What is the plan for incorporation of comments into the book?
I’m guessing for most posts they’ll just be omitted, and it’ll be fine (or perhaps some curated selection of comments will make it into the book). But I notice that Unreal’s Circling seems to be a historically relevant post that I would only want to endorse if it came along with a substantial fraction of the discussion in the comments (in a way that would dramatically lengthen its section, possibly ‘taking over’ the book).
I hunted your comment down here and upvoted it strongly.
I basically only write comments, and when I write “comments for the ages” that I feel proud of, I consider it a good sign if they (1) get many upvotes (especially votes that arrive after lots of competing sibling comments already exist) and (2) do not get any responses (except “Wow! Good! Thanks!” kind of stuff).
Looking at “first level comments” to worthwhile OPs according to a measure like this might provide some interesting and reasonably brief postscripts.
Applying the same basic measure to posts themselves, if an OP gets a large number of direct replies that are highly upvoted that OP may not be dense with relatively useful and/or flawless content. (Though there are probably exceptions that could be detected by thoughtful curating… for example, if the OP is a request for ideas then a lot of highly voted comments are kinda the point.)
A lot of the details are up in the air – over the next week I plan to write out a lot of my thoughts and open questions about the review process, and how it should feel into the overall end product.
One option is to include a curated selection of comments from the post. Another is to sort of leave that up to reviewers, to distill those comments down into a more succinct encapsulation of them. In some cases it might be that the commenters “got it right the first time”, and basically wrote a fine “review-like comment” back in 2018, and there should be some way of marking an old comment as a review, retroactively.
A middle ground might be something like “in addition to summarizing key points from the previous discussion, reviewers can point to particular comments that seem worth including”.
In the end, the editors will make some judgment calls about how much fits – we definitely wouldn’t include the entire comment section of Circling. My guess is that the upper bound of “amount of comments and/or reviews from a given post to include” is roughly the same as “the upper bound for a post.” (In some cases posts are quite long, but maybe expect the median comments/reviews-length to be comparable to the median post length)
I would like to see some comments considered for inclusion—those that expand on a post in some way (the circling post is a good example).
Also I read slack . I liked it and then G Gordon Worley’s comment brought a new dimension to the concept and expanded my ‘knowledge base’ about things I’ve not really thought about.
What is the plan for incorporation of comments into the book?
I’m guessing for most posts they’ll just be omitted, and it’ll be fine (or perhaps some curated selection of comments will make it into the book). But I notice that Unreal’s Circling seems to be a historically relevant post that I would only want to endorse if it came along with a substantial fraction of the discussion in the comments (in a way that would dramatically lengthen its section, possibly ‘taking over’ the book).
I hunted your comment down here and upvoted it strongly.
I basically only write comments, and when I write “comments for the ages” that I feel proud of, I consider it a good sign if they (1) get many upvotes (especially votes that arrive after lots of competing sibling comments already exist) and (2) do not get any responses (except “Wow! Good! Thanks!” kind of stuff).
Looking at “first level comments” to worthwhile OPs according to a measure like this might provide some interesting and reasonably brief postscripts.
Applying the same basic measure to posts themselves, if an OP gets a large number of direct replies that are highly upvoted that OP may not be dense with relatively useful and/or flawless content. (Though there are probably exceptions that could be detected by thoughtful curating… for example, if the OP is a request for ideas then a lot of highly voted comments are kinda the point.)
A lot of the details are up in the air – over the next week I plan to write out a lot of my thoughts and open questions about the review process, and how it should feel into the overall end product.
One option is to include a curated selection of comments from the post. Another is to sort of leave that up to reviewers, to distill those comments down into a more succinct encapsulation of them. In some cases it might be that the commenters “got it right the first time”, and basically wrote a fine “review-like comment” back in 2018, and there should be some way of marking an old comment as a review, retroactively.
A middle ground might be something like “in addition to summarizing key points from the previous discussion, reviewers can point to particular comments that seem worth including”.
In the end, the editors will make some judgment calls about how much fits – we definitely wouldn’t include the entire comment section of Circling. My guess is that the upper bound of “amount of comments and/or reviews from a given post to include” is roughly the same as “the upper bound for a post.” (In some cases posts are quite long, but maybe expect the median comments/reviews-length to be comparable to the median post length)
I would like to see some comments considered for inclusion—those that expand on a post in some way (the circling post is a good example).
Also I read slack . I liked it and then G Gordon Worley’s comment brought a new dimension to the concept and expanded my ‘knowledge base’ about things I’ve not really thought about.
We have a draft book that tried to do this for some posts on LessWrong. If you ping Ben you can probably take a look at it if you want.