it helps LW itself … but if im going for impact surely large reach is the way to go?
I think the main question is “do you have things to say that build on states-of-the-art in a domain that LessWrong is on the cutting edge of?”. Large reach is good when you have a fairly simple thing you want to communicate to raise the society baseline, but sometimes higher impact comes from pushing the state of the art forward, or communicating something nuanced with a lot of dependencies.
You say you don’t research, so maybe not, but just wanted to note you may want to consider variations on that theme.
If you’re communicating something to broader society, fwiw I also don’t know that there’s actually much tradeoff between optimizing for hacker news vs LessWrong. If you optimize directly for doing well on hacker news probably LW folk will still reasonably like it, even if it’s not, like, peak karma or whatever (with some caveats around politically loaded stuff which might play differently with different audiences).
I think the main question is “do you have things to say that build on states-of-the-art in a domain that LessWrong is on the cutting edge of?”. Large reach is good when you have a fairly simple thing you want to communicate to raise the society baseline, but sometimes higher impact comes from pushing the state of the art forward, or communicating something nuanced with a lot of dependencies.
You say you don’t research, so maybe not, but just wanted to note you may want to consider variations on that theme.
If you’re communicating something to broader society, fwiw I also don’t know that there’s actually much tradeoff between optimizing for hacker news vs LessWrong. If you optimize directly for doing well on hacker news probably LW folk will still reasonably like it, even if it’s not, like, peak karma or whatever (with some caveats around politically loaded stuff which might play differently with different audiences).