As someone basically thinking alone (cue George Thoroughgood), I definitely would value more comments / discussion. But if someone has access to research retreats where they’re talking face to face as much as they want, I’m not surprised that they don’t post much.
Talking is a lot easier than writing, and more immediately rewarding. It can be an activity among friends. It’s more high-bandwidth to have a discussion face to face than it is over the internet. You can assume a lot more about your audience which saves a ton of effort. When talking, you are more allowed to bullshit and guess and handwave and collaboratively think with the other person, and still be interesting, wheras when writing your audience usually expects you to be confident in what you’ve written. Writing is hard, reading is hard, understanding what people have written is harder than understanding what people have said and if you ask for clarification that might get misunderstood in turn. This all applies to comments almost as much as to posts, particularly on technical subjects.
The two advantages writing has for me is that I can communicate in writing with people who I couldn’t talk to, and that when you write something out you get a good long chance to make sure it’s not stupid. When talking it’s very easy to be convincing, including to yourself, even when you’re confused. That’s a lot harder in writing.
To encourage more discussion in writing one could try to change the format to reduce these barriers as much as possible—trying to foster one-to-one or small group threads rather than one-to-many, forstering/enabling knowledge about other posters, creating a context that allows for more guesswork and collaborative thinking. Maybe one underutilized tool on current LW is the question thread. Question threads are great excuses to let people bullshit on a topic and then engage them in small group threads.
What if AI safety researchers hired a secretary to take notes on their conversations? If there was anything in the conversation that didn’t make sense on reflection, they could say “oh it was probably the secretary’s mistake in transcribing the conversation”. Heck, the participants could even be anonymized.
Yeah, I think this is actually probably a decent solution, with one caveat being that people who have the background knowledge to effectively summarize the conversation probably (soon afterwards) have the skills necessary to do other things. (At least, this is what someone claimed when I asked them about the idea)
So it serves as a training program for aspiring researchers… even better! Actually, in more ways than one, because other aspiring researchers can read the transcript and come up to speed more quickly.
“soon afterwards” was meant to be more of a throwaway qualifier than a main point. The claim (not made my me and I’m not sure if I endorse it) is that the people who can write up the transcripts effectively (esp. if there’s any kind of distillation work going on) would already have more important things they are already capable of doing.
Well if they’re incompetent, that enhances the plausible deniability aspect (‘If there was anything in the conversation that didn’t make sense on reflection, they could say “oh it was probably the secretary’s mistake in transcribing the conversation”.’) It also might be a way to quickly evaluate someone’s distillation ability.
who have the background knowledge to effectively summarize the conversation
This sounds like it might make more sense for the people having the conversation to do, perhaps at the end (possibly with the recorder prompting “What were the essential points in this discussion?”).
But part of the problem aiming to be solved here is “the people who’s conversations you want to record are busy, and don’t actually get much direct benefit from having recorded or summarized their conversation, and one of the primary problems is anxiety about writing it up in a way that won’t get misconstrued or turn out to be wrong later”, and the whole point is to outsource the executive function to someone else.
And the executive function is actually a fairly high bar.
As someone basically thinking alone (cue George Thoroughgood), I definitely would value more comments / discussion. But if someone has access to research retreats where they’re talking face to face as much as they want, I’m not surprised that they don’t post much.
Talking is a lot easier than writing, and more immediately rewarding. It can be an activity among friends. It’s more high-bandwidth to have a discussion face to face than it is over the internet. You can assume a lot more about your audience which saves a ton of effort. When talking, you are more allowed to bullshit and guess and handwave and collaboratively think with the other person, and still be interesting, wheras when writing your audience usually expects you to be confident in what you’ve written. Writing is hard, reading is hard, understanding what people have written is harder than understanding what people have said and if you ask for clarification that might get misunderstood in turn. This all applies to comments almost as much as to posts, particularly on technical subjects.
The two advantages writing has for me is that I can communicate in writing with people who I couldn’t talk to, and that when you write something out you get a good long chance to make sure it’s not stupid. When talking it’s very easy to be convincing, including to yourself, even when you’re confused. That’s a lot harder in writing.
To encourage more discussion in writing one could try to change the format to reduce these barriers as much as possible—trying to foster one-to-one or small group threads rather than one-to-many, forstering/enabling knowledge about other posters, creating a context that allows for more guesswork and collaborative thinking. Maybe one underutilized tool on current LW is the question thread. Question threads are great excuses to let people bullshit on a topic and then engage them in small group threads.
What if AI safety researchers hired a secretary to take notes on their conversations? If there was anything in the conversation that didn’t make sense on reflection, they could say “oh it was probably the secretary’s mistake in transcribing the conversation”. Heck, the participants could even be anonymized.
Yeah, I think this is actually probably a decent solution, with one caveat being that people who have the background knowledge to effectively summarize the conversation probably (soon afterwards) have the skills necessary to do other things. (At least, this is what someone claimed when I asked them about the idea)
So it serves as a training program for aspiring researchers… even better! Actually, in more ways than one, because other aspiring researchers can read the transcript and come up to speed more quickly.
“soon afterwards” was meant to be more of a throwaway qualifier than a main point. The claim (not made my me and I’m not sure if I endorse it) is that the people who can write up the transcripts effectively (esp. if there’s any kind of distillation work going on) would already have more important things they are already capable of doing.
Well if they’re incompetent, that enhances the plausible deniability aspect (‘If there was anything in the conversation that didn’t make sense on reflection, they could say “oh it was probably the secretary’s mistake in transcribing the conversation”.’) It also might be a way to quickly evaluate someone’s distillation ability.
This sounds like it might make more sense for the people having the conversation to do, perhaps at the end (possibly with the recorder prompting “What were the essential points in this discussion?”).
But part of the problem aiming to be solved here is “the people who’s conversations you want to record are busy, and don’t actually get much direct benefit from having recorded or summarized their conversation, and one of the primary problems is anxiety about writing it up in a way that won’t get misconstrued or turn out to be wrong later”, and the whole point is to outsource the executive function to someone else.
And the executive function is actually a fairly high bar.
A rapporteur?