This fits with my depiction of LW as a sort of serious-minded scholarly fanfic community.
I think it can be valuable to read the post alone, write down your reaction to it, and only then examine the comments. If somebody else made the same critique as you, it’s a bit like pre-registering an experiment. You can have more confidence that you’re doing your own thinking, and that you’re converging on the truth. Perhaps this is a way to get out of the “I can only produce rationalizations” dilemma.
I think I didn’t get the fanfic analogy at first. Could I summarise it as “Lesswrong is to scholarship as serious fanfic is to original novels”?
I know the LW team have spoken about a level above curated which would be intended to be more on the level of scholarship. I think the 2018 review was designed to serve this purpose so we should hope that these posts in particular don’t contain any glaring errors!
I think it’s super valuable to be able to be able to put imperfect ideas out there (I see one of the 2018 review top posts was Babble!) but thinking about this has really emphasised to me how useful epistemic statuses are.
To your second paragraph—yes, definitely this! When I do this it definitely gets me out of the habit of passive reading.
This fits with my depiction of LW as a sort of serious-minded scholarly fanfic community.
I think it can be valuable to read the post alone, write down your reaction to it, and only then examine the comments. If somebody else made the same critique as you, it’s a bit like pre-registering an experiment. You can have more confidence that you’re doing your own thinking, and that you’re converging on the truth. Perhaps this is a way to get out of the “I can only produce rationalizations” dilemma.
I think I didn’t get the fanfic analogy at first. Could I summarise it as “Lesswrong is to scholarship as serious fanfic is to original novels”?
I know the LW team have spoken about a level above curated which would be intended to be more on the level of scholarship. I think the 2018 review was designed to serve this purpose so we should hope that these posts in particular don’t contain any glaring errors!
I think it’s super valuable to be able to be able to put imperfect ideas out there (I see one of the 2018 review top posts was Babble!) but thinking about this has really emphasised to me how useful epistemic statuses are.
To your second paragraph—yes, definitely this! When I do this it definitely gets me out of the habit of passive reading.