(Self review) Does this essay belong in the Best Of collection? That’s a good question. Do people go back and read all the Best Of posts? Do they read the Best Of posts from previous years? Speaking as the person who wrote this, if there was a collection of posts everyone on LessWrong read when they joined, I might not need this essay included in that collection because the essay would have already succeeded. I’d want basically any other essay that taught an object-level thing.
Then again, this essay is a useful pointer to why a group might repeat information that most people already know. If I imagine a Five Books Of Moses for the Rationality Community, I actually do think it would be good to include one chapter that said essentially “make a copy of this book and read it every year, because that’s how you make sure everyone in the community actually knows this stuff.” If you left out that chapter, eventually someone would forget why they were supposed to have that habit of rereading the thing as a group every year, they wouldn’t do it, and then years later the community would have a bunch of people who didn’t know the basics.
(Amusingly, I plan to create a different version of this essay every couple of years and post it somewhere. This is because I don’t want people to forget about it, and it’s easy to forget about, and I think newcomers read new stuff more than they reliably dig into old stuff. This information isn’t especially important on the object level, but I stand by my argument that if there isn’t something that teaches new people the things you want everyone in a space to know, new people won’t know it. )
I don’t think the Best Of posts are actually intended to be the collection of common knowledge everyone is expected to eventually know. Absent that, this is just a good essay about how common knowledge works. It’s my essay so I can’t vote on it, but if I could I’d have given it a 1 upvote for the Best Of collection- a serviceable addition, but probably replaceable.
(Self review) Does this essay belong in the Best Of collection? That’s a good question. Do people go back and read all the Best Of posts? Do they read the Best Of posts from previous years? Speaking as the person who wrote this, if there was a collection of posts everyone on LessWrong read when they joined, I might not need this essay included in that collection because the essay would have already succeeded. I’d want basically any other essay that taught an object-level thing.
Then again, this essay is a useful pointer to why a group might repeat information that most people already know. If I imagine a Five Books Of Moses for the Rationality Community, I actually do think it would be good to include one chapter that said essentially “make a copy of this book and read it every year, because that’s how you make sure everyone in the community actually knows this stuff.” If you left out that chapter, eventually someone would forget why they were supposed to have that habit of rereading the thing as a group every year, they wouldn’t do it, and then years later the community would have a bunch of people who didn’t know the basics.
(Amusingly, I plan to create a different version of this essay every couple of years and post it somewhere. This is because I don’t want people to forget about it, and it’s easy to forget about, and I think newcomers read new stuff more than they reliably dig into old stuff. This information isn’t especially important on the object level, but I stand by my argument that if there isn’t something that teaches new people the things you want everyone in a space to know, new people won’t know it. )
I don’t think the Best Of posts are actually intended to be the collection of common knowledge everyone is expected to eventually know. Absent that, this is just a good essay about how common knowledge works. It’s my essay so I can’t vote on it, but if I could I’d have given it a 1 upvote for the Best Of collection- a serviceable addition, but probably replaceable.