I curated this post partly for the OP, and partly for the subsequent discussion.
Something valuable I think LessWrong can be is a place where people pose well formed questions on important problems, and then make progress on them. I don’t have the impression that any clear-cut breakthroughs happened here, but it does look like incremental, “chip away at the edges” progress was made.
My current take is that the knowledge-building process has several phases, that can reinforce each other in a non-linear fashion:
researching current literature
transforming ad-hoc exploratory research and impressions into a clearly stated questions
brainstorming new ideas
refining those ideas into something legible
subjective those ideas to scrutiny
distilling all that into a final concept that others can build on
I think it’s important for LW to showcase progress on each of those stages. By default, a tendency is to only publish work that’s reached the final stages, or that feels like it makes some kind of coherent point. This post and comments seemed to be doing some thing real, even if at a middle-stage, and I want it to be clear that this is something LW strives to reward.
I curated this post partly for the OP, and partly for the subsequent discussion.
Something valuable I think LessWrong can be is a place where people pose well formed questions on important problems, and then make progress on them. I don’t have the impression that any clear-cut breakthroughs happened here, but it does look like incremental, “chip away at the edges” progress was made.
My current take is that the knowledge-building process has several phases, that can reinforce each other in a non-linear fashion:
researching current literature
transforming ad-hoc exploratory research and impressions into a clearly stated questions
brainstorming new ideas
refining those ideas into something legible
subjective those ideas to scrutiny
distilling all that into a final concept that others can build on
I think it’s important for LW to showcase progress on each of those stages. By default, a tendency is to only publish work that’s reached the final stages, or that feels like it makes some kind of coherent point. This post and comments seemed to be doing some thing real, even if at a middle-stage, and I want it to be clear that this is something LW strives to reward.