I agree. My knee-jerk reaction “does not play well with signaling games” has a lot to do with how “thought about it for five minutes” looks to someone not familiar with the LW meme about that. This might address my other point as well: perhaps if people were used to seeing things like “thought for 5 minutes” and “did one google search” and so on, they would feel comfortable writing those things and it wouldn’t make people self-conscious. Or maybe not, if (like me) they also think about how non-community-members would read the labels.
I think some beliefs I have that others may not share is that:
a) for the Less Wrong project to succeed, we’ll need to develop a lot of cultural tools that are different from how mainstream society does things, and that may mean it’ll necessarily look weird to outsiders.
b) the Less Wrong brand is, frankly, already pretty thoroughly ruined. Not enough effort was put into PR concerns in the early days. By now, it’s well known as a pretty weird place, and trying to salvage that reputation seems like wasted effort to me. This is almost convenient though, because it means we can now focus mostly on doing what is effective rather than worrying (overly much, anyhow), about what looks weird.
(Epistemic effort: have not actually done anything to validate either of these assumptions, they are just how it seems to me)
So I think it, as far as posts on Less Wrong itself go, it’s totally fine to do things that don’t necessarily interface with outside status games.
I do think it’s also handy to develop cultural tools that are accessible to the rest of the world. On your facebook wall, it’d be nice to have status-tags that other people might want to adopt. Where possible, I do agree that we should cultivate norms on Less Wrong that work well in the rest of the world. But I don’t think we should completely shy away from norms.
I personally don’t have any intuitive sense of “thought about it for 5 minutes” to be a bad thing (especially for the reasons WhySpace describes—it tells people what to expect). And if you’re publishing a major essay that you want to be taken seriously, it’s important that you put more than 5 minutes of thought into it. If you want it to be taken seriously, the option of “actually put in more work that sounds genuinely impressive” is an option.
My reaction was the complete opposite: an excellent signaling tool.
If I just made a connection between 2 things, and want to bounce ideas off people, I can just say Epistemic effort: Thought about it musingly, and wanted to bounce the idea off a few people and no one will judge me for have a partially formed idea. Perhaps more importantly, anyone not interested in such things will skip the article, instead of wasting their time, and feeling the need do discourage my offending low quality post.
I’m not a fan of “brainstorming” in particular, but there really does seem to be a problem that brainstorming is trying to solve, and I think this would help solve it. Refining a diamond in the rough doesn’t have to be a solitary activity; it can be a community task.
I agree. My knee-jerk reaction “does not play well with signaling games” has a lot to do with how “thought about it for five minutes” looks to someone not familiar with the LW meme about that. This might address my other point as well: perhaps if people were used to seeing things like “thought for 5 minutes” and “did one google search” and so on, they would feel comfortable writing those things and it wouldn’t make people self-conscious. Or maybe not, if (like me) they also think about how non-community-members would read the labels.
I think some beliefs I have that others may not share is that:
a) for the Less Wrong project to succeed, we’ll need to develop a lot of cultural tools that are different from how mainstream society does things, and that may mean it’ll necessarily look weird to outsiders.
b) the Less Wrong brand is, frankly, already pretty thoroughly ruined. Not enough effort was put into PR concerns in the early days. By now, it’s well known as a pretty weird place, and trying to salvage that reputation seems like wasted effort to me. This is almost convenient though, because it means we can now focus mostly on doing what is effective rather than worrying (overly much, anyhow), about what looks weird.
(Epistemic effort: have not actually done anything to validate either of these assumptions, they are just how it seems to me)
So I think it, as far as posts on Less Wrong itself go, it’s totally fine to do things that don’t necessarily interface with outside status games.
I do think it’s also handy to develop cultural tools that are accessible to the rest of the world. On your facebook wall, it’d be nice to have status-tags that other people might want to adopt. Where possible, I do agree that we should cultivate norms on Less Wrong that work well in the rest of the world. But I don’t think we should completely shy away from norms.
I personally don’t have any intuitive sense of “thought about it for 5 minutes” to be a bad thing (especially for the reasons WhySpace describes—it tells people what to expect). And if you’re publishing a major essay that you want to be taken seriously, it’s important that you put more than 5 minutes of thought into it. If you want it to be taken seriously, the option of “actually put in more work that sounds genuinely impressive” is an option.
My reaction was the complete opposite: an excellent signaling tool.
If I just made a connection between 2 things, and want to bounce ideas off people, I can just say Epistemic effort: Thought about it musingly, and wanted to bounce the idea off a few people and no one will judge me for have a partially formed idea. Perhaps more importantly, anyone not interested in such things will skip the article, instead of wasting their time, and feeling the need do discourage my offending low quality post.
I’m not a fan of “brainstorming” in particular, but there really does seem to be a problem that brainstorming is trying to solve, and I think this would help solve it. Refining a diamond in the rough doesn’t have to be a solitary activity; it can be a community task.