I see this as occurring with various pieces of Infrabayesianism, like Diffractor’s UDT posts. They’re dense enough mathematically (hitting the target) which makes them challenging to read… and then also challenging to discuss. There are fewer comments even from the people who read the entire post because they don’t feel competent enough to make useful commentary (with some truth behind that feeling); the silence also further making commentation harder. At least that’s what I’ve noticed in myself, even though I enjoy & upvote those posts.
Less attention seems natural because of specialization into cognitive niches, not everyone has read all the details of SAEs, or knows all the mathematics referenced in certain agent foundations posts. But it does still make it a problem in socially incentivizing good research.
I don’t know if there are any great solutions. More up-weighting for research-level posts? I view the distillation idea from a ~year ago as helping with drawing attention towards strong (but dense) posts, but it appeared to die down. Try to revive that more?
I see this as occurring with various pieces of Infrabayesianism, like Diffractor’s UDT posts. They’re dense enough mathematically (hitting the target) which makes them challenging to read… and then also challenging to discuss. There are fewer comments even from the people who read the entire post because they don’t feel competent enough to make useful commentary (with some truth behind that feeling); the silence also further making commentation harder. At least that’s what I’ve noticed in myself, even though I enjoy & upvote those posts.
Less attention seems natural because of specialization into cognitive niches, not everyone has read all the details of SAEs, or knows all the mathematics referenced in certain agent foundations posts. But it does still make it a problem in socially incentivizing good research.
I don’t know if there are any great solutions. More up-weighting for research-level posts? I view the distillation idea from a ~year ago as helping with drawing attention towards strong (but dense) posts, but it appeared to die down. Try to revive that more?
What was the distillation idea from a year ago?
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/zo9zKcz47JxDErFzQ/call-for-distillers