writing, so you no longer think that is cost effective for you, but then what is your motivation for trying to figure these things out now? Just to guide your own actions and maybe a very small group of others? If so, what is your reason for being so pessimistic about getting your ideas into a wider audience if you tried harder? Are there not comparably complex or subtle or counterintuitive ideas that have gotten into a wider audience?
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.
It seems to me like I’d have to make the abstract half the length of this post for this to work—there’s not a simple takeaway here, if I could have done this in a small abstract I wouldn’t have written the whole post!
The case for an abstract or section headings is much stronger for the Authoritarian Empiricism post which goes into detail about stuff not directly relevant to the main point, but at this point I’ve basically given up on most real engagement by people I’m not in a direct dialogue with and am throwing these things up on a sort of just-in-case basis and trying not to do extra work that I don’t expect to pay off. I also don’t think of the tangents as less important than the central structure.
Something about the way in which you’re talking about this makes me not trust the advice you’re giving. I’m finding it hard to articulate precisely, but I think it has to do with a sense that the abstract and full length article structure tends towards things where the abstract makes an assertion, and then the article makes a bunch of defensible claims and gives a GPT2ish sense of having made an argument without really adding much to the abstract. I don’t really want to compete with that, so I feel reluctant to adopt its literary conventions.
ETA: On review, there was already a summary at the beginning of the Authoritarian Empiricism post:
The beginning of Totalitarian ethical systems similarly summarizes somewhat telegraphically (naturally, it’s a summary) what the rest of the post explains in detail. I’m not sure what’s missing here.
I didn’t recognize this as a summary because it seemed to be talking about a specific “pseudo-community” and I didn’t interpret it as making a general point. Even reading it now, knowing that it’s a summary, I still can’t tell what the main point of the article might be. The beginning of Totalitarian ethical systems seems clearer as summary now that you’ve described it as such, but before that I didn’t know if it was presenting the main point or just an example of a more general point or something tangential, etc., since I didn’t understand all of the rest of the post so I couldn’t be sure the main point of the post wasn’t something different.
Also it seems like the point of a summary is to clearly communicate what the main points of the post are so the reader has some reference to know whether they should read the rest of it and also to help understand the rest of the post (since they can interpret it in relation to the main points) and having an unlabeled summary seems to defeat these purposes as the reader can’t even recognize the summary as a summary before they’ve read and understood the rest of the post.
Thanks for the additional detail. In general I consider a post of that length that has a “main point” to be too long. I’m writing something more like essays than like treatises, while it seems to me that your reading style is optimized for treatises. When I’m writing something more like a treatise, I do find it intuitive to have summaries of main points, clear section headings, etc. But the essay form tends to explore the connections between a set of ideas rather than work out a detailed argument for one.
I’m open to arguments that I should be investing more in treatises, but right now I don’t really see the extra work per idea as paying off in a greater number of readers understanding the ideas and taking initiative to extend them, apply them, or explain them to others in other contexts.
Thanks for the clarification, but if I had known this earlier, I probably would have invested less time/effort trying to understand these posts. Maybe you could put this disclaimer on top of your dialog posts in the future for the benefit of other readers?
Hmm, I think I can be clearer (and nicer) than I’ve been.
I wouldn’t be posting this stuff if I didn’t think it was a reasonably efficient summary of an important model component, enough that I’m happy to move on and point people back to the relevant post if they need that particular piece of context.
I try to write and title this stuff so that it’s easy to see what the theme etc. is early in the post. Dialogue that doesn’t have an intuitive narrative arc is much less likely to get posted as-is, much more likely to be cannibalized into a more conventional article. But there’s something about putting up an abstract or summary separate from the body of the article that often feels bad and forced, like it’s designed for a baseline expectation that articles will have a lot of what I’d consider pointless filler. I don’t want to signal that—I want my writing to accurately signal what it is and I worry that a shell written in a different style will tacitly send discordant signals, doing more harm than good.
I can’t write high-quality posts on these particular topics with LessWrong in mind as the target audience, because I have little expectation that my understanding will be improved by engagement from LessWrong. The motivation structure of writing for readers who include the noninterested isn’t conducive to high-quality output for me—the responses of the imagined reader affects my sense of taste. So I have to write them with some other audience in mind. I write them to be high-quality in that context. (It does seem to be getting a bit better lately, though.) But I share them on LessWrong since I do actually think there’s a non-negligible chance that someone on LessWrong will pick up some of the ideas and use them, or engage with some part productively.
