Occasionally I think about writing a review, but then feel like I’m too confused to do so.
Some of my open questions:
I’m unsure of what to write. The post says that “A good frame of reference for the reviews are shorter versions of LessWrong or SlatestarCodex book reviews (which do a combination of epistemic spot checks, summarizing, and contextualizing)”, but this feels like weird advice for reviewing a blog post, which is much shorter than a book. Especially the “summarizing” bit—for most posts the content is already too short for further summarizing to make sense. This guideline confuses me more than it helps.
If I just ignore the guideline and think about what would make sense to me, it would be… something like my longer nomination comments. But I already posted those as nominations. Should I re-post some of them as reviews? That seems silly.
I don’t know which posts I should review. I won’t have the chance to review all of them, so I should pick just a few. But which ones? The post says “Posts that got at least one review proceed to the voting phase”, which makes it sound like reviews are like nominations / votes; a post won’t be included unless it gets at least one vote. That creates an incentive for me not to review posts I don’t like, since even a critical review might cause it to get to the voting stage. So I should probably focus on reviewing the posts that I like. That conclusion does not seem like it’s what was intended, though.
Also, I’m not sure of how to review posts that I didn’t like. The posts that got to this stage are generally decent quality, and I don’t have major criticisms of them. If I don’t think that something should be included in a collection of best posts, then my reason is generally “I didn’t seem to have gotten any lasting value out of it”. But someone else did, or else it would not have been nominated. There’s no point in me posting a review saying “I didn’t get lasting value out of this, but of course someone else might have”.
There should be a post coming up soon that goes into more examples of how to do Reviews. It’s a bit tough question because different posts benefit from different types of reviews.
A thing that I think is commonly useful is asking “what are the actual claims this post is making”, and listing them succinctly, and writing up some thoughts about how we could actually empirically check if those claims are true. (Even if we don’t actually run the experiment, I think operationalizing what observations we’d expect in the world is helpful for evaluating when/why/whether the post is valid)
One of the key ideas here is that I’d like posts to have gotten someone to “look into the dark”. If the post wasn’t as useful as it seemed, how would we know? If 10 years from now you no longer endorsed the post, why might that be?
Occasionally I think about writing a review, but then feel like I’m too confused to do so.
Some of my open questions:
I’m unsure of what to write. The post says that “A good frame of reference for the reviews are shorter versions of LessWrong or SlatestarCodex book reviews (which do a combination of epistemic spot checks, summarizing, and contextualizing)”, but this feels like weird advice for reviewing a blog post, which is much shorter than a book. Especially the “summarizing” bit—for most posts the content is already too short for further summarizing to make sense. This guideline confuses me more than it helps.
If I just ignore the guideline and think about what would make sense to me, it would be… something like my longer nomination comments. But I already posted those as nominations. Should I re-post some of them as reviews? That seems silly.
I don’t know which posts I should review. I won’t have the chance to review all of them, so I should pick just a few. But which ones? The post says “Posts that got at least one review proceed to the voting phase”, which makes it sound like reviews are like nominations / votes; a post won’t be included unless it gets at least one vote. That creates an incentive for me not to review posts I don’t like, since even a critical review might cause it to get to the voting stage. So I should probably focus on reviewing the posts that I like. That conclusion does not seem like it’s what was intended, though.
Also, I’m not sure of how to review posts that I didn’t like. The posts that got to this stage are generally decent quality, and I don’t have major criticisms of them. If I don’t think that something should be included in a collection of best posts, then my reason is generally “I didn’t seem to have gotten any lasting value out of it”. But someone else did, or else it would not have been nominated. There’s no point in me posting a review saying “I didn’t get lasting value out of this, but of course someone else might have”.
There should be a post coming up soon that goes into more examples of how to do Reviews. It’s a bit tough question because different posts benefit from different types of reviews.
A thing that I think is commonly useful is asking “what are the actual claims this post is making”, and listing them succinctly, and writing up some thoughts about how we could actually empirically check if those claims are true. (Even if we don’t actually run the experiment, I think operationalizing what observations we’d expect in the world is helpful for evaluating when/why/whether the post is valid)
One of the key ideas here is that I’d like posts to have gotten someone to “look into the dark”. If the post wasn’t as useful as it seemed, how would we know? If 10 years from now you no longer endorsed the post, why might that be?
Here’s a review of mine that I think is pretty representative of the sort of review that I, personally, am most excited about.