Feature suggestion: add a ‘clarity score’ to posts
Add a voting mechanism for posts, beside the karma, that indicates whether you
understood the post well enough to agree or disagree with it (upvote), or
cannot understand the post with a reasonable time investment (downvote)
I suggest that this determines the post’s clarity score (we could name it something else, like the ‘simplicity’ score).
Then, allow users to sort posts by clarity.
Especially: allow users to sort posts by clarity within a topic. That way, people can read posts in a topic in order of simplicity descending/complexity ascending. I suspect that this would make familiarization with a topic a rather linear and efficient process.
Amusingly, this is one of the previously suggested voting axes (“Clear”/”Muddled”): https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/ywpWMnJmqAkeaDtne/open-thread-jan-2022-vote-experiment
I don’t like the implication that just because something is complex then it must be muddled. ‘Muddled’ sounds like an extremely close synonym of ‘confused’.
I don’t understand the following post, but I bet if I spent a year sharing a room with the author, and the author was very patient, I could understand what they were saying well enough to at least agree or disagree with it: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/9fL22eBJMtyCLvL7j/soft-optimization-makes-the-value-target-bigger
The opposite of ‘clear’ is not ‘muddled’; the opposite of ‘clear’ is ‘obscure’.
If ‘muddled’ is the negative-affect way of saying ‘obscure’, I suggest that ‘arcane’ is the positive-affect way of saying it.
So are we looking for “Simple”/”Complex” maybe?
This feels like a 2D space: Clarity = Complexity × Confusion.
How easy it is to understand something is a combination of whether the topic itself is complicated, as well as how muddled the explanation is.
In general, I’m not in favour of over-complicating numerical ratings, from the point of view of both the one giving the rating and the one receiving it. “Over-complicating” to me is anything beyond the --/-/0/+/++ karma. I don’t have strong feelings about the agree/disagree points, but I rarely use them, and what can I do with an anonymous agree/disagree or clear/obscure score? I’d rather make a comment or receive one.