I don’t seem to get enhanced engagement when I try to preempt likely questions—instead the post just ends up being too long for people to bother with even if I have an abstract and section headings, and the kinds of readers who would benefit from a more tightly written treatment find it too tedious to engage with. My series on GiveWell is an example. I’m often happy to expand on arguments etc. if I find out that they’re actually unclear, depending on how sympathetic I find the confusion.
More specific feedback would be helpful to me, like, “I started reading this article because I got the sense that it was about X, and was disappointed because it didn’t cover arguments Y and Z that I consider important.” Though almost the same information is contained in “what about arguments Y and Z?”, and I expect I’d make similar updates in how to write articles in either case.
In the specific case you brought up (negotiations between NK govt or NK people), it’s really tangential to the core structural points in the dialogue, which include (a) it’s important to track your political commitments, since not representing them in your internal model doesn’t mean you don’t have them, it just means you’re unable to reason about them, and (b) it’s important to have a model of whether negotiation is possible and with whom before ruling out negotiation. Your (implied) question helped me notice that that point had been missed by at least one reader in my target audience.
(Sorry, due to attending a research retreat I didn’t get a chance to answer your comments until now.)
I don’t think you should care so much about engagement as opposed to communicating your ideas to your readers. I found your series on GiveWell a lot easier to understand would much prefer writings in that style.
I started reading this post because I read some posts from you in the past that I liked (such as the GiveWell one), and on these dialog ones it was just really hard to tell what main points you’re trying to make. I questioned the NK government vs NK people thing because I at least understood that part, and didn’t realize it’s tangential.
Like, before you added a summary, this post started by talking to a friend who used “threatening” with regard to NK, without even mentioning EA, which made me think “why should I care about this?” so I tried to skim the article but that didn’t work (I found one part that seemed clear to me but that turned out to be tangential). I guess just don’t know how to read an article that doesn’t clearly at the outset say what the main points are (and therefore why I should care), and which also can’t be skimmed.
Thanks, this style of feedback is much easier for me to understand! I’m a bit confused about how much I should care about people having liked my post on GiveWell since it doesn’t seem like the discourse going forward changed much as a result. I don’t think I’ve seen a single clear example of someone taking initiative (where saying something new in public based on engagement with the post’s underlying model would count as taking initiative) as a result of that post, and making different giving decisions would probably count too. As a consolation prize, I’ll accept reduced initiative in counterproductive directions.
If you can point me to an example of either of those (obviously I’d have to take your word about counterfactuals) then I’ll update away from thinking that writing that sort of post is futile. Strength of update depends somewhat on effect size, of course.
FWIW, your Givewell posts have formed an important background model of how I think about the funding landscape.
I considered pushing forward in a direction that looked like “Get Good Ventures to change direction”, but after looking into the situation more, my takeaway was “Good Ventures / OpenPhil don’t actually look like they should be doing things differently. I have some sense that everyone else should be doing things differently, but not a clear sense on how to coordinate around that.”
I wrote a post that was in part a response/followup to your GiveWell post although I’m not sure if you’d count that as engagement with your underlying model or just superficially engaging with the conclusions or going off on a tangent or something like that.
I think I have some general confusion about what you’re trying to do. If you think you have ideas that are good enough to, upon vetting by a wider community, potentially be basis for action for others or help change other people’s decisions, or be the basis for further thinking by others, and aren’t getting as much engagement as you hope, it seems like you should try harder to communicate your ideas clearly and to a wide audience. On the other hand if you’re still pretty confused about something and still trying to figure things out to your own satisfaction, then it would make sense to just talk with others who already share your context and not try super hard to make things clear to a wider audience. Or do you think you’ve figured some things out but it doesn’t seem cost effective to communicate to a wider audience but you might as well put them out there in a low-effort way and maybe a few readers will get your ideas.
(So one suggestion/complaint is to make clearer which type of post is which. Just throwing things out there isn’t low cost if it wastes readers’ time! Again maybe you think that should just be obvious from looking at the first few paragraphs of a post but it was not to me, in part because others like Eliezer use dialogs to write the first kind of post. In retrospect he was writing fictionalized dialogs instead of reporting actual dialogs but I think that’s why the post didn’t immediately jump out to me as “maybe this isn’t worthwhile for me to try to understand so I should stop before I invest more time/effort into it”.)
It seems like you’re saying that you rarely or never get enough engagement with the first type of writing, so you no longer think that is cost effective for you, but then what is your motivation for trying to figure these things out now? Just to guide your own actions and maybe a very small group of others? If so, what is your reason for being so pessimistic about getting your ideas into a wider audience if you tried harder? Are there not comparably complex or subtle or counterintuitive ideas that have gotten into a wider audience?
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.