After tagging settles down a bit, it may be time to re-visit this question more.
I think LW hasn’t yet managed to approach google docs in terms of draft-feedback process. Since I compose all my posts directly on LW, this matters to me (of course I could try to copy/paste).
GDoc-Like Comments For Drafts
The primary thing here is the commenting-on-highlights interface. It’s just so much better for editing!
Probably this should work for publish posts as well, facilitating easy private pings of authors for broken links, spelling mistakes, etc. Although there’s a question of whether this kind of direct editing feedback from anyone feels aversive and could discourage people.
GDoc-Like Comments for Public Review/Critique
I also think it would be nice if there were some way to associate public comments with specific points in a document, for the purpose of well-organized debate about the points raised in a post. However, I don’t know how to make this work without it being (a) pretty aversive, and (b) not too visually cluttered, while (c) still making sure people can see the point-by-point objections to a post fairly easily.
Argument Diagramming
This is a bit of a stretch, but it sure would be nice if there were some natural argument-diagramming going on. To sketch a possible implementation:
Points in posts can be pulled out and associated with questions.
Questions can be associated with each other via arguments. EG, an answer (perhaps a new type of answer, not a text answer) can state that a particular answer would be true if X and Y were true, where X and Y are different answers (to different questions).
The point is not so much that this is a good idea as stated. It’s just that some form of argument mapping might really help to map disagreements and ultimately clarify the evidential status of contentious points raised in a post.
Post Endorsement
Upvotes have ambiguous meaning. For a while (mainly due to Curi accusing LW of lacking any surface area for falsification, due to the way no one explicitly stands by any principles or any canonical texts as really seriously right) I have been thinking that it would be nice if LW encouraged users to state what they endorse on their homepages. But this would not do very much good without a system for discussing endorsements.
Let’s say for a moment that a post called “The Blindness of History” is really popular but has a big flaw in its argument—for concreteness let’s say it cites a major source as stating the exact opposite of what that source really concludes. People don’t notice right away, and like 50 people endorse that post.
Someone notices the problem. Now they need to approach like 50 people and question their endorsements. There needs to be a way to find all the people who endorse a post and do something like that. As things stand, you’d have to search users to find the ones mentioning that post as endorsed on their profile page, and then PM each one.
There could be something good about having a public system like that, which notifies users specifically of challenges to posts which they endorse, and encourages users to respond somehow, perhaps putting an explicit caveat into their endorsement or something.
And of course, these responses need to themselves have responses, etc, encouraging real responses because if you made a bad argument someone will call you out on it.
Yep, this seems doable, we’re working on it. Not currently a priority (lately it’s been tagging for most of the team, and the book for me). I think it’s plausibly the next priority.
GDoc-Like Comments for Public Review/Critique
My main issue is the visual clutter and breaking up a person’s narrative flow. I think the reading experience of this post is substantially impeded by the regular comments saying “Nope, different thing” which often demotivates continuing reading the main argument, and I wouldn’t want to force that onto writers’ posts.
Some options that come to mind: authors choosing to confirm the comments appearing inline (and otherwise they just appear in the normal comment section); authors choosing a small number of users who can comment inline; things only appearing inline if they reach a karma threshold; things only appearing inline after you’ve already read the post once (e.g. a button at the end of the post to turn the comments inline). I don’t expect any of these ideas to work. Overall I’ve not played around with it yet, will probably have better ideas later.
Argument Diagramming
I like your concrete suggestions, I feel more pessimistic about something like ‘automatically generated diagrams’, they reliably go very poorly.
Post Endorsement
Something about negotiating lots of public endorsements sounds very gossipy to me in a way that I could imagine being a big mess. I do quite like the idea that when people criticise a post and the critique gets high karma, the people who upvoted (or strong upvoted) the initial post can get a notification. In general “get a notification for substantial discussion of a post I liked” sounds like a notification I’d like to get.
After tagging settles down a bit, it may be time to re-visit this question more.
I think LW hasn’t yet managed to approach google docs in terms of draft-feedback process. Since I compose all my posts directly on LW, this matters to me (of course I could try to copy/paste).
GDoc-Like Comments For Drafts
The primary thing here is the commenting-on-highlights interface. It’s just so much better for editing!
Probably this should work for publish posts as well, facilitating easy private pings of authors for broken links, spelling mistakes, etc. Although there’s a question of whether this kind of direct editing feedback from anyone feels aversive and could discourage people.
GDoc-Like Comments for Public Review/Critique
I also think it would be nice if there were some way to associate public comments with specific points in a document, for the purpose of well-organized debate about the points raised in a post. However, I don’t know how to make this work without it being (a) pretty aversive, and (b) not too visually cluttered, while (c) still making sure people can see the point-by-point objections to a post fairly easily.
Argument Diagramming
This is a bit of a stretch, but it sure would be nice if there were some natural argument-diagramming going on. To sketch a possible implementation:
Points in posts can be pulled out and associated with questions.
Questions can be associated with each other via arguments. EG, an answer (perhaps a new type of answer, not a text answer) can state that a particular answer would be true if X and Y were true, where X and Y are different answers (to different questions).
The point is not so much that this is a good idea as stated. It’s just that some form of argument mapping might really help to map disagreements and ultimately clarify the evidential status of contentious points raised in a post.
Post Endorsement
Upvotes have ambiguous meaning. For a while (mainly due to Curi accusing LW of lacking any surface area for falsification, due to the way no one explicitly stands by any principles or any canonical texts as really seriously right) I have been thinking that it would be nice if LW encouraged users to state what they endorse on their homepages. But this would not do very much good without a system for discussing endorsements.
Let’s say for a moment that a post called “The Blindness of History” is really popular but has a big flaw in its argument—for concreteness let’s say it cites a major source as stating the exact opposite of what that source really concludes. People don’t notice right away, and like 50 people endorse that post.
Someone notices the problem. Now they need to approach like 50 people and question their endorsements. There needs to be a way to find all the people who endorse a post and do something like that. As things stand, you’d have to search users to find the ones mentioning that post as endorsed on their profile page, and then PM each one.
There could be something good about having a public system like that, which notifies users specifically of challenges to posts which they endorse, and encourages users to respond somehow, perhaps putting an explicit caveat into their endorsement or something.
And of course, these responses need to themselves have responses, etc, encouraging real responses because if you made a bad argument someone will call you out on it.
Not sure how all of this could possibly work.
GDoc-Like Comments For Drafts
Yep, this seems doable, we’re working on it. Not currently a priority (lately it’s been tagging for most of the team, and the book for me). I think it’s plausibly the next priority.
GDoc-Like Comments for Public Review/Critique
My main issue is the visual clutter and breaking up a person’s narrative flow. I think the reading experience of this post is substantially impeded by the regular comments saying “Nope, different thing” which often demotivates continuing reading the main argument, and I wouldn’t want to force that onto writers’ posts.
Some options that come to mind: authors choosing to confirm the comments appearing inline (and otherwise they just appear in the normal comment section); authors choosing a small number of users who can comment inline; things only appearing inline if they reach a karma threshold; things only appearing inline after you’ve already read the post once (e.g. a button at the end of the post to turn the comments inline). I don’t expect any of these ideas to work. Overall I’ve not played around with it yet, will probably have better ideas later.
Argument Diagramming
I like your concrete suggestions, I feel more pessimistic about something like ‘automatically generated diagrams’, they reliably go very poorly.
Post Endorsement
Something about negotiating lots of public endorsements sounds very gossipy to me in a way that I could imagine being a big mess. I do quite like the idea that when people criticise a post and the critique gets high karma, the people who upvoted (or strong upvoted) the initial post can get a notification. In general “get a notification for substantial discussion of a post I liked” sounds like a notification I’d like to get.