While I agree that we don’t live at the Pareto frontier of conciseness, explain-ability and etc, those are some odd examples to use to support your thesis. And the comparison to the hackernews post is likely using the wrong reference class.
Two of the three examples are heavily downvoted. Whether that’s because of untruthful content or stylistic (length, tone, etc) or memetic reason (Eliezer ~ prophet), those posts are hardly the poster child of what Lesswrong can do or even is.
As for Vanessa Kosoy’s piece, the last third was filled with quotations and they had given the “stop here if you don’t want my comments” warning. And it is also otherwise filled with references to many historically important posts and concepts that requires at least a quick refresher to catch the reader up to speed. I suppose Vanessa could have assumed that her readers would have been familiar with all those arguments and the nuances in different positions, but that was not her goal.
The specific example used from hacker news is likely a HackerNews Ask—a format more comparable to the shortforms and quicktake format in Lesswrong. Full fledged posts here vs full fledged posts on Hackernews is actually very comparable. (See below for some data)
Update—HackewNews posts today and Lesswrong posts today are very similar in length. That doesn’t mean they do an equal job at being concise—maybe Lesswrongers say preciously little for the length of their treatises. But deriving the sophistication of the posts is left as an exercise for the readers and beyond my paygrade:
Hackewnews—avg. 2876.125 words. For the current top 10 posts.[1]
Lesswrong—avg. 2581.2 words. For the top ten post in the last 24 hrs. (God damn it Zvi)
A few problem with this 5 minute method of comparison:
Not Weighted: A better way to do this would be comparing some kind of karma weighted score. After all, the people who have high karmas are who we as a community see as people we really embody the spirit. Same with HackerNews.
Not Representative: I only took the most popular posts in hacknews today. There is no reason to think these posts today represents what HackerNews is in the last decade. Similarly, the posts on lesswrong in the last 24 hours are few and also not a very representative cohort.
Non-systematic way to throw out outliers: There was a project Gutenberg book on HackerNews today. It felt wrong to include the book and I feel justified in its exclusion. But this should be done more systematically.
A lot of discussion and culture building is in the comments, I didn’t include that: Ditto
Markdown table below incase I made a mistake:
1
word count
A Course of Pure Mathematics – G. H. Hardy (1921) [pdf] (gutenberg.org)
N/A—It is a book
107 points by bikenaga 4 hours ago | hide | 23 comments
2
I keep turning my Google Sheets into phone-friendly webapps, and I can’t stop (arstechnica.com)
1443
26 points by cpeterso 1 hour ago | hide | 2 comments
While I agree that we don’t live at the Pareto frontier of conciseness, explain-ability and etc, those are some odd examples to use to support your thesis. And the comparison to the hackernews post is likely using the wrong reference class.
Two of the three examples are heavily downvoted. Whether that’s because of untruthful content or stylistic (length, tone, etc) or memetic reason (Eliezer ~ prophet), those posts are hardly the poster child of what Lesswrong can do or even is.
As for Vanessa Kosoy’s piece, the last third was filled with quotations and they had given the “stop here if you don’t want my comments” warning. And it is also otherwise filled with references to many historically important posts and concepts that requires at least a quick refresher to catch the reader up to speed. I suppose Vanessa could have assumed that her readers would have been familiar with all those arguments and the nuances in different positions, but that was not her goal.
The specific example used from hacker news is likely a HackerNews Ask—a format more comparable to the shortforms and quicktake format in Lesswrong. Full fledged posts here vs full fledged posts on Hackernews is actually very comparable. (See below for some data)
Update—HackewNews posts today and Lesswrong posts today are very similar in length. That doesn’t mean they do an equal job at being concise—maybe Lesswrongers say preciously little for the length of their treatises. But deriving the sophistication of the posts is left as an exercise for the readers and beyond my paygrade:
Hackewnews—avg. 2876.125 words. For the current top 10 posts.[1]
Lesswrong—avg. 2581.2 words. For the top ten post in the last 24 hrs. (God damn it Zvi)
A few problem with this 5 minute method of comparison:
Not Weighted: A better way to do this would be comparing some kind of karma weighted score. After all, the people who have high karmas are who we as a community see as people we really embody the spirit. Same with HackerNews.
Not Representative: I only took the most popular posts in hacknews today. There is no reason to think these posts today represents what HackerNews is in the last decade. Similarly, the posts on lesswrong in the last 24 hours are few and also not a very representative cohort.
Non-systematic way to throw out outliers: There was a project Gutenberg book on HackerNews today. It felt wrong to include the book and I feel justified in its exclusion. But this should be done more systematically.
A lot of discussion and culture building is in the comments, I didn’t include that: Ditto
Markdown table below incase I made a mistake:
See Paul Graham comment for their ranking algos: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1781013.