Is there a better place than LW to put a big post on causal information, anthropics, being a person as an event in the probability-theory sense, and decision theory?
I’m somewhat concerned that such things are a pollutant in the LW ecosystem, but I don’t know of a good alternative.
Why would it be a pollutant in the LW ecosystem? This sounds pretty central in the space of things LW people are interested in; what am I missing? (Are you concerned that it would be too elementary for LW? that it might be full of mistakes and annoy or mislead people? that its topic isn’t of interest to LW readers? …)
What’s the intended audience? What’s it for? (Introducing ideas to people who don’t know them? Cutting-edge research? Thinking aloud to get your ideas in order? …)
I think it increases barrier to entry for new people.
Nah. Both Discussion and Main fairly consistently have a mix of intimidating technicality, fun (e.g., “Rationality Quotes”), lifehackery, ethics, random discussion, etc., etc., etc. One more bit of intimidating technicality isn’t going to scare anyone away who wasn’t going to be scared away anyhow.
I guess cutting-edge-adjacent.
Sounds like fun. Go for it, say I.
(Important note: I have not done anything remotely resembling research into the thought processes of potential new LW readers, and my model of them may be badly wrong. Don’t trust the above much. It’s just one random person’s opinion.)
The way I do the equivalent of what you are doing is write up something in various stages of “less than fully baked” and send to someone I know is interested/I respect in private, and have a chat about it. What’s nice about that is it exploits the threat of embarrassment of outputting nonsense to force me to at least “bake” it sufficiently to have a meaningful conversation about it. It’s very easy to output nonsense.
But I am skeptical regarding the wiki model of generating good novel stuff—there’s too much noise.
Is there a better place than LW to put a big post on causal information, anthropics, being a person as an event in the probability-theory sense, and decision theory?
I’m somewhat concerned that such things are a pollutant in the LW ecosystem, but I don’t know of a good alternative.
Why would it be a pollutant in the LW ecosystem? This sounds pretty central in the space of things LW people are interested in; what am I missing? (Are you concerned that it would be too elementary for LW? that it might be full of mistakes and annoy or mislead people? that its topic isn’t of interest to LW readers? …)
What’s the intended audience? What’s it for? (Introducing ideas to people who don’t know them? Cutting-edge research? Thinking aloud to get your ideas in order? …)
I feel like it increases barrier to entry for new people.
Intended audience is me from three years ago, I guess cutting-edge-adjacent.
Barrier to entry shouldn’t be your main criteria. High quality posts draw intelligent people.
Nah. Both Discussion and Main fairly consistently have a mix of intimidating technicality, fun (e.g., “Rationality Quotes”), lifehackery, ethics, random discussion, etc., etc., etc. One more bit of intimidating technicality isn’t going to scare anyone away who wasn’t going to be scared away anyhow.
Sounds like fun. Go for it, say I.
(Important note: I have not done anything remotely resembling research into the thought processes of potential new LW readers, and my model of them may be badly wrong. Don’t trust the above much. It’s just one random person’s opinion.)
Manfred, I think your posts on Sleeping Beauty, etc. are fine, people just may not be able to follow you or have anything to contribute.
Thanks. So would you recommend that for the new stuff I use those sorts of 3/4-baked stream of consciousness posts?
The way I do the equivalent of what you are doing is write up something in various stages of “less than fully baked” and send to someone I know is interested/I respect in private, and have a chat about it. What’s nice about that is it exploits the threat of embarrassment of outputting nonsense to force me to at least “bake” it sufficiently to have a meaningful conversation about it. It’s very easy to output nonsense.
But I am skeptical regarding the wiki model of generating good novel stuff—there’s too much noise.