I think the engineer mindset is more strongly represented here than you think, but that the nature of nonspecialist online discussion warps things away from the engineer mindset and towards the scientist mindset. Both types of people are present, but the engineer-mindset people tend not to put that part of themselves forward here.
The problem with getting down into the details is that there are many areas with messy details to get into, and it’s hard to appreciate the messy details of an area you haven’t spent enough time in. So deep dives in narrow topics wind up looking more like engineer-mindset, while shallow passes over wide areas wind up looking more like scientist-mindset. LessWrong posts can’t assume much background, which limits their depth.
I would be happy to see more deep-dives; a lightly edited transcript of John Carmack wouldn’t be a prototypical LessWrong post, but it would be a good one. But such posts are necessarily going to exclude a lot of readers, and LessWrong isn’t necessarily going to be competitive with posting in more topic-specialized places.
After I saw that Benito did a transcript post, I considered doing one for one of Carmack’s talks or a recent interview of Yann LeCunn I found pretty interesting (based on the talks of his I’ve listened to, LeCunn has a pretty engineering-y mindset even though he’s nominally a scientist). Not going to happen immediately though since it requires a pretty big time investment.
Alternatively, maybe I’ll review Masters of Doom, which is where I learned most of what I know about Carmack.
I think the engineer mindset is more strongly represented here than you think, but that the nature of nonspecialist online discussion warps things away from the engineer mindset and towards the scientist mindset. Both types of people are present, but the engineer-mindset people tend not to put that part of themselves forward here.
The problem with getting down into the details is that there are many areas with messy details to get into, and it’s hard to appreciate the messy details of an area you haven’t spent enough time in. So deep dives in narrow topics wind up looking more like engineer-mindset, while shallow passes over wide areas wind up looking more like scientist-mindset. LessWrong posts can’t assume much background, which limits their depth.
I would be happy to see more deep-dives; a lightly edited transcript of John Carmack wouldn’t be a prototypical LessWrong post, but it would be a good one. But such posts are necessarily going to exclude a lot of readers, and LessWrong isn’t necessarily going to be competitive with posting in more topic-specialized places.
These are all good points.
After I saw that Benito did a transcript post, I considered doing one for one of Carmack’s talks or a recent interview of Yann LeCunn I found pretty interesting (based on the talks of his I’ve listened to, LeCunn has a pretty engineering-y mindset even though he’s nominally a scientist). Not going to happen immediately though since it requires a pretty big time investment.
Alternatively, maybe I’ll review Masters of Doom, which is where I learned most of what I know about Carmack.