Is it necessarily a good idea to break up the topic into so many separate questions before having a general discussion post about it first? I would imagine that people might have comments which were related to several of the different questions, but now the discussion is going to get fragmented over many places.
E.g. if someone knows about a historical info cascade in academia and how people failed to deal with that, then that example falls under two different questions. So then the answer with that example either has to be be split into two or to be posted in an essentially similar form on both pages, neither of which is good for keeping the entire context of the discussion in one place.
Separately, there’s a part of me that finds it viscerally annoying to have multiple questions around the same theme posted around the same time. It feels like it incentivizes people with a pet topic to promote that topic by asking a lot of questions about it so that other topics get temporarily drowned out. Even if the topic is sometimes important enough to be worth it, it still feels like the kind of thing to discourage.
Seems like a sensible worry, and we did consider some version of it. My reasoning was roughly:
1) The questions feature is quite new, and if it will be very valuable, most use-cases and the proper UI haven’t been discovered yet (these can be hard to predict in advance without getting users to play around with different things and then talking to them).
2) Questions 1⁄2, 3 and 4 are quite different, and it seems good to be able to do research on one sub-problem without taking mindshare from everyone working on any subproblem.
Is it necessarily a good idea to break up the topic into so many separate questions before having a general discussion post about it first? I would imagine that people might have comments which were related to several of the different questions, but now the discussion is going to get fragmented over many places.
E.g. if someone knows about a historical info cascade in academia and how people failed to deal with that, then that example falls under two different questions. So then the answer with that example either has to be be split into two or to be posted in an essentially similar form on both pages, neither of which is good for keeping the entire context of the discussion in one place.
Separately, there’s a part of me that finds it viscerally annoying to have multiple questions around the same theme posted around the same time. It feels like it incentivizes people with a pet topic to promote that topic by asking a lot of questions about it so that other topics get temporarily drowned out. Even if the topic is sometimes important enough to be worth it, it still feels like the kind of thing to discourage.
I also have this visceral feeling. It feels like a “subquestions” feature could fix both these issues.
Seems like a sensible worry, and we did consider some version of it. My reasoning was roughly:
1) The questions feature is quite new, and if it will be very valuable, most use-cases and the proper UI haven’t been discovered yet (these can be hard to predict in advance without getting users to play around with different things and then talking to them).
No one has yet attempted to use multiple questions. So it would be valuable for the LW team and the community to experiment with that, despite possible countervailing considerations (any good experiment will have sufficient uncertainty that such considerations will always exist).
2) Questions 1⁄2, 3 and 4 are quite different, and it seems good to be able to do research on one sub-problem without taking mindshare from everyone working on any subproblem